King, Thomas. The Inconvenient
Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America.
Doubleday Canada, 2012
If I
had to select one quote that best summarizes the fork in the rode for
indigenous peoples in North America in 2013, it would be most of
paragraph 2 on page 265 of Thomas King's Curious Account:
" . . . there is little shelter and little gain for Native peoples
in doing nothing. So long as we possess one element of sovereignty,
so long as we possess one parcel of land, North America will come for
us, and the question we have to face is how badly we wish to continue
to pursue the concepts of sovereignty and self-determination. How
important is it for us to maintain protected communal homelands? Are
our traditions and languages worth the cost of carrying on the fight?
Certainly the easier and more expedient option is simply to step away
from who we are and who we wish to be, sell what we have for cash,
and sink into the stewpot of North America.
With the rest of the bones."
Everything before the penultimate page 265 is King's accounting of
reasons for coming to this conclusion.
In fairness to the other ethnic communities in Canada, the question
of assimilating or “sinking into the stewpot of North America”
can't be considered exclusively an Aboriginal choice. Something
similar could be said about the many Chinatown cultures in our
metropolitan areas, the Hutterian Brethren colonies, the Amish of
Southern Ontario, the Kurds of Northern Iraq to name just a few
minorities struggling to survive while gradually "sinking into the
stewpot."
Where
the cases differ is in the history that brought us all to these
shores. The Inconvenient Indian is
a story of a culture over-run by Western civilization, it's a history
that can help us understand why "I started with nothing and made
it, why can't they?" is an absurd question.
King
begins in 1492, where we normally begin our history of
the Aboriginal people of North America as if they didn't exist as
anything more than the deer and the beaver before then. The memorable
stories that followed Columbus' discovery
of the New World—Custer's last stand,
the Riel Rebellion,
the role of the fur trade and its missionary partners—all are
clothed in our history books with the patina of a conquerors'
viewpoint. Like the cold winters and the vast, formidable distances,
the presence of Indians has historically been one more obstacle to
overcome as we forged nations after the European fashion. Hence, the
inconvenient Indian.
At the least, the story of our interactions with North America's
Aboriginal people is highly ambiguous. King traces some of this
ambiguity through the portrayal of Indians in movies where the
"Cowboys and Indians" mentality had its birth. The relationship
between the Lone Ranger and his sidekick, Tonto, (remember kemo
sabay?) exemplifies one movie stereotype. Tonto is the Indian image
that lives on in minds around the world: the noble savage, the living
Indian. But there are other images that we carry around with us at
the same time: the bloodthirsty savage (the scary one), the "dying"
Indian (the disappearing one), the indolent Indian (languishing on
reserves), the hungry Indian (poverty is highest on reserves), and
you could probably add others. King draws our attention to the
multitude of First Nations citizens who have become household names,
not because they were Indians but because they were talented: Buffy
Sainte-Marie, Kenoujuak, Clint Walker, Jay Silverheels and Will
Rogers to name a few. (A joke of Will Rogers: "There's no trick to
being a humourist when you have the whole government working for
you," underlines another sensibility, namely that every government
since confederation has bungled the Aboriginal file - page 39.)
Added to the stereotypes above is the reality of Indians categorized
more objectively: the legal Indian or treaty Indian vs.
the non-treaty Indian, the Inuit, the Metis and others who may or may
not have fallen under any particular treaty. This is all very tricky
ground and the moment one starts to define who is a genetic, an
ethnic or traditional member of a group, the ambiguities begin to burgeon. There exist certain treaty rights to which only legal
Indians are entitled and before 1968, treaty Indians who voted, who
served in the military, graduated college, married a non-treaty
person were automatically or voluntarily enfranchised, ie.
given Canadian citizenship in exchange for treaty status. King quotes
a Blackfoot friend: " . . . enfranchised is French for 'screwed'"
(page 71). Suffice it to say that King portrays with a concise and
ironic wit the ambiguities adding to the inconvenience of
Aboriginal populations and the legacy with which early settlement
saddled both us and them.
Not every phase of the story from Columbus onward lends itself to
witty retelling. The assimilation through education chapter
most certainly belongs in the "too tragic for jokes" category. In
the "We are Sorry" chapter, King deals with the residential
schools period under the general principle that for whites, two
options only were considered for resolving the Native inconvenience:
extermination or assimilation (page 101). In the endeavour to
"kill the Indian to save the man," children of Aboriginal
families were forced into residential schools where Indian culture,
language and spirituality were drummed out and English or French,
European culture and Christianity were beaten in. At least that was
the plan, its execution entrusted to various mission-minded churches,
a decidedly unholy alliance of state, commerce and Christianity. ( "
. . . you might wish to describe Christianity as the gateway drug to
supply-side capitalism" – page 103) The cruelty of the plan and
its ineffectiveness in reaching its goals is currently being
clarified by the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in Canada. It's
still unclear how much benefit Aboriginal people will experience as a
result of apologies heard, received and accepted for the Residential
Schools debacle.
In 1991, a Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples began work that
would conclude with a 4,000 page report and 440 recommendations to
government in numerous areas including replacement of the Department
of Indian Affairs and Northern Development with something more in
line with current realities. "The expectation was that the
government would see the report as an opportunity to renew, amend,
and restructure its relationship with Canada's First Nations . . .
Almost as soon as the report was released, it was placed on the shelf
with all the rest of the reports from Royal Commissions." (page 171)
It seems that governments still lack either the will or the means—or
both—to effect the changes that are necessary but then, the history
of the relationship between the Canadian nation and the First Nations
has—according to King—always been about land (see page 216), and
to this end, the periodic confiscation of reserved land, the delays
in settling land claims and the toying with reducing the numbers of
status Indians through measures like Bill C-31 would be
evidence enough to conclude that the end game is to extinguish the
sovereignty of First Nations over their territories and their right
to self-determination.
Even so, The Inconvenient Indian is not a diatribe against
the evil white man. King is remarkably even-handed in his assessment
of where things have gone wrong and where they've gone right. He may
be too generous. The mess that characterizes the majority of reserves
in Canada was made by the system that has made me well-off, secure
and able to make choices. What role should First Nations expect me to
fulfil in the cleaning up of that mess? Whatever that role is, it's
not about handouts, admonishment or even education; been there, done
that--nobody liked it much. For us children of settlers, the first
obligation is to get to know the past, to educate ourselves about the
present and to grasp finally that we are treaty people as much as the
Aboriginal bands, tribes and individuals are.
To this end, a thoughtful reading of The Inconvenient Indian
certainly makes a good start.