The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“‘First Nations’ is the current term of choice in Canada, while ‘Native Americans’ is the fashionable preference in the United States. I’m fond of both of these terms, but, for all its faults and problems—especially in Canada—‘Indian,’ as a general designation, remains for me, at least, the North American default.”

Many Indigenous people see naming as a fraught and complicated topic, as any name that seeks to unite a multitude of different cultures and tribes is bound to offend some. King describes how these names have changed throughout Indigenous history, often reflecting trends for which term is most “fashionable” at a given moment. King ultimately sees “Indian” as the simplest way of referring to the various Indigenous peoples who lived in North America before colonization.

“Still, the story [of John Smith and Pocahontas], false though I believe it to be, has been too appealing for North America to ignore. And we have dragged the damn thing—with its eroticism and exoticism, its White hero and its dusky maiden—across the continent and the centuries.”

In Chapter 1 King describes one of the most classic stories of European settler colonialism in the Americas: that of the Powhatan princess Pocahontas saving and falling in love with the British John Smith. Though Pocahontas did exist, it is highly unlikely she and Smith ever met or had the relationship that Smith later claimed. For King, the story’s persistent popularity reveals how ideas of Indigenous people are often based less on facts than on rumors, lies, and stereotypes. This lays the groundwork for King’s broader discussion of The Construction of Race.

“As a series of entertainments, Native history is an imaginative cobbling together of fears and loathings, romances and reverences, facts and fantasies into a cycle of creative performances, in Technicolor and 3-D, with accompanying soft drinks, candy, and popcorn.”

Through the stories of Louis Riel and General Custer in Chapter 1, King charts how the events of Indigenous history are altered as they are represented in film, television, and other forms of media. King argues that this has led to the American and Canadian publics having a highly distorted understanding of Indigenous peoples, as stereotypes have come to replace actual history.

“I don’t know how many people know the sculpture itself or its story, but most everyone recognizes the image of a dejected Indian holding a spear while he slumps over his equally dejected horse. The idea seems to be that both rider and horse have run out of time and space and are poised on the edge of oblivion.”

The End of the Trail, sculpted by James Earle Fraser in 1915, has become one of the most iconic artistic representations of Indigenous people in American culture and is often reproduced in various contexts. The sculpture’s depiction of a tired Indigenous horseman has become symbolic of the idea that Indigenous people and cultures are incompatible with modernity and thus dying out.

“The only thing film had to do was to collect such materials and cobble them into a series of functioning clichés. Film dispensed with any errant subtleties and colorings, and crafted three basic Indian types. There was the bloodthirsty savage, the noble savage, and the dying savage.”

As Indigenous people are one of the most popular subjects in film throughout cinematic history, King argues that Indigenous characters can be divided into three main tropes. While some Indigenous characters are “bloodthirsty” and seek violence, and others are “noble” and want to help white settlers, King argues that all of them are depicted as “savage” and “primitive” compared to white people.

“A good friend of mine, the Choctaw-Cherokee writer Louis Owens, once suggested that Indians were viewed in much the same way as the livestock that had to be requisitioned for a Western film—cattle, a herd of buffalo, a couple of dogs, a dozen horses, maybe a wolf or a bear.”

The comment by King’s friend that Indigenous characters in film are treated as “livestock” suggests that films about the American West usually fail to portray Indigenous characters as real people with complex personalities. Instead, Indigenous characters are treated as a mass of interchangeable beings, more akin to animals than humans.

“These bits of cultural debris—authentic and constructed—are what literary theorists like to call ‘signifiers,’ signs that create a ‘simulacrum,’ which Jean Baudrillard, the French sociologist and postmodern theorist, succinctly explained as something that ‘is never that which conceals the truth—it is the truth which conceals that there is none.’”

In Chapter 3 King uses Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum to analyze how Indigenous people are portrayed in popular culture. King argues that when white North Americans think of Indigenous people, they aren’t thinking of real Indigenous people but an amalgamation of images that they associate with Indigeneity: “war bonnets, beaded shirts, fringed deerskin dresses” (54), and so on. This false view is a simulacrum, and it prevents representation of real Indigenous people in American culture.

