Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Inconvenient Indian, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
History and Mythology
Racism and Systemic Oppression
Land
Sovereignty
Summary
Analysis
King attests that “What Indians Want” is “a future.” However, whatever future Indians can have “will be predicated, in large part, on sovereignty.” The definition of sovereignty is “supreme and unrestricted authority.” In practice, sovereignty is more complex, and rarely “absolute.” Aboriginal sovereignty is legally recognized in treaties, in both the Canadian and American constitutions, and in the Indian Act. In practice, however, it remains a controversial subject.
King has referenced the controversial subject of tribal sovereignty throughout the book, but he finally addresses it directly in Chapter 8. Chapter 8 marks a shift in focus, since it concerns the future of Indian-White relations as opposed to the past, which has been the primary focus of the book thus far.
Themes
In a Globe and Mail article from August 2009, Canadian columnist Jeffrey Simpson takes issue with the practicality of a sovereign nation that consists of only a few hundred people being wholly sovereign. King challenges Simpson’s take by citing the Navajo nation in the Southwest, or the Blackfoot of Alberta, who have been sovereign nations for many years and control on-reserve services in the areas of health, education, and housing.
King implicitly evokes the concept of the Live Indian’s invisibility in this passage, revealing how Simpson’s argument against sovereignty blatantly ignores the successful sovereign Native Nations that exist in present day. In this way, King insinuates that opposition to sovereignty is rooted in its failures in the past rather than its possibility of providing Native tribes with a prosperous future.
Themes
However, complications persist, and Ottawa and Washington, D.C. manage budgets for sovereign indigenous nations while simultaneously remaining uninvolved in other liabilities. For example, in 2010, the Iroquois Nationals lacrosse team was unable to enter England to compete in the International Lacrosse Championships because their Iroquois passports were deemed invalid.
Technicalities like the Iroquois lacrosse team’s inability to cross the border exist because the U.S. and Canada’s policies on sovereignty are murky and unclear. For instance, while the U.S. Constitution currently recognizes tribal sovereignty, most Native land is held in trust by the United States, which means the land—and the tribal governments and economic systems in operation on it—is still subject to federal law and regulation.
Themes
American historian David Wilkins argues that the U.S. federal government and indigenous tribes are engaged in “an ongoing contest over sovereignty.” Regardless of who is winning that contest, King adds, history has made it clear that neither the Canadian nor U.S. governments have much interest in granting tribes the sovereignty to which either country’s constitution supposedly entitles them. In fact, the federal governments seem expressly interested in minimizing the power of agency tribes have to self-govern.
Another example of the way the federal government uses policy to limit tribal sovereignty is the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court Case Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, which ruled that tribes do not have the inherent authority to arrest, try, and convict non-Native people who have committed crimes on tribal land.
Themes
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King takes issue with the contemporary mainstream belief that North America’s Native population needs to be “rescued from reserves and reservations,” and from pieces of legislation, such as the Indian Act, that give tribes authority. The logic goes that tribes are “obsolete” and broken systems, and that Native peoples need to be free to participate in western capitalism. It follows that treaties actually inhibit “Native-non-Native rapprochement.” Washington State politician Slade Gorton supported this position and made a career out of attacking tribal sovereignty. He sponsored a 1998 Senate bill called “The American Indian Equal Justice Act” which attacked tribal sovereignty on the grounds that it encouraged “social tensions” and was antithetical to “social peace.”
The belief that Native peoples need to be “rescued from reserves and reservations” is a continuation of the sentiment that has existed since the early days of colonialism: that Natives are helpless to govern themselves and live meaningful, culturally rich lives and thus need the influence of Western culture to save them from themselves. The views Gorton espoused in the American Indian Equal Justice Act are reminiscent of the ideas put forth by CERF in Chapter 7. Both ideas insinuate that granting a historically and currently oppressed peoples special privileges is an exercise in inequality and is ultimately unconstitutional. Such views espouse equality over equity and reinforce what King sees as a sentiment that is damaging and antithetical to Native economic and cultural empowerment.
Themes
Gorton’s position is far from unpopular. In 1983, for example, Washington State Senator Jack Metcalf called on Congress to terminate existing treaties with tribes. A major voice in Canada’s neo-termination movement is Thomas Flanagan, a political science professor at the University of Calgary strongly in favor of assimilation. The main points underlying Flanagan’s position are that Aboriginal peoples are not entitled to sovereignty and should not receive federal funding or tax exemptions. Furthermore, closing the Department of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Affairs would save billions of tax dollars annually. Finally, the dissolution of tribal sovereignty would return treaty-protected lands to the market.
Despite the progress achieved during the revolutionary years of AIM protests and occupations, termination is still a topic in contemporary politics. This underscores the premise King introduced in the chapter’s opening remarks: that the future of Indian-White relations will be focused on the issue of tribal sovereignty. The contentious nature of sovereignty also suggests that the past isn’t as distant and buried as certain narratives of North American history would like to think they are.
Themes
King shifts his focus away from the theoretical and toward the practical application of sovereignty, specifically the issues of tribal membership and resource development, which he believes are the most important challenges facing contemporary Native peoples. Currently, tribal membership in an Aboriginal Nation is determined by federal law, blood quantum, and tribal regulations. In Canada, the Indian Act and other treaties set the terms required for band membership. In the U.S., membership depends on federal tribal recognition.
King revisits the concept of Legal Indians he introduced in Chapter 3, as well as the U.S. and Canadian federal governments’ efforts to limit the number of individuals who legally qualify as Indians. This time, King explores the issues within the specific context of tribal sovereignty, arguing that the diminishing numbers of legally recognized Indians goes hand and hand with the dissolution of tribal sovereignty.
