The Inconvenient Indian Quotes

“While the hardware of civilization - iron pots, blankets, guns - was welcomed by Native people, the software of Protestantism and Catholicism - original sin, universal damnation, atonement, and subligation - was not, and Europeans were perplexed, offended, and incensed that Native peoples had the temerity to take their goods and return their gods.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“You know what they say. If at first you don't succeed, try the same thing again. Sometimes the effort is called persistence and is the mark of a strong will. Sometimes it's called perseveration and is a sign of immaturity. For an individual, one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again in the same way and expecting different results. For a government, such behavior is called... policy.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“History may well be a series of stories we tell about the past, but the stories are not just any stories. They're not chosen by chance. By and large, the stories are about famous men and celebrated events. We throw in a couple of exceptional women every now and then, not out of any need to recognize female eminence, but out of embarrassment.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“Or, if you want the positive but somewhat callous view, you might wish to describe Christianity as the gateway drug to supply-side capitalism”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“Ignorance has never been the problem. The problem was and continues to be unexamined confidence in western civilization and the unwarranted certainty of Christianity. And arrogance. Perhaps it is unfair to judge the past by the present, but it is also necessary.

If nothing else, an examination of the past—and of the present, for that matter—can be instructive. It shows us that 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.

No matter how you frame Native history, the one inescapable constant is that Native people in North America have lost much. We’ve given away a great deal, we’ve had a great deal taken from us, and, if we are not careful, we will continue to lose parts of ourselves—as Indians, as Cree, as Blackfoot, as Navajo, as Inuit—with each generation. But this need not happen. Native cultures aren’t static. They’re dynamic, adaptive, and flexible, and for many of us, the modern variations of older tribal traditions continue to provide order, satisfaction, identity, and value in our lives. More than that, in the five hundred years of European occupation, Native cultures have already proven themselves to be remarkably tenacious and resilient.

Okay.

That was heroic and uncomfortably inspirational, wasn’t it? Poignant, even. You can almost hear the trumpets and the violins. And that kind of romance is not what we need. It serves no one, and the cost to maintain it is too high.

So, let’s agree that Indians are not special. We’re not … mystical. I’m fine with that. Yes, a great many Native people have a long-standing relationship with the natural world. But that relationship is equally available to non-Natives, should they choose to embrace it. 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.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“We will never have true civilization until we have learned to recognize the rights of others.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“A great many people in North America believe that Canada and the United States, in a moment of inexplicable generosity, gave treaty rights to Native people as a gift. Of course, anyone familiar with the history of Indians in North America knows that Native people paid for every treaty right, and in some cases, paid more than once. The idea that either country gave First Nations something for free is horseshit.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“And then there was the sad sign that a young woman working at a Tim Hortons in Lethbridge, Alberta, taped to the drive-through window in 2007. It read, “No Drunk Natives.”

Accusations of racism erupted, Tim Hortons assured everyone that their coffee shops were not centres for bigotry, but what was most interesting was the public response. For as many people who called in to radio shows or wrote letters to the Lethbridge Herald to voice their outrage over the sign, there were almost as many who expressed their support for the sentiment. The young woman who posted the sign said it had just been a joke.

Now, I’ll be the first to say that drunks are a problem. But I lived in Lethbridge for ten years, and I can tell you with as much neutrality as I can muster that there were many more White drunks stumbling out of the bars on Friday and Saturday nights than there were Native drunks. It’s just that in North America, White drunks tend to be invisible, whereas people of colour who drink to excess are not.

Actually, White drunks are not just invisible, they can also be amusing. Remember how much fun it was to watch Dean Martin, Red Skelton, W. C. Fields, John Wayne, John Barrymore, Ernie Kovacs, James Stewart, and Marilyn Monroe play drunks on the screen and sometimes in real life? Or Jodie Marsh, Paris Hilton, Cheryl Tweedy, Britney Spears, and the late Anna Nicole Smith, just to mention a few from my daughter’s generation. And let’s not forget some of our politicians and persons of power who control the fates of nations: Winston Churchill, John A. Macdonald, Boris Yeltsin, George Bush, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Hard drinkers, every one.

The somewhat uncomfortable point I’m making is that we don’t seem to mind our White drunks.

They’re no big deal so long as they’re not driving. But if they are driving drunk, as have Canada’s coffee king Tim Horton, the ex-premier of Alberta Ralph Klein, actors Kiefer Sutherland and Mel Gibson, Super Bowl star Lawyer Milloy, or the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Mark Bell, we just hope that they don’t hurt themselves. Or others.

