![]() The book roams freely: King explores the alternately romanticized and demonized image of the Indian in popular culture, examines various attempts at cultural assimilation (including residential schools), and reveals enduring hypocrisies in the attitudes of whites toward Indians. King never deigns to speak collectively for the hundreds of nations in both Canada and the U.S., noting that “there never was a collective to begin with.” He eschews the terms “Native American” and “First Nations” in favour of the less politically correct (and, historically, downright wrong) “Indian,” on the grounds that it remains, for better or worse, the North American default. 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.” ![]()
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