The Inconvenient Indian Summary

In the Prologue to The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King explains his use of fiction and nonfiction to tell the history of relations between Native Americans and white settlers in North America. He also says that throughout the book he will be using “Indians” for Native Americans and “Whites” for white settlers.

Chapter 1 explores the concept of constructing a history and the impossibility of presenting a completely neutral account of the past. King laments the difficulty of beginning a history of Indian-White relations in North America without talking about Christopher Columbus. He portrays history not as an objective set of facts but as a culmination of the “stories we tell about the past.” He asks the reader to “forget Columbus” and begins his account elsewhere, with the description of a plaque in a small town in Idaho that purports to commemorate an Indian massacre of White pioneers that never actually took place. King uses this story as a launch point to explore other popular but likely fictitious myths about early Indian-White relations, such as Pocahontas saving John Smith and George Custer going down in history as a hero.

Chapter 2 focuses on the origins of White-Indian relations in North America. King explores the construction of race and how negative stereotypes that depicted Indians as uncivilized, godless savages influenced the U.S. and Canada’s interactions with Native peoples. These stereotypes also influence the policies that were legalized to justify removing Native peoples from their land. King explores how North American culture—films, literature, and visual art—reinforced these negative stereotypes.

Chapter 3 is a more in-depth investigation of Indians’ role in North American culture, past and present. King describes three “types” of Indians—Dead Indians, Live Indians, and Legal Indians—to distinguish between the way North Americans see Indians, the reality of life for contemporary Indians in the U.S., and the way policy shapes who can legally define themselves as Indian. This chapter aims to distinguish between how Indians exist in reality versus how stereotypes of them exist in the collective imagination of North America.

King argues that North America’s notion of Indians is rooted in the past: it associates Native culture with the feathers, loincloths, and drums of Western movies and believes that the culture has died out. Contemporary Native peoples don’t fulfill these dated, inaccurate stereotypes. They are “inconvenient” to contemporary America because they are a reminder of the wrongs of the past, with which America remains unwilling to reckon. King argues that real Indians have to appear like Dead Indians to be seen by contemporary America, as evidenced by the trend of using Dead Indian imagery to market products and lifestyles to Whites. Finally, King discusses Legal Indians, a term he employs to designate individuals who are legally recognized as Indians and afforded certain rights according to the U.S. and Canadian governments.

Chapter 4 explores the history of policies that the U.S. and Canadian governments have employed to negotiate land settlements and, broadly speaking, “deal” with the continent’s “Indian Problem.” Relocation became official policy when President Andrew Jackson signed the Removal Act into law in 1830, authorizing the U.S. government to negotiate treaties with tribes to relocate them to newly purchased land west of the Mississippi in order to make room for the development of settler towns in the East. These negotiations were coercive, and many tribes were effectively forced off their ancestral land. King cites the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of the Cherokee, as a particularly horrific example of this policy’s brutality.

Chapter 5 explores the two “impulses” that define Indian-White relations in North America: extermination and assimilation. Assimilation was a departure from the earlier policy of “extermination,” which employed racist logic derived from social Darwinism to claim that the death of Indians as a race was ethical because the “survival of the fittest” dictates that the superior race will survive over the inferior. In contrast, proponents of assimilation, such as Richard Pratt, argued that Indians could be taught to adapt to Western culture if they were removed from their traditional environments. Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a residential school where Indian children were taken from their families and cultures and forced to conform to Western ideals and speak English. Pratt’s school served as a model for the many boarding schools that would emerge across North America over the next several decades. Children faced harsh conditions at these schools, and abuse, sickness, and malnutrition were common. While both the U.S. and Canada conducted investigations that revealed the sordid conditions of these institutions, neither government acted on this knowledge.

Chapter 6 further investigates policies the U.S. and Canadian governments employed to force Natives off their land and coerce them to assimilate into Western society. King begins with an analysis of the 1887 General Allotment Act, which divided Indian land into parcels assigned to individuals to coerce Natives into the Western ideal of owning private property. The government would then steal back the Indian land that remained after distributing former reservation land into allotments. Allotment continued until Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA), signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934. This was a step in the right direction for Native people, but the onset of World War II took away the time and resources needed to implement the act. By the end of the war, the U.S. rolled back many of the liberties promised to Indians in the IRA, and “termination” became the new policy regarding Indian relations. In 1953, the passage of House Concurrent Resolution 108 repealed existing treaties with tribes and ended federal management. By the time termination ended in 1969, it had abolished over 100 tribes. King closes Chapter 6 with a discussion of the revolutionary movements established in the late 1960s to resist and draw attention to the poor treatment Indians suffered from the government. In particular, he focuses on the American Indian Movement, exploring several notable occupations it was involved in in the 1960s and 1970s, such as the occupation of Alcatraz in 1969 or the occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973.

Chapter 7 explores how to reconcile the past with the present. King wryly evokes the complaints of Whites who claim that racism is a thing of the past and that historically oppressed people ought to forget about it and move on with their lives. In this chapter, he explores policies that have affected Indians since 1985 to see if racism is a thing of the past or if it continues into contemporary life. To do this, King explores several Canadian laws that have impacted Natives. For instance, Bill C-31, an amendment that seems to help Indians on the surface, worked toward minimizing the number of individuals who qualify as Status Natives, thus eliminating Canada’s overall Native population and the amount of federal spending allocated to them.

King also explores the emergence of Indian gaming in the U.S. in the 1970s. Operating gaming operations on reservations offered the opportunity for economic advancement and prosperity for Natives living on the reservation. However, the federal government quickly stepped in to interfere, passing the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act to monitor and manage gaming operations on reservations, prohibiting tribes from gaining true economic independence and political agency.

Chapter 8 focuses on the future of Native people in the U.S. and Canada. King identifies the complicated and controversial concept of sovereignty—or self-governance—as something that is incredibly important to the future of Indian-White relations in North America. King explores the economic and social impact of sovereignty and the various policies the government has employed to deny tribes the right to operate as sovereign nations, despite being authorized to operate as such in both the U.S. and Canadian constitutions.

Chapter 9 focuses on the central role land has played in Indian-White conflicts since the beginning of European settlement in America. King explores the ways U.S. and Canadian governments have broken treaties and used legal loopholes to steal Indian land and complicate their ability to purchase more. King believes that Whites won’t stop coveting land until they control the entire continent. To King, the desire for land is the one constant that has remained at the center of Indian-White conflict: controlling land is more important to Whites than assimilation or Indian removal.

Chapter 10 explores the future of Indian-White relations. King focuses on two land-claims settlements that he sees as indicative of a positive shift in Indian-White relations: the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), passed in 1971, and the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, passed in 1993. King closes his “account” with an ambiguous but hopeful look at the future of Indian life in North America and the prosperity that might await Indians in the ages to come.