More to the point, they get to make their mistakes as individuals and not as representatives of an entire race.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“To be sure, they have had the occasional success, but there is little chance that North America will develop a functional land ethic until it finds a way to overcome its irrational addiction to profit.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“but most Canadians, like most Americans, have a shockingly poor grasp of their own history. Dates, people, the large and small nuances of events have all been reduced to the form and content of Classic Comics. This isn’t a complaint. It’s an acknowledgment that people are busy with other things and generally glance at the past only on holidays. Given our hectic schedules, the least I can do is to provide a little historical background so no one will feel left out when our story gets complicated.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“A great many intelligent and compassionate people have called residential schools a national tragedy. And they were. But perhaps “tragedy” is the wrong term. It suggests that the consequences of residential schools were unintended and undesired, a difficult argument to make since, as Ward Churchill points out, the schools were national policy”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“For an individual, one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again in the same way and expecting different results. For a government, such behaviour is called...policy.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“The yard consisted of grass and a Russian Olive tree, which was about the only kind of tree able to survive on the high prairies. Its thin, grey leaves made it look as though it were on the verge of dying, thereby fooling the elements and the bad weather into thinking that they didn't have to bother with something so spindly and bent, something so obviously on its last legs.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“No one knows for sure how many Native children wound up at residential schools in the United States. Canada reckons their own numbers at about 150,000, so the tally for America would have been considerably higher. But for the children who did find themselves there, the schools were, in all ways, a death trap. Children were stripped of their cultures and their languages. Up to 50 percent of them lost their lives to disease, malnutrition, neglect, and abuse—50 percent.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“Where do you begin telling someone their world is not the only one? —Lee Maracle, Ravensong”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“The sad truth is that, within the public sphere, within the collective consciousness of the general populace, most of the history of Indians in North America has been forgotten, and what we are left with is a series of historical artifacts and, more importantly, a series of entertainments. As a series of artifacts, Native history is somewhat akin to a fossil hunt in which we find a skull in Almo, Idaho, a thigh bone on the Montana plains, a tooth near the site of Powhatan’s village in Virginia, and then, assuming that all the parts are from the same animal, we guess at the size and shape of the beast. As a series of entertainments, Native history is an imaginative cobbling together of fears and loathings, romances and reverences, facts and fantasies into a cycle of creative performances, in Technicolor and 3-D, with accompanying soft drinks, candy, and popcorn.

In the end, who really needs the whole of Native history when we can watch the movie?”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“The fact is, the primary way that Ottawa and Washington deal with Native people is to ignore us. They know that the court system favors the powerful and the wealthy and the influential, and that, if we buy into the notion of an impartial justice system, tribes and bands can be forced through a long, convoluted, and expensive process designed to wear us down and bankrupt our economies.

Be good. Play by our rules. Don't cause a disturbance.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“Most of us think that history is the past. It’s not. History is the stories we tell about the past. That’s all it is.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“There was no particular reason for the Canadian government to remember what had happened to the Cherokee in the 1840s. After all, most governments can't remember the promises that got them elected.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“...writing a novel is buttering warm toast, while writing a history is herding porcupines with your elbows.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“Indians were made for film. Indians were exotic and erotic. All those feathers, all that face paint, the breast plates, the bone chokers, the skimpy loincloths, not to mention the bows and arrows and spears, the war cries, the galloping horses, the stern stares, and the threatening grunts. We hunted buffalo, fought the cavalry, circled wagon trains, fought the cavalry, captured White women, fought the cavalry, scalped homesteaders, fought the cavalry. And don't forget the drums and the wild dances where we got all sweaty and lathered up, before we rode off to fight the cavalry.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“Lately, Indians have become First Nations in Canada and Native Americans in the United States, but the fact of the matter is that there has never been a good collective noun because there never was a collective to begin with”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“Most of us think that history is the past. It’s not. History is the stories we tell about the past. That’s all it is. Stories. Such a definition might make the enterprise of history seem neutral. Benign.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“We do NOT know the past in chronological sequence. It may be convenient to lay it out anesthetized on the table with dates pasted on here and there, but what we know we know by ripples and spirals eddying out from us and from our own time.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“After watching what has happened over the past fifty years in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and seeing the money that is to be made from such ventures, I wonder if the adage should have a corollary: 'Those who understand the lessons of history are only too happy to repeat them.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“This somewhat uncomfortable point I’m making is that we don’t seem to mind our White drunks. They’re no big deal so long as they’re not driving. But if they are driving drunk, as have Canada’s coffee king Tim Horton, the X premier of Alberta Ralph Klein, actors Kiefer Sutherland and Mel Gibson, Super Bowl star lawyer Milloy, or the Toronto Maple Leafs Mark Bell, we just hope that they don’t hurt themselves. Or others.
More to the point, they get to make their mistakes as individuals and not as representatives of an entire race.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“Francis Jennings, and his book the invasion of America, called christianity a conquest religion. I suspect this description is true of most religions. I can’t think of one that could be termed a seduction religion, where converts are lured in by the beauty of the doctrine and the generosity of the practice.
Maybe Buddhism. Certainly not Christianity.
Missionary work in the New World was war. Christianity, and all its varieties, has always been a stakeholder in the business of assimilation, and in the 16th century, it was the initial wound in the side of native culture.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“historians are not often appreciated because their research tends to destroy myths. I”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“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 in our terms.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

“Donald Trump, looking after his own profits, was particularly vocal in his opposition to Native gaming.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America