Excerpt from The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King
This is an excerpt from the book The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King.
If North America doesn’t like Live Indians and it doesn’t like Legal Indians, why doesn’t the military-political-corporate complex just kill us off? I know this question sounds melodramatic and absurd, but I’ve been to rallies, marches, and protests where some clever wit has shouted out from the crowd, “We should have killed all you [expletives deleted] Indians, when we had the chance.” I’d like to believe that this kind of remark is just the huffing and puffing of bigoted buffoonery. But I’ve heard it too many times. Such sentiments may not be the rule, but neither are they the exception.
“Why didn’t we kill you off, when we had the chance?” It’s a fair question. Why didn’t the United States keep dropping atomic bombs on Japan? If two bombs were good, wouldn’t four have been better? Why didn’t Turkey keep on killing Armenians after World War I? What stopped the murderous purges of China’s Mao Zedong, Russia’s Josef Stalin, Cambodia’s Pol Pot, and North Korea’s Kim Il Sung? A friend of mine suggested that I include George W. Bush for his efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and much of the rest of the world, but if I did that, I’d have to throw in At&T, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, and once you start down that road, there’s no end to the list of killers and killings.
Even without the testimony of scholars and social scientists, we know that we don’t mind killing as much as we think we should. In particular, contemporary history has demonstrated that we don’t mind killing people we don’t like, and we don’t mind killing if it can be done at a distance and out of sight. And killing is especially acceptable if the slaughter can be attributed to a defect in the victims or to a flaw in their way of life or to an immutable law of nature. Or all of the above. How fortunate it is to have so many excellent ways of destroying a people without getting one’s hands damp.
“Why didn’t we kill you off, when we had the chance?” Maybe the answer isn’t all that complicated. Maybe killing is like most everything else. Do it enough times, and it loses its appeal. Maybe it gets boring.
Have you read this book? I’d love to hear your thoughts in a comment below!
The Inconvenient Indian – Summary
The Inconvenient Indian is at once a “history” and the complete subversion of a history—in short, a critical and personal meditation that the remarkable Thomas King has conducted over the past 50 years about what it means to be “Indian” in North America.
Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, this book distills the insights gleaned from that meditation, weaving the curiously circular tale of the relationship between non-Natives and Natives in the centuries since the two first encountered each other. In the process, King refashions old stories about historical events and figures, takes a sideways look at film and pop culture, relates his own complex experiences with activism, and articulates a deep and revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands.
This is a book both timeless and timely, burnished with anger but tempered by wit, and ultimately a hard-won offering of hope—a sometimes inconvenient, but nonetheless indispensable account for all of us, Indian and non-Indian alike, seeking to understand how we might tell a new story for the future.
Copyright © 2012 by Thomas King.
You can find more details here on Goodreads and on StoryGraph.
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