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

While Chapter 8 focuses on the question of what Indigenous people want, Chapter 9 instead asks, “What do Whites want?” (216). After considering the history of Indigenous-white relations, King believes that “Whites want land” (216). Throughout Chapter 9 he describes various incidents throughout the history of contact between Indigenous and white people to argue that any conflicts between the two groups have always circled around white desire for Indigenous land. King argues that these conflicts will continue “until there isn’t a square foot of land left in North America that is controlled by the Native people” (217).

In King’s view, much of this conflict stems from the contrasting ways that white and Indigenous people understand the purpose of land. While modern Western cultures tend to believe that “land is primarily a commodity,” Indigenous societies see land as being directly tied to their culture: “[L]and contains the languages, the stories, and the histories of a people” (218). Both white and Indigenous people have sought to settle these conflicts by signing treaties clearly dictating who has which rights to the land. However, King notes that such treaties have always resulted in Indigenous people “los[ing] land” and argues that they were largely “vehicles for acquiring land” for white people (224).

When Indigenous people signed these treaties, they were often told that the treaties were meant to last “as long as the grass is green and the waters run” (223). However, the treaties never contained this language, and King notes that they were broken continually. One example King provides is that of the conflict between the Lakota and the US government over the Black Hills in South Dakota. Though an 1868 treaty stipulated that the Lakota could keep the Black Hills, the US government quickly broke the treaty after discovering that the Black Hills were a source of gold. In 1980 a Supreme Court case ruled that the Black Hills were still rightfully Lakota land. The Lakota refused to accept the monetary settlement of $106 million awarded by the Supreme Court, arguing that the Black Hills should instead be returned to them.

King closes the chapter by discussing six stories that display white “theft of Indian land” (227). One of these stories is that of the Ipperwash, a piece of land that the Canadian government seized during World War II after the Stoney Point Ojibway refused to sell it to the government. After the war, the government failed to return the land to the Ojibway, leading to numerous protests that sometimes turned into violent conflicts between the protestors and the police. The government refused to return the land in part because it would be too expensive to clean up the military debris that had been left there. Though an agreement in 2009 finally promised to clean the land and return it to the Ojibway, King notes that as of May 2012, “the land still hasn’t been returned” (230).

In The Inconvenient Indian’s final chapter, King discusses two land agreements that he feels represent positive developments in Indigenous-white relations: the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement and the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. Both settlements sought to equitably divide land between whites and Indigenous peoples in the Canadian territory of Nunavut and the US state of Alaska. While neither settlement is without flaws, King feels that both were settled far more fairly and with greater respect for the rights of Indigenous people than past treaties.

The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANSCA) was passed in the years after Alaska became the 49th US state in 1959. The enactment of statehood led to a conflict between the state government and Alaska’s Indigenous tribes, who each claimed that “most of the state” land was rightfully theirs (253). However, the conflict was quickly settled with the passing of ANSCA, which gave Alaska’s Indigenous tribes 44 million acres of land and nearly $1 billion in exchange for the land that was lost. While the settlement was “the largest land-and-cash settlement” in North American history, King argues that ANSCA has several drawbacks (254). Chief among these is that the land was given to the tribes as “fee-simple,” meaning that the land is privately owned rather than owned in trust. While the fee-simple land is owned by a group of Indigenous regional and village corporations, preventing individuals from selling it off, King argues that the turn to corporations has caused Indigenous people to become detached from the history and culture of their tribes. King also argues that corporation ownership means the land is vulnerable to corporation mismanagement.

The Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, passed in 1993, created the new territory of Nunavut in Canada’s northern provinces. The formation of the territory required a lengthy negotiation with the region’s Inuit people, who laid claim to the land. Rather than pursue the creation of a separate “homeland within the existing Northwest Territories,” the Inuit argued that the creation of a new territory with a large Inuit population would better protect their rights (260). The resulting territory of Nunavut has a population that is 85% Inuit, and the Inuit people received 350,000 square kilometers of land, the vast majority of which is held “in trust for the Inuit by the Canadian government” (260). However, despite the large population of Inuit people, King notes that Inuit culture is in danger of dying out in Nunavut. Crucially, the Inuit language of Inuktitut is only taught in elementary schools, meaning that English is poised to replace Inuktitut as the region’s primary language.