THE INCONVENIENT INDIAN : A Curious Account of Native People in North America

In The Inconvenient Indian, award-winning novelist Thomas King gives us an extraordinary work that literally has been a lifetime in the making: a brilliantly learned, darkly funny, unabashedly opinionated, entertaining and devastating account of the tangle and twist of "Indian/White" relations in North America since contact between Native Peoples and Europeans.

Here is a most unusual history—or, as King writes, "a curious account"—full of digression, wit, anger, insight, and wisdom. In truth, The Inconvenient Indian is at once a "history" and the complete subversion of 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. 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. 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. 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. THOMAS KING is one of North America's premier Native public intellectuals. For the past five decades, he has worked as an activist for Native causes and an administrator of Native programs, and has taught Native Literature and History at universities in the United States and Canada. His literary fiction has been described as "precise and elegant" by The New York Times; "a first class work of art" by Newsweek; as "masterful" by Kirkus and "extraordinarily moving" by PW. King was also the first Aboriginal person to deliver the prestigious Massey Lectures, published as The Truth About Stories. He is the winner of the Western American Literary Association Lifetime Achievement Award and the Oakland PEN Award, the National Aboriginal Achievement Award, the Governor General's Literary Award, the Trillium Award, the Commonwealth Prize, and the Order of Canada. Born and raised on a reservation in California, he holds a PhD from University of Utah, and now lives in Guelph, Ontario. Tom wrote this book because the Native perspective is massively under-represented — and often misrepresented — in books. He is a trained historian, but he has chosen not to rely on the tricks of that trade, but rather to subvert them to a more narrative approach. Part of the brilliance of this book lies in Thomas King's central thesis: that for the Indian, history is not a straight line; rather, it is a circle in which the same dynamics are played out over and over again, even into the present day. Tom shows us how the pattern played out in the first interactions between Native People and Non-Natives, and then he takes us into the present and examines the issues that torment us today. Along the way, he spends some very amusing and enlightening time dissecting pop culture depictions of Indians, and shows how these icons and clichés have distorted how Native People and Non-Natives have thought about each other through the years.

Thomas King has been awarded the 2022 Pierre Berton Award, celebrating those who have brought Canadian history to a wider audience.