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Loading... The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (original 2012; edition 2013)by Thomas King
Work InformationThe Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America by Thomas King (2012)
   » 6 more No current Talk conversations about this book.  casey2962 | Dec 16, 2024 |    ) ppival | Nov 24, 2024 | Written in 2013, it would be welcome to see an Update in the hope that some small miracles have ended the devastation of government hypocrisy, lies, racism...in exchange for Truth. ( ) m.belljackson | May 4, 2024 |  ) Tess_W | Nov 21, 2023 | The audiobook is what prompted me to sign up for Libro.fm, because the library didn’t have it and I simply needed to hear Lorne Cardinal reading this book. He does an excellent job, especially with highlighting King’s deadpan wit. I highly recommend both print and audio for this book, which is a must read. ( ) rabbitprincess | Oct 30, 2022 |
 The book Canadians are snapping up hardly paints them in a flattering light. King’s tone is breezy and light, full of funny stories and self-deprecating jokes, but just below that geniality lies a deep reservoir of bitterness over the treatment of Indians in Canada and the United States that continues on to this day. White North Americans, he argues, prefer their Indians noble, primitive, and safely extinct, and actual, live Indians who stubbornly insist on their rights as an independent people they regard as at best a troublesome nuisance. It’s a mistake to expect a scholarly history of Native Americans—though Thomas King certainly has he chops to write it—but what we get instead is something only King could do: an historical and cultural memoir, packed with facts and using narrative as it is best used. ... A bit lighter in tone than Vine Deloria Jr.’s Custer Died for Your Sins, The Inconvenient Indian is also fully rooted in the 21st century, with discussion of contemporary Native American practices and culture.  The Inconvenient Indian is less an indictment than a reassurance that we can create equality and harmony. A powerful, important book. Novelist Thomas King describes his brilliantly insightful, peevish book about native people in North America as a “a series of conversations and arguments that I’ve been having with myself and others for most of my adult life.” Making no excuses for the intrusion of his own personal biases and the book’s lack of footnotes, King suggests we view The Inconvenient Indian not as history, but as storytelling “fraught with history.” Dr. King’s book should be required reading for anyone seeking insider insight into how Indians have been treated in Canada versus the United States. Born in America and now a distinguished Canadian writer-educator, the author is in a prime position for this undertaking. - See more at: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-... AwardsNotable Lists
In this book, the author offers a deeply knowing, darkly funny, unabashedly opinionated, and utterly unconventional account of Indian-White relations in North America since initial contact. In the process, he refashions old stories about historical events and figures. Ranging freely across the centuries and the Canada-U.S. border, he debunks fabricated stories of Indian savagery and White heroism, takes an oblique look at Indians (and cowboys) in film and popular culture, wrestles with the history of Native American resistance and his own experiences as a Native rights activist, and articulates a profound, revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands. At once a "history" and the complete subversion of a history, this is a critical and personal meditation that the author has conducted over the past 50 years about what it means to be "Indian" in North America. 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. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)970.004History & geography History of North America History of North America North America Ethnic and National GroupsLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (4.13)
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Though a few chapters toward the end took some work to slog through (about various government acts and laws), the book is still worth 5 stars and highly recommended. And I really enjoyed the conversational tone when his wife Helen would stick her nose in as he's writing and give him advice. Made me feel like I was with them in their home. Nice!
For anyone interested in Native issues, I also recommend "Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI," by David Grann, a non-fiction account of a series of murders on a Native reservation in Oklahoma around the 1920s. (