For many non-aboriginal people, the Idle No More movement that has swept across Canada with its protests and marches and demands from aboriginal people can be mystifying, frustrating and inconvenient.
But, armed with information, those feelings can change to understanding and support and to that end writer, activist and educator Thomas King, the mind behind the Dead Dog Café, has the perfect primer to begin understanding Idle No More.
King, who is of Cherokee descent, has no affiliation or connection with Idle No More. Instead, the release of his latest book The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America is simply a matter of fate or good timing.
In typical King fashion, The Inconvenient Indian provides a sharp and often darkly funny account of why native people are speaking out.
King is perhaps best known for perceptive writing, good humour and sharp political commentary in novels like Green Grass, Running Water; Medicine River; Truth and Brightwater and of course, The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour, where the slogan “Be Calm, Stay Brave, Wait for the Signs!” ended each episode, but with The Inconvenient Indian he uses his pointed humour, as he said, “to get in close” and “throttle” his topic.
“I learned over the years if you are going to discuss something really serious, really horrendous, you can do it straight out but you have a chance of putting off your audience, that they will turn away,” King said during an interview with the Outlook in late November. “They’ll turn away because they are horrified by it. They’ll turn away because they just don’t want to hear anymore. They’ll turn away for so many reasons. But if they know there might be a little chuckle in there someplace, they’ll stay with you.
“Even if it is a sarcastic chuckle, that’ll get them through.”
For readers, King’s approach is very kind, for the material he covers is stuff where, if you can’t laugh, you’re sure as hell going to cry.
It’s heavy material and under less adept hands would likely be a challenging, cumbersome read, but with King at the helm, The Inconvenient Indian as an account and not a traditional history is surprisingly easy to read despite the subject matter.
One part-icularly tragic part of the book that certainly benefits from a helping hand to get through is the awful legacy of the residential school system. Imagine you have, say, four children and you send them off to school and by the end of it all, two are dead and the other two are left with a life-time’s worth of trauma – physical and sexual abuse, malnutrition, disease, and a loss of dignity.
The death rates in some residential schools reached between 30 to 50 per cent.
“I was shocked by that,” said King. “I knew it was high, but I didn’t realize it could get up that high. If there was a 20 per cent mortality rate at a school in Canmore, Canmore would go up like a rocket.”
And yet the governments in both Canada and the U.S. ignored those mortality rates and other damning indicators that all was not well at these schools and allowed the schools to carry on, business as usual, King said, despite the fact that two reports, one done in the 1900s and another in 1928, fully documented all of the problems with residential schools.
The same could be said about all of the policies implemented in Canada and the U.S. in regards to native people.
“This needs to be said,” he wrote in the book. “In the history of Indian-White relations, it is clear that politicians, reformers, the clergy, the military, in fact, the whole lot, knew the potential for destruction that their policies and actions could have on native communities. They were betting that something good would come out of the devastation. And they were able to make these decisions with easy confidence, because they weren’t betting their money. They weren’t betting with their communities. They weren’t betting with their children.”
If you’re wondering where Idle No More came from, The Inconvenient Indian provides the story. Even though King and this book have no connection to this particular movement, it is tied to native activism throughout time and how native and non-native people, governments specifically, have interacted.
