|
|
You will want to read this book.
Perusing a recent Northern Wilds issue, The Inconvenient Indian came across my ken. The evocative ad printed with this column shows this curious subtitle: “A Curious Account of Native People in North America.” Intrigued, I ordered the book online and was prompted to write this column.
The author, Thomas King, disclaims the title given by his book jacket, “… one of Canada’s premier public intellectuals,” but he is too modest. He has distilled several hundred years of Native American history in a readable, sad, funny “history.” History in quotation marks because he will not do footnotes, and he eschews chronology, except when he doesn’t. Thus, he titles it “A Curious Account” rather than a history. But it really is history in a uniquely readable form.
King is a Californian by birth and of Cherokee, Greek, and German descent. He now teaches at Guelph University in Ontario. (Now I know where Guelph is—between Windsor and Toronto. It’s amazing how little we learn of our Canadian neighbors. They study us because the U.S. is the North American colossus.)
Of this book National Chief Shawn A-inchut Atleo says, “The Inconvenient Indian exposes and makes accessible, perhaps for the first time, our perspective of events that have shaped the continent.” King is reclaiming our true lived experience in the tradition of our storytellers and artists. He brings humor, razor sharp analysis and insights, compelling every reader to confront the uncomfortable and urgent reality of our peoples today.” Here are some quotations to whet your appetites. (As King wryly notes, “There’s nothing like a good quotation to help a body escape an onerous task.”)
“Writing a history is like herding porcupines with your elbows.”
“…[W]hen we look at Native-nonnative relations, there is no great difference between past and present…. twenty-first century attitudes towards Native people are remarkably similar to those of previous centuries.”
The town of Almo, Idaho erected a plaque commemorating the 1861 “massacre” of 295 of 300 folks in a pioneer party. It never happened, but Almo keeps the plaque up. What follows is a listing of massacres by Whites and Natives. The white armies were far better at massacres. King notes numerous other fictional facts about Native Americans we learned in our schools.
We know that 258 soldiers, 7 civilians, and 3 Arakawa scouts were killed at Little Big Horn. We will never know how many Lakota and Northern Cheyenne were killed there.
To draw you in further, here are the chapter titles: Forget Columbus, The End of the Trail, Too Heavy to Lift, One name to Rule Them All, We are Sorry, Like Cowboys and Indians, Forget About It, What Indians Want, As Long as the Grass is Green and Happy Ever After.
Parting thoughts by King: “Ignorance has never been the problem. [It] … continues to be unexamined confidence in western civilization and unwarranted certainty of Christianity. And arrogance.”
“The fact of Native existence is that we live modern lives informed by traditional values and contemporary realities and that we wish to live those lives on our terms.” Like all of us.
We learn much we did not know and more that we need to know about relations between North American governments and Native people. The book was written before President Biden appointed Deb Haaland as Secretary of the Interior. A Laguna Pueblo and former Congressman from New Mexico, she is the first Native American to hold a federal Cabinet post. That is hopeful, but it is too soon to tell how much.
(For any wondering how this book relates to Highway 61, note that King writes materially of Ojibwe, Anishinaabe, and Chippewa, and puts the events in continental contexts.)
Corrections: The correct spelling of Dwain Staples and Jerry Kohl in the Dew Boys column is done here.
Steve Aldrich is a retired Hennepin County lawyer, mediator, and Judge, serving from 1997-2010. He and his wife moved here in 2016. He likes to remember that he was a Minnesota Super Family Lawyer before being elected to the bench. Now he is among the most vulnerable to viruses but fully boosted. Steve really enjoys doing weddings, the one thing a retired judge can do without appointment by the Chief Justice. He officiated at a well-masked wedding this year where the “congregation” was in Grand Marais, Norway, and White Bear Lake.
Copyright Stephen C. Aldrich and News-Herald, 2021
Leave a Reply