The Inconvenient Indian
by Thomas King
North America's relationship with Native people, undisguised.
For you if
you want to understand Indigenous North America through someone who refuses to be either a tragedy or an inspiration
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King — Cherokee and Greek, raised in California, living in Canada — writes the most sardonic and necessary account of the relationship between Native people and the settler state ever published in North America. Part history, part memoir, part cultural criticism, completely uninterested in making the reader comfortable. He catalogs the ways North American society has simultaneously romanticized and erased Indigenous people — the cigar store Indian, the sports mascot, the Hollywood chief — with a wit so precise it makes the violence funny, which makes it land harder.
Where This Book Lives
- Setting
- Canada • North America
- Voice
- Written by a Canadian author
Related Viewing
Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
The Corporation(2003)
dir. Mark Achbar & Jennifer Abbott
The 150-year rise of a legal 'person' with no soul.
A wide-ranging examination of the modern corporation as a legal 'person' — tracing its rise, its psychology, and the reformers and whistleblowers pushing back against it.
Why it’s here: Corporations gained the legal rights of a person a century and a half ago and never picked up the responsibilities that come with personhood. Chomsky, Klein, and even sympathetic CEOs get equal time here, and the argument holds up without needing to shout.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
Flip the lens
Same country. Now hear it from the other side.
For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