“[Indians] were irrelevant, and as the nineteenth century rolled into the twentieth century, Live Indians were forgotten, safely stored away on reservations and reserves or scattered in the rural backwaters and cityscapes of Canada and the United States. Out of sight, out of mind.”

While American culture is obsessed with images of “Dead Indians,” King argues that it has largely ignored the real Indigenous people who continue to live in North America. King believes that white America has sought to forget the real Indigenous people and the pain it caused them, all while celebrating images of a supposedly dead culture and civilization.

“But when I arrived in France, I was promptly told by a photographer, who was taking shots of all the Native authors, that I wasn’t Indian. That’s not exactly what she said. What she said was, ‘I know you’re Indian, but you’re not really Indian, are you?’”

King tells a story about traveling to France to visit a book fair as an Indigenous author. While doing press for the fair, a photographer insisted that King could not be an “authentic Indian,” as he did not look the way Indigenous people do in popular culture. For King, the story evinces how real Indigenous peoples are often treated as fake because they do not adhere to white ideas of how an Indigenous person should look or behave.

“In fifty or a hundred years, Native people would be gone, and the gnarly, logistical questions that the terms of the treaties might raise in the long term would be resolved naturally through attrition.”

In Chapter 4 King explores how Indigenous-white relations were originally governed through treaties that sought to clearly establish what land belonged to the tribes and what belonged to the US government. King argues that such treaties were never meant to last, as many white people were operating under the assumption that Indigenous civilization would naturally die out in the face of modernity. When this did not prove to be true, white America sought new means of taking Indigenous territory, demonstrating The Role of Land in Indigenous-White Relations.

“If a tribe or a band refused to sign a removal treaty, government officials would find a few members who could be convinced to sign, and then the treaty would be applied to the entire tribe.”

In the 1800s the United States adopted the policies of removal and relocation, forcibly moving many Eastern tribes to land in the West. Though the government would sometimes seek to sign new treaties with the tribes, they would often have the treaties signed under dubious means, using signatures from tribe members who were not authorized to speak on behalf of the entire tribe.

“Throughout the history of Indian-White relations in North America, there have always been two impulses afoot. Extermination and assimilation.”

In King’s view, white impulses toward Indigenous people always included either killing or Westernizing them. While assimilation may have been less violent than extermination, it still sought to eradicate Indigenous culture and customs. Both of these impulses were based on a racist idea of human history, which sees whites as more evolved than the supposedly “primitive” Indigenous peoples.

“[Richard] Pratt’s plan was a simple one. North America would have to kill the Indian in order to save the man. ‘Kill the Indian in him, and save the man’ was the exact quotation […]”

Richard Pratt was a former military general who advocated for the residential school system as a means of assimilating Indigenous youth into white culture. These schools took Indigenous children from their parents and forced them into a harsh and disciplinary school environment. The violence of these schools is clearly evidenced by Pratt’s self-proclaimed desire to “Kill the Indian in him” (108).

“The Canadian apology, while heartfelt, was in many ways, a stingy thing, limited only to the abuse that Native people had endured in the residential school system. There was nothing in the apology about treaty violations.”

In 2008 the Canadian prime minister offered an official apology to Indigenous peoples for the policy of assimilation and the violence perpetrated by the country’s residential schools. While King is happy to receive some acknowledgment of the country’s racist treatment of Indigenous people, he ultimately feels that the apology is not enough and that Canada has yet to acknowledge the totality of violence it has committed against Indigenous people.

“And, in 1887, the answer was allotment. Reservations, which had seemed a good idea earlier, were now decried as an affront to Christianity and capitalism. Indian agents and church officials complained that so long as Indians were allowed to live on reservations, they would retain their pagan customs and cultures.”

Though Indigenous peoples were initially allowed to maintain their cultural customs on reservations, the US and Canadian governments soon felt that the reservation system was preventing Indigenous people from assimilating to white culture. In response, they shifted to the policy of allotment, which offered incentives for tribes to divide the reservation into parcels of privately owned land. Allotment primarily targeted the Indigenous custom of owning land in common, which white policymakers felt was an obstacle to Indigenous people’s participation in the capitalist economy.

