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

The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America by Thomas King
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've been meaning to read this book for a while, but the fact that I'm going to be teaching an Indigenous literatures course next year meant that I felt it was time to get on it. While not necessarily a history (indeed, King disavows that it is a history per se), King looks at the experience of Indigenous peoples in Canada and US as well as what it looks like now. His writing is really vivid and very funny, but also really hard hitting. He does not hold back and that's a good thing, especially for this topic.

One of his main point is that, fundamentally, North Americans have difficulties understanding Indigenous peoples as living and breathing, with needs and demands of their own; that one of the most persistent images of Indigenous peoples is the 'dead Indian' in which Indigenous peoples are only understood as people of the past, not people with whom we need to engage now. But much of the rest of the book shows the harm that image has caused and continues to cause.

Definitely an important book to read and understand!

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