The Inconvenient Indian Thomas King Summary

Thomas King's The Inconvenient Indian provides a harrowing and sarcastic but ultimately very real, look at the history of Indigenous peoples in North America from the time of first contact to the present. King details the relationship between non-Indigenous peoples and Indigneous peoples, establishing a subversion of history in which this relationship has continuously exploited and dominated over Indigneous people. At times a deeply personal account on his own conflicted activism, and at other times a revised edition of truths that show the identity of Indigenous peoples and how these identities have been affected by popular culture. In fact herein lies King's main theme of The Inconvenient Indian, how the stories and narratives by which legal …show more content…
This simple statement leads into the interweaving stories of historical accounts King keeps consistent through out his book. Simply put, the stories King has compiled into The Inconvenient Indian were the stories left out in history. The stories that as people who reside on land that does not belong to us, need to hear. King's storytelling calls for a higher truth that at the same time proves inconvenient in the sense that it fights the foundation of what we know as history. Through his storytelling and various accounts of the toxic dumpsites, residential schools, treaty histories, King is able to provide a strong argument. History is not a completely unbiased and factual account of what has happened in the past, history instead is a deeply flawed narrative shaped heavily by those in power. While reading this book much of the accounts King shared were unknown to me, because in a country that was built upon the exploitation of Indigenous and black people, a country rooted in colonialism, Canada does not share it's sordid part in the tragedies that were a consequence of it's colonialism. This inability to share the truths further perpetuates its history of colonialism, in denying a voice to Indigenous people. When Stephen Harper stood in front of the masses and declared that 'Canada has no history of colonialism' he further perpetuated the tragic …show more content…
History is linear but it is certainly not progressive. King frequently mentions that although much time has passed, it has meant nothing in regards to how Indigenous people have and are being treated. How can we change the future of the relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples when the basis of our history is presented in a way that paints one side as invariably dispensable? The Inconvenient Indian gives us a look at the valuable importance of how history shapes the relationships that are fostered as a result of how history paints each side. We must constantly be aware that not all history is truths; in fact at times history is a deliberate covering up of the truth. How many genocides, war crimes, tragic incidences of racism have been covered up or been spun to show a different narrative altogether? At present day there are so many Indigenous women who have gone missing, but why is that story lost? Where has the attention gone from these women and their families who deserve a voice? It is because history has frequently and persistently presented Indigenous people and women as obstacles to the evolution of western settlement. Indigenous people as human beings has never been allowed as a narrative because it did not fit the agenda of