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

King describes the difficulty of choosing where to start a book about the history of Indigenous people in North America. Though many books might start with Christopher Columbus’s discovery of the North American continent, King wants the reader to “forget Columbus” (3). Instead, King begins his history by describing a historical plaque in Alamo, Indiana. The plaque was erected in 1938 and purports to commemorate the 1861 massacre of 295 white “immigrants” who were traveling West. The number of deaths makes the incident the second-deadliest massacre of white people by Indigenous people in American history. The only larger massacre occurred at Fort Mims in 1813, where Indigenous people killed nearly “four hundred Whites” (4). In contrast, white massacres of Indigenous people often numbered in the hundreds, and King notes that “Whites were considerably more successful at massacres than Indians” (5).

While the casualties would have made the Alamo massacre historically significant if it had actually occurred, King notes that the massacre is a piece of historical fiction. Though a 1926 book about the history of the area surrounding Alamo included the story of the massacre, no mention of the massacre was published in newspapers at the time it supposedly took place. Though the story of the massacre has been disproven, the town has kept the plaque, reasoning that it is now “part of the culture and history of the area” (7). King argues that our understanding of Indigenous history abounds with false or embellished events like the Alamo massacre. For example, John Smith famously claimed that the Indigenous princess Pocahontas saved him from execution. King argues that the historical timeline makes it unlikely Smith ever encountered Pocahontas and that the story’s enduring presence in American culture is due to its engaging narrative rather than its historical veracity.

King closes the chapter by discussing two actual historical figures whose lives have since become enshrined in cultural representations of the West: Louis Riel and General Custer. Custer was a white American military officer who led a failed battle against the Lakota people at Little Bighorn in 1876, resulting in his death. Riel was a member of the Métis people in Canada who led a rebellion against the Canadian government in 1885, which similarly led to his death. King argues that both these figures have become cultural touchstones due to the martyr-like nature of their deaths. However, in the process, “dates, people, the large and small nuances of events have all been reduced to the form and content of Classic Comics” (11). King argues that history favors tales of violence when discussing Indigenous people, often eschewing the many ways that Indigenous people provided “aid” to white immigrants in their efforts to settle in North America (19).

In Chapter 2 King provides a broad overview of relations between Indigenous and white people throughout North American history. King introduces this topic by discussing how, as a child, he and his brother “would dress up and play cowboys and Indians with the rest of the kids” (21). King notes that white children often desired to pretend to be “Indians.” According to King, this fascination with Indigeneity can be found in cultural artifacts stemming from the original colonies “at Plymouth, Jamestown, Acadia, and Quebec” (23).

White people arriving in North America, whether as explorers or colonizers, continually had to deal with the Indigenous communities that were already living in America. King notes that early depictions of Indigenous people varied depending on whether one was an explorer or a colonist. Explorers, who relied on the help and knowledge of Indigenous guides to navigate through unknown lands, often held positive views of Indigenous people. In contrast, colonists tended to view Indigenous people as “savage” and frequently attempted to convert them to Christianity.

King also discusses the concept of race, through which human civilizations have divided groups of individuals, often claiming that certain races hold innately higher levels of intelligence than others. European conceptions of race in the 19th century divided humans into five categories: “Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Ethiopian, American Indian, and Malayan” (28). Within these racial classifications, white people were seen as the most evolved and “human,” while “American Indians” were seen as “primitives” who “were still working their way up the evolutionary ladder” (29).

The rest of the chapter traces how this conception of race, which sees Indigenous people as primitive or backward, has influenced cultural representations. In the late 1800s, one popular form of entertainment was Wild West shows, made famous by Buffalo Bill Cody. These shows often featured Indigenous people performing rituals and dances for a white audience. King also describes the 1915 sculpture The End of the Trail, made by white artist James Earle Fraser, which King argues is “the twentieth century’s most famous Indian image” (32). The sculpture depicts an Indigenous man whose expression and posture imply sorrow, riding an “equally dejected horse,” which King argues suggests that the “Indian” has “run out of time and space and [is] poised on the edge of oblivion” (32). King closes the chapter by discussing the long history of Indigenous representation in American cinema. While Hollywood frequently films stories involving Indigenous people, these stories only depict an outdated white idea of how Indigenous people look or behave. They very rarely tell stories about the lives of modern-day Indigenous people who typically don’t conform to these stereotypes.