First Nations people moved and moved again, and displaced and relocated. What I never knew, and only learned from reading The Inconvenient Indian, is the way in which First Nations land has been stolen over and over again. “I never knew,” I said to my husband, when I finished reading this book on Sunday afternoon, “what they meant when they said that we stole their land.” I’d assumed it was in a general sense-Europeans arriving on these shores and planting a flag, the First Nations people displaced with that one gesture. The way he’s done it, at least, King gets to have a little bit of fun. This history is painful and terrible, and to tell it all chronologically, straightforwardly would be to be writing the same thing over and over again. There is a begrudgingness here, King offering up a book his readers have done nothing to deserve except be ignorant. I wasn’t there”? King’s supposed insouciance, his humour, his edge-with wry understatement-all rhetorical devices. What is the historian who offers up lines like, “I don’t know. Plus haunted by the spirit of King’s wife, Helen, much esteemed, offering her own feedback from somewhere in the background: give examples, don’t generalize, and other editorial suggestions.

A history whose narrator shrugs away any claims of authority, chronology abandoned, national borders ignored, a narrative tone that’s sarcastic and a bit snarly. It’s a book that might be difficult to discuss in its own right, outside of its subject matter.īut let’s for just a moment do such a thing.įor in all my years of reading, I don’t know that I’ve ever read a more curious “curious account” of anything. It comes with a moral imperative so great that a reader might be shamed to offer up a different book instead, a book championed for, say, its aesthetic concerns. Its scope is outsized compared to the other books.

Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America is a curious contender for the Canada Reads debates, which this year is mixing fiction and non-fiction for the first time. The history I offered to forget, the past I offered to burn, turns out to be our present. JanuThe Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King

The inconvenient indian book review