Maybe I’ve a better picture than many because of growing up in Oklahoma, reading more than a handful of relevant books, and having worked on a reservation at one point. Like most of you, I have only a limited picture of this history: the distorted background of the fiction of movies and TV, some details on focal times and places from a small set of relevant books I’ve read, and personal experiences with Indians and their culture from the various places I’ve lived. I also appreciated his cushioning of uncomfortable truths with ironic humor and a sense that we are all facing the problems together. This is no dry history, but a personalized account. King does a great service in explaining the long history of Indian-White relations in North America so clearly and in using the sweep of the tragic failures to urge us all to do better in the future.

I learned a lot from this and was blown away by King’s ability to compress so much history by focusing on a limited set of themes. This is a book both timeless and timely, burnished with anger but tempered by wit, and ultimately a hard-won offering of hope-a sometimes inconvenient, but nonetheless indispensable account for all of us, Indian and non-Indian alike, seeking to understand how we might tell a new story for the future. In the process, King refashions old stories about historical events and figures, takes a sideways look at film and pop culture, relates his own complex experiences with activism, and articulates a deep and revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands. Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, this book distills the insights gleaned from that meditation, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since the two first encountered each other. The Inconvenient Indian is at once a “history” and the complete subversion of a history-in short, a critical and personal meditation that the remarkable Thomas King has conducted over the past 50 years about what it means to be “Indian” in North America.

The inconvenient indian review