“Besieged by coyotes in Ottawa and Washington, Native people stopped asking for justice and began demanding it. Asking had gotten Indians little more than a paternalistic pat on the head. AIM and other activist groups were tired of begging, tired of being ignored. Were there ways to frame Native concerns other than with demonstrations, confrontations, and, on occasion, violence?”

The American Indian Movement (AIM) was an Indigenous rights organization founded in 1968 that was controversial for its aggressive and sometimes violent tactics. Many have dismissed AIM as too radical, saying that activists should instead peacefully appeal to the US government for change. However, King argues such statements are naïve and that AIM’s tactics were necessary after a long history of being outright ignored by the US and Canadian governments.

“Ignore the past. Play in the present.”

These short sentences encapsulate King’s rhetorical approach in Chapter 7, in which he ponders forgetting the long history of abuse against Indigenous people to focus on the present, when Indigenous people are believed to have achieved racial equality. Throughout the chapter, King discusses various events since 1985 to show that such an approach is foolish, as Indigenous people continue to encounter racism in the present day.

“The idea that Native people had something resembling agency and independence was just too much to bear, and almost immediately, state governments, along with citizen groups opposed to gambling of any sort, the gambling cabal itself, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Congress all climbed into bed together to figure out a way to get around the Brennan decision.”

A 1976 Supreme Court decision authored by Justice Brennan argued that state regulations did not apply to federal reservations, paving the way for tribes to open casinos and other forms of gambling on their reservations, regardless of state gambling laws. King describes how the US government and other organizations swiftly sought to limit Indigenous gaming, which King sees as an attempt to keep Indigenous people from achieving sovereignty and self-determination. The decision is thus one of many examples of The Precarity of Indigenous Sovereignty even in contemporary North America.

“Aboriginal people have suffered unduly from government interference and bureaucratic oppression, so the thinking goes, and the only solution is to abrogate treaties, eliminate federal guarantees, divide First Nations land into fee-simple blocks, and allow Native people to participate freely in the economic markets that Western capitalism has created.”

King suggests that both the US and Canadian governments have grown tired of negotiating with Indigenous peoples, so new proposals often suggest eliminating the reservation system and fully integrating Indigenous people into “Western capitalism.” In King’s view, such proposals represent a final attempt at extermination, as they would eliminate Indigenous sovereignty and any government protections Indigenous people still have.

“But instead of pursuing the American dream of accumulating land as personal wealth, the tribes have taken their purchases to the Secretary of the Interior and requested that the land they acquired be added to their respective reservations and given trust status.”

Many Indigenous tribes, such as the Oneida Nation, have used profits from gambling and resource mining to purchase more land and add to their reservations. While King is skeptical of tribes economically relying on either of these industries, he sees these moves as a sign that engaging with such industries can increase Indigenous sovereignty and protect tribes from eradication.

“The issue has always been land. It will always be land, until there isn’t a square foot of land left in North America that is controlled by Native people.”

In Chapter 9, King argues that a desire to obtain and profit from Indigenous land has been the biggest motivating factor for white people in their dealings with Indigenous tribes. White people fail to respect Indigenous customs of holding land in common and leaving it undeveloped, and throughout North American history they have sought to seize the land and turn it into private property for the accumulation of wealth.

“And as they had done in 1875, the Lakota refused the settlement. Money was never the issue. They wanted the Hills back. As for the money, it stays in an interest-bearing account to this day.”

In 1980 the Supreme Court argued that the Lakota were owed $106 million for the illegal seizure of their land, the Black Hills in South Dakota. However, the Lakota refused and argued that they were owed the actual land, not monetary compensation. The refusal reflects a general cultural difference between white and Indigenous attitudes toward land. While white people see land in terms of property and wealth, Indigenous people view land as a sacred embodiment of culture and history that cannot be converted into a monetary sum.

“When I was in Juneau in 2011, a Tlingit friend of mine told me that, since the advent of [Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act] ANCSA and the changes the act has had on traditional Native culture, there is a generation of Tlingit who ‘no longer know their clan or their house, but they sure know the name of their corporation.’”

ANCSA was a 1971 law that sought to determine how much of Alaska was Indigenous land. It placed much of the land in the control of several Indigenous corporations, with tribe members as shareholders. Though the act was meant to protect Indigenous land, King argues that the transformation of tribes into corporations has detached Indigenous people from their cultural history.