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

Allotment was a government policy that sought to attack the reservation system. The policy was begun in 1887 with the General Allotment Act and offered Indigenous people citizenship if they agreed to break up reservations and turn them into privately owned property. Advocates of allotment believed that it would force Indigenous people to adopt Western social customs and participate in capitalism by attacking the cultural tradition of owning land in common. King argues that allotment’s effects were to “liquidate” reservations, causing many tribes to lose much of their “land base”—evidence of The Precarity of Indigenous Sovereignty both historically and in the present day.

The American Indian Movement was an organization founded in 1968 in Minneapolis to advocate for the rights of Indigenous peoples in America. Though the organization was originally founded as a response to police brutality, it became a nationwide group that was involved in several protest actions. These included the occupation of Alcatraz from 1969 to 1971 and the “Trail of Broken Treaties,” a “car caravan” that traveled across the United States to raise awareness of the issues impacting Indigenous communities and reservations. AIM was most infamous for its 1973 siege of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, which led to a two-month standoff between AIM members and federal officers. Though many have denounced AIM’s aggressive and sometimes violent tactics, King argues that such actions were necessary given the long history of government ignorance of Indigenous issues.

Bill C-31 is an amendment to the Indian Act passed by the Canadian government in 1985 that governs whether Indigenous status is passed down to descendants. The bill stipulates that “no one could gain or lose Status through marriage” (168). The bill also includes a “two-generation cut-off clause” (168), which states that Status cannot be passed down if one’s descendants marry non-Status individuals for two generations. King is highly critical of Bill C-31, as he feels the cut-off clause is a means for the government to reduce the number of people who can claim Indigenous status.

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was one of the first residential schools created by Richard Pratt. In the residential school system, young Indigenous children were taken from their parents and forced to live at the school, where they learned about white culture and customs. The schools forbade students from speaking in their native languages, and teachers often used harsh disciplinary tactics to force children to behave. The schools also failed to provide students with proper nutrition and clothing, leading to a high mortality rate at many of the schools.

Named for its author, Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, the 1887 Dawes Act allowed the US government to break up Indigenous reservations into individual “allotments” of land. This policy was meant to encourage Indigenous people to adopt white, Western culture’s understanding of land as a tradable commodity, paving the way for the gradual dissolution of reservation lands into the capitalist marketplace.

The Indian Act is a law passed by Canada in 1876 that broadly outlines which individuals are recognized as Indigenous people by the Canadian government. Legal recognition of one’s Indigenous status is important as it allows access to government resources meant for Indigenous people. The Indian Act continues to dictate which individuals qualify for Indigenous status in Canada, though amendments are frequently passed that alter the qualifications.

The IRA, passed in 1934 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, changed US policy toward Indigenous people as it offered greater legal protections for Indigenous land and “ended allotment as official policy” (133). The act also sought to return lost land to Indigenous tribes. However, the IRA was largely ineffectual, owing to the country’s involvement in World War II several years after the IRA was passed.

Signed in 1993, the NLCA created a separate territory in Canada’s Northwest Territories for the Indigenous Inuit people. Comprising 350,000 square kilometers, the new territory—called Nunavut—represents the largest single Indigenous land claim in Canadian history.

The Removal Act was a law passed by President Andrew Jackson in 1830 that created the national policy of removal and relocation. Under this policy, the United States signed several treaties with tribes, forcing them to leave their East Coast lands for reservations in the newly purchased Western territories. Many of these treaties were signed under dubious circumstances, with the US government often getting signatures from tribe members who lacked the authority to speak for the tribe. Many Indigenous people died in the course of these relocations, with the most notorious being the Trail of Tears, during which thousands of Cherokees died as they left their land in Georgia. As the goal of the Removal Act was resettlement of the vacated territories by white colonists, it exemplifies The Role of Land in Indigenous-White Relations.

The simulacrum is a concept coined by French theorist Jean Baudrillard. It refers to the process by which a group of symbolic images come to represent a real thing, such as a group of people or a cultural identity. It is therefore key to King’s discussion of The Construction of Race. 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, white society’s ideas of Indigenous peoples 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 no longer has any connection to how any actual Indigenous group lived or what these images signified in the cultures they came from. This simulacrum of Indigeneity is harmful because it represents Indigenous people according to stereotypes that depict them as savage or primitive.

King uses the terms “Legal Indians” and “Status Indians” to refer to any Indigenous people who are officially recognized by the US or Canadian governments as having Indigenous identity. The concept of a Legal Indian stems from treaties made between Indigenous tribes and the United States or Canada that offer tribal members certain legal rights. Criteria for legal status vary, but they are often highly restrictive. However, the complicated process by which one can be considered a Legal Indian means that “only about 40 percent of Live Indians in North America are Legal Indians” (69).