King explores how North American culture-films, literature, and visual art-reinforced these negative stereotypes.Ĭhapter 3 is a more in-depth investigation of Indians’ role in North American culture, past and present. These stereotypes also influence the policies that were legalized to justify removing Native peoples from their land. and Canada’s interactions with Native peoples. King explores the construction of race and how negative stereotypes that depicted Indians as uncivilized, godless savages influenced the U.S. King uses this story as a launch point to explore other popular but likely fictitious myths about early Indian-White relations, such as Pocahontas saving John Smith and George Custer going down in history as a hero.Ĭhapter 2 focuses on the origins of White-Indian relations in North America. He portrays history not as an objective set of facts but as a culmination of the “stories we tell about the past.” He asks the reader to “forget Columbus” and begins his account elsewhere, with the description of a plaque in a small town in Idaho that purports to commemorate an Indian massacre of White pioneers that never actually took place. King laments the difficulty of beginning a history of Indian-White relations in North America without talking about Christopher Columbus. He also says that throughout the book he will be using “Indians” for Native Americans and “Whites” for white settlers.Ĭhapter 1 explores the concept of constructing a history and the impossibility of presenting a completely neutral account of the past. In the Prologue to The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King explains his use of fiction and nonfiction to tell the history of relations between Native Americans and white settlers in North America.
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