The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North AmericaThomasKing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.

Abstract

The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America Thomas King. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013.It seems an unfortunate truth that even the most insightful books dealing with the historical experiences of Native peoples rarely seem to reach the audiences that could most benefit from their insights. Works that fall into this category, fiction and nonfiction, naturally appeal to Native peoples who are eager for perspectives that challenge conventional narratives founded upon colonial mythmaking, as well as readers interested in Native American and Cultural Studies. The question that remains, however, is how to get the attention of that larger majority of potential readers whose views often seem to owe more to images made popular by Hollywood westerns or represented by sports mascots than they do with lived experience. Thus, the crux of the issue can be reduced to the matter of listening and remembering. Thomas King's latest work, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America, is one such text that has the potential to be heard and remembered due to its presentation of a comprehensive, yet accessible, primer to the issues of vital importance to Native people in the twenty-first century. In fact, as Michael Bourne has already noted in the Los Angeles Times, the wide appeal of The Inconvenient Indian is evidenced by the positive reception of the Canadian imprint (2012), which has sold over 20,000 copies.The achievement of bestseller status is a remarkable accomplishment for a non-fiction work centered on Native issues, much less one composed by a Native writer. Although King returns to the affective prose style found in his The Truth About Stories (2003), King finds little use in laying claim to the authority of that grand form of writing known as historiography, and why should he? Throughout The Inconvenient Indian, King makes quite clear that the common equation between written histories and real life experience has done little more than marginalize Native peoples as a scary unknown element that was essential to the binaries of frontier literature and Wild West shows (31), which at the same time functioned to invalidate and marginalize their own stories. The Inconvenient Indian was not written to serve as a Native counterhistory to set the record straight about North American colonialism. And King is clear on this point when he reminds readers, we should know by now that will not save us (xi). King's book covers much more than mere history, it is instead an exceptionally wise account of the relationships that Native and nonNative people have formed with the natural world and each other. This is conveyed through King's use of poignant narration, irony, and humor in which the facts he addresses are masterfully woven into a fabric of stories endowed with the capacity to inform, unify, and heal. …