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Reviewed by: The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native Americans in North America by Thomas King, and: One Good Story, That One by Thomas King Joshua T. Anderson (bio) Thomas King. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native Americans in North America. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013. isbn 978-0-8166-8976-7. 272pp. Thomas King. One Good Story, That One. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2013. isbn 978-0-8166-8978-1. 147pp. In The Inconvenient Indian, award-winning novelist, short story writer, radio show host (Dead Dog Café), and photographer Thomas King (Cherokee) presents Indigenous North American history with his trademark brands of wit and political bite, telling stories and recovering histories from both sides of the US-Canadian border, where the truth is often inconvenient. Through his unconventional account, King deftly oscillates between the past and the present, destabilizing agreed-upon histories while simultaneously bringing about a sense of urgency to ongoing concerns such as dams, toxic waste dumps, the Alberta Tar Sands, and other threats to Indigenous peoples and Indigenous land bases. His nonlinear accumulation and juxtaposition of archival and pop culture evidence leads King to offer his readers something of a disclaimer: “[T]here’s a great deal in The Inconvenient Indian that is history. I’m just not the historian you had in mind” (xi). Bending and blurring the genres of history, creative nonfiction, and storytelling, King traces and critiques settler-colonial history from Columbus to Custer to Collier to contemporary concerns, as well as Native North American stereotypes imagined and reinforced on the sets of classic western films, in the pages of “historical” frontier romances by John Smith, James Fenimore Cooper, and Buffalo Bill Cody, and in consumer products such as the Land [End Page 96] O’ Lakes Indian princess, American Spirit cigarettes, and the Washington Redskins. And with chapter titles such as “Forget Columbus” (chapter 1) and, later, “Forget about It” (chapter 7)—which calls on readers to momentarily forget about all of North American Indigenous history prior to 1985—much of King’s unconventional methodology brings critical attention to the processes of strategic and imaginative forgetting and remembering, processes that have, for centuries, been applied to canonize limiting fictions into the “official” historical record, but that can also be used to reimagine settler colonialism from Indigenous perspectives. Admitting in the introduction that he is more comfortable with the truth of stories than he is with writing capital-H History, King explains: “[W]riting a novel is buttering warm toast, while writing a history is herding porcupines with your elbows” (xii). This struggle with the historical record is perhaps the underlying thesis of King’s work: rather than conforming to conventions of “history,” King calls attention to the processes by which stories about the past become History, offering imaginative examples for testing, challenging, and complicating how such stories produce and reinforce the categories ascribed to Indians in pop culture—“blood thirsty savages, noble savages, and dying Indians” (chapter 2: “The End of the Trail”)—and in real life—“Live, Dead, and Legal Indians” (chapter 3: “Too Heavy to Lift”). Throughout his sweeping, fast-paced account, King puts necessary pressure on these categories, drawing upon a remarkable range of topics and archives to bring attention to the ways that political and legal history construct and maintain the image of “Dead Indians,” or the familiar image of the temporally, politically, and culturally static Native, as well as the “Legal Indian,” which connotes both a product and a process of legislation aimed at answering the “Indian question,” often with an end goal of legislating Indigenous identity out of existence. King then puts “Legal” and “Dead” Indians in tension with the inconvenient “Live Indians,” or those still-living, still-present, still-changing Indigenous peoples and communities that are much less convenient to the versions of history that North American settler colonialism wants to tell. Through this process of reimagining and reclaiming, The Inconvenient Indian makes its greatest contribution, as King builds toward a reversal of the “Indian question,” productively turning it back on settler colonialism, asking not “what do Indians want” (chapter 7: “What Do Indians Want?”), but rather, “what do Whites want...

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