68 pages • 2 hours read
Thomas KingThe Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The Construction of Race
Content Warning: Both the source material and this guide contain extensive discussion of racism against the Indigenous peoples of North America, including the genocide of Indigenous peoples and forced assimilation.
Throughout The Inconvenient Indian, King explores how racist narratives and stereotypes presented Indigenous people as inherently savage or backward. Such narratives helped justify white violence against Indigenous people and validate the idea that the death of Indigenous civilization was a historical inevitability.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, European anthropologists and scientists began arguing that the human species could be divided into distinct racial categories, with each race having inherent traits and characteristics. Individuals like Charles Darwin argued that some races were inherently more fit and capable than others, advocating for “the superiority of Europeans over other races” (28). Writer James Fenimore Cooper wrote in his novel The Deerslayer that “White is the highest color” and that Indigenous peoples were the lowest of human races and could be described as “half human” (29). Such writers manipulated scientific arguments to present the hierarchization of race as “a scientific certainty” and often suggested that Indigenous people represented a primitive stage in mankind’s evolution (29). King argues that “the need for race precedes race” (29), meaning the concept of race was created to justify the poor treatment of groups judged to be inferior to white Europeans.
The belief that Indigenous people constituted a primitive civilization helped justify several violent and detrimental policies created by the US and Canadian governments. King describes how one of the main impulses that undergirded policy toward Indigenous peoples was extermination, which sought to hasten the supposedly natural and inevitable extinction of Indigenous culture. Advocates of extermination borrowed Charles Darwin’s concept of the “survival of the fittest” to argue that the eradication of Indigenous civilization was inevitable due to the purported superiority of white, Western culture (101). Extermination took a number of forms, from depriving Indigenous people of necessary resources to killing them through outright military assault. While such violent measures became uncommon after the “closing of the frontier” in the 1890s, the impulse of extermination lingered into the 20th century. For instance, in the 1950s, the US government began the policy of termination, which sought to abrogate treaties with Indigenous tribes and remove their legal status and protected lands.
The Role of Land in Indigenous-White Conflicts
King asserts that disputes over land have always been at the core of Indigenous-White conflicts. While conflicts over the use of land appear throughout King’s history of Indigenous people in North America, he explores the concept explicitly in Chapter 9. King asks, “What do Whites want?” and then proclaims: “The answer is quite simple, and it’s been in plain sight all along. Land. Whites want land.” (216). In King’s view, every conflict between Indigenous and white people since the start of colonization has revolved around the white desire for Indigenous land. King argues that this conflict won’t cease until “there isn’t a square foot of land left in North America that is controlled by Native people” (217). From the Removal Act’s forcible displacement of the Cherokee to the General Allotment Act’s assault on Indigenous reservations and the practice of holding land in common, white settlers have continually sought to take control of Indigenous land.
King argues that this disjunction stems largely from cultural differences in how white and Indigenous people understand the purpose of the land. For Indigenous tribes, land is spiritually tied to their culture and history, and it plays an important part in many cultural ceremonies. On the other hand, King argues that “for non-Natives, land is primarily a commodity” (218), meaning that land is seen as important solely in relation to how it can be used for financial gain.
These differences are embodied in the story of the Lakota people. The Lakota lived in the Black Hills in South Dakota. In 1868, they signed a treaty with the US government that agreed that the land belonged to the Lakota. However, once it was discovered that gold could be mined in the Black Hills, White settlers began to encroach on their land with the tacit support of the military. Though the US Supreme Court later attempted to make a financial settlement with the Lakota in 1980, the tribe refused, as they wanted the land back more than monetary compensation.
The Precarity of Indigenous Sovereignty
One of the major themes King explores throughout The Inconvenient Indian is how the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples is continually under attack by the US and Canadian governments. Though the United Nations has stated that Indigenous peoples have the right to “freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development” (194), no Indigenous tribe in the United States or Canada can be said to hold full sovereignty. Any tribe’s ability to self-govern and rule over its people is severely limited by various treaties and tax laws passed by the US and Canadian governments, which leave each tribe with only partial sovereignty.
Both countries are reluctant to grant tribes full sovereignty, as it means they would lose out on valuable resources and tax revenue that could be obtained from Indigenous lands. When a US Supreme Court case ruled that Indigenous people could open casinos on their lands, regardless of local laws, the US government and gambling industry swiftly moved to pass laws limiting such casinos and taxing any profits from them. Since the 1980s, there have been growing calls for the United States to pursue a policy of “neo-termination,” which would fully dissolve “Indian reserves and federal Status” and eradicate any sovereignty that the tribes hold (199).
However, assaults on Indigenous sovereignty often come in the form of laws that are superficially meant to help preserve Indigenous rights. In Chapter 7 King describes Canada’s Bill C-31, which was meant to keep individuals from gaining legal “Indian Status” through marriage. However, the law also contained a clause that removed status for one’s children in certain cases, which King calls a governmental ploy to “eliminate Status Indians” (168). Such elimination could lead to a future where there are no remaining “legal Indians,” effectively eradicating tribal sovereignty. Given these attempts to attack Indigenous sovereignty, King argues that tribes must create means of growing their land reserves and protecting their right to self-determination.
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