The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

The simulacrum is a concept coined by French theorist Jean Baudrillard. It refers to how a group of symbolic images come to represent a real thing, such as a group of people or a cultural identity. In Chapter 3 King uses the idea of the simulacrum to explain how America’s conception of Indians is based on a falsity. According to King, a simulacrum is when a “truth of the thing is the lie itself” (54). In King’s view, Whites’ ideas of Indians are based on an amalgamation of symbols and images that have become detached from their actual cultural contexts, such as “war bonnets, beaded shirts, fringed deerskin dresses, [and] loincloths” (54). Together, this assemblage of images creates a “simulacrum” of Indians, as the image of Indians created by Whites no longer has any connection to how authentic Indians lived or what these images signified in Indian culture. This simulacrum of Indians is harmful because it represents Native people according to stereotypes that depict them as savage or primitive.

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was one of the first residential schools created by Richard Pratt. In the residential school system young Native children were taken from their parents and forced to live at the school, where they learned about White culture and customs.