The Inconvenient Indian: Chapter 10. Happy Ever After Summary & Analysis

Public Land Order 4582 passed in January 1969 and was set to expire in December 1970.  The law ordered all public lands that were unreserved to be allotted to Alaska’s indigenous population. The law’s unpopularity with Hickel and the petroleum lobby illustrates another instance in which non-Native’s tendency to view land as a commodity directly factors into Indian-White conflict. Construction of the planned pipeline ended up being delayed until 1975, since the 1973 oil crisis made exploring the Prudhoe Bay oil field impossible.

Unlike many of the treaties between mainland U.S. tribes and the federal government, Natives were considerably involved in the negotiation process for ANCSA. However, Native opponents of the act take issue with the fact that only tribal leaders were involved in the negotiation process, and Alaska’s indigenous population was unable to vote the act into law. Additionally, other critics have claimed that Native support for the bill was predicated on their fear of government retaliation if they rejected the act, which was a common response among U.S. and Canadian tribes, whom the government often coerced into ceding rights to which they were legally entitled.

Alaska Native land ownership as outlined in ANCSA differed from land settlements awarded to U.S. tribes, whose reservations were (and still are) on leased land. In contrast, “fee-simple land” means the recipient has sole ownership over the land, as well as full authority to utilize it as they please. Another key difference between earlier U.S. Indian policy, such as the Allotment Act, and ANCSA, was that ANCSA entrusted land parcels not to individuals but to specially formed Native corporations. This structure provided Alaska Natives with opportunities for economic development, employment, and the ability to engage in the communal experiences that Allotment had tried to extinguish from Native life.

King’s friend’s remark about younger Tlingit (an American Indian people native to southeastern Alaska and British Columbia) knowing the name of their “corporation” but not their “clan” mourns the loss of culture the Tlingit endured through White settlement in Alaska. At the same time, though, one might argue that ANCSA’s formation of corporations helps preserve the value of shared resources and communal land that the U.S. tried to eradicate through its own Indian policies, such as allotment.   

HR 278 expanded the definition of who legally qualified as an Alaska Native. This accomplishes the opposite goal of other legislation King has explored throughout the book. For example, Canada’s Bill C-31, with its “two-generation cut-off clause” effectively diminished the percentage of Canada’s indigenous population who could receive Status by denying Status to the children of Natives who married non-Indians for multiple generations. King’s wariness about the possibility that Native land will be exploited for non-Native interests is warranted, given the land’s fee-simple status. Outside of zoning laws, fee-simple land has no limitations regarding how its owners use it. Theoretically, Alaska Natives could be coerced into leasing portions of their land for energy extraction purposes or other unhealthy and unsustainable business practices for economic reasons. In Chapter 8, King describes how this happened to the Navajo Nation in the form of hazardous coal and uranium mining operations. 

The remaining percentage of the land allotted to the Inuit is held in trust by the Canadian government, as is the case for Indian Reservation land in the U.S. Today, Nunavut is Canada’s largest territory. Its majority Inuit population allows for the designation of Inuit languages as its official languages. King suggests that Nunavut effectively functions as a sovereign nation separate from Canada, whereas Alaska Natives are relatively more involved in and affected by U.S. culture and policy. 

The ambitious goals the Inuit harbor for Nunavut reflect their belief in the cultural preservation they can achieve through independent governance. At the same time, Nunavut faces many of the same problems as Native Nations across the continent, namely a lack of financial support from the federal government. The federal government’s decision to allocate more funds for French instruction than Inuktitut instruction reflects the country’s preferential treatment of Western culture.

King fears that history will repeat itself and the Inuit will lose their language and culture as people invariably migrate into Nunavut and change its demographics and policies with the influence of Western culture. This ominous prediction reflects the sentiment King conveyed in Chapter 9—that Whites will not stop until they control the entirety of the continent’s Native land.

King reflects on the “curious account” he has presented of Indian-White relations in North America to make several conclusions about what the history can tell us about what sort of future Native peoples can expect. His ultimate stance is that it is illogical to order Native peoples to “get over” centuries of colonial violence, since Western values continue to negatively influence North America’s indigenous population.

King honors the title of the book’s final chapter—“Happy Ever After”—by suggesting that the resilience that allowed Native people to survive into the present will sustain them into the future. He closes by reinforcing his opening position on the power of storytelling to shape history and experience.