Themes
The legality of tribe membership poses challenging questions about Native identity in North America. Presently, most tribes or bands control membership. Specific rules vary among tribes and bands, but the basic requirement is a blood relationship between a registered Indian or ancestor and the Indian requesting membership. Some tribes have additional blood quantum requirement. For example, the Comanche in Oklahoma require a minimum blood quantum of one-quarter. The Cherokee require that a person’s ancestors’ names appear on the 1924 Baker rolls or the 1898-1914 Dawes-Gaion-Miller rolls. Presently, tribes across North America are trying to limit membership due to limited land and other resources. As Native populations grow, there is a call to restrict access of tribal assets to “authentic” Indians. King sees the difficult question of authenticity as simultaneously “self-serving and self-defeating.”
King portrays the relationship between tribal sovereignty and Legal Indians as a vicious cycle: as “self-serving and self-defeating.” Tribes need a strong community to operate as a sovereign nation. On the other hand, limited land and resources incentivize tribes to restrict official membership to individuals who fulfill a particular set of requirements, such as blood quantum. Blood quantum laws are themselves controversial. The laws were first created by the U.S. government to establish legally defined disparate racial groups. While some tribes require enrolled members to meet a blood quantum requirement, opponents of the law argue that it encourages racism within tribes. For example, many Cherokee enslavers (that is, members of the Cherokee tribe who enslaved Black people) were of partial European ancestry, which implies that this degree of whiteness incentivized their participation in the slave trade.
Themes
Sovereignty is important because it enables bands and tribes to have more control over tribal membership, whether that means raising or lowering requirements. In Canada, authenticity is defined by the Indian Act, and there is no alternate way to create new Status Indians outside of birth. While bands may award membership to non-Status Indians or non-Indians, granting them the opportunity to vote in band elections, they would not be eligible to receive benefits allotted to Status Indians in the Indian Act.
It's also worth remembering that the Indian Act’s “two generation cut-off clause” rescinds Status from children born to individuals who have married non-Status Indians for two generations. In its current form, the Indian Act offers no means for federally recognized tribes to regenerate their populations.
Themes
Another reason sovereignty is important to Native peoples is its role in the creation of strong economic systems for reserves and reservations. While reservations with more land have more opportunities for economic growth than reservations with less land, as a whole, they are still considerably limited. One ghastly option King cites as an example available to reservations is to lease portions of their land to waste management companies to be used as garbage dumps. In the 1980s and 1990s, waste management companies sought to convince tribal leaders to allot parts of reservations for dumping sites, since the legal status of reservations enabled companies to forgo many of the environmental regulations enforced by the federal government. Many reservations were so impoverished that such an arrangement appealed to tribal leaders.
King cites the example of waste management companies seeking out reservation land for dumping sites, arguing that this highlights another recurrent trend in Indian-White relations: Whites primarily care about Indian issues when they stand to benefit from them. In this case, waste management companies swiftly become advocates for tribal sovereignty, since such sovereignty would grant tribes the right to use land for purposes outside of federally enforced environmental guidelines.
Themes
The Navajo face an ongoing battle between economic development and land protection, though so far, economic development has been their priority. The Navajo have engaged in resource mining since the mid-20th century, since much of Navajo country boasts significant quantities of uranium and coal. In 1948, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission launched a mining boom when it promised to buy uranium ore at a set price. While the mining boom created a wealth of jobs for the Navajo, they were ill-informed on the health hazards of uranium and radon gas, or the environmental ramifications of resource mining. In July 1976, the collapse of a dam at the Church Rock nuclear facility at the edge of the Navajo reservation led to the permanent contamination of the Puerco River with radioactive waste. The Navajo ultimately banned uranium mining in 2005.
Again, tribal sovereignty is a contentious issue until the possibility of leveraging sovereignty for the economic advancement of Whites becomes a possibility. Unfortunately, the Navajo Nation’s situation isn’t unusual. Across the continent, tribal land is exploited for the extraction of natural resources. For example, the Dakota Access pipeline’s proximity to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation has compromised access to clean air, water, and disrupted land sacred to the Lakota. Construction of the 1,172-mile-long underground pipeline has inspired numerous protests.
Themes
Coal mining has also created ecological disasters on Navajo land. The Four Corners power plant, which was created in 1963, for example, emits over 15 million tons of toxic gases each year, including 600 pounds of mercury, far exceeding any power plant in the U.S. Today, air quality on the Navajo and Hopi reservations is far worse than a major city like Los Angeles.
As of 2020, the Arizona Public Service stated it would decommission the Four Corners power plant by 2031.
Themes
There have been discussions about launching renewable energy projects on tribal land, and several tribes are already involved in such projects, including the Blackfeet in Browning, Montana, and the Spirit Lake Sioux at Fort Totten, North Dakota.
Renewable energy offers a safer alternative for tribes to generate income that is also more in line with their cultural respect for the land.
Themes
Indian Gaming is another major source of economic growth for tribes and bands of North America and comes at a far lesser cost to the environment than resource mining. While it’s true that gaming also comes with an increase in alcohol, drugs, prostitution, and gambling addiction, its profits allow tribes to buy additional land parcels. For example, the Oneida Nation in upstate New York used profits from its Turning Stone Resort and Casino to buy 17,000 acres of land. Furthermore, rather than using this land to contribute to personal wealth (the White American way), tribes have requested that land be combined with their existing reservations and awarded trust status, thus perpetuating the custom of communal living they enjoyed in the past.
The practice of tribes using casino profits to buy additional land is an ironic twist of fate. The U.S. government enacted many policies around the idea that imposing Western culture onto Indians through private land ownership and capitalism would encourage them to abandon their own traditions. And yet, the Oneida engaged in capitalist enterprise to buy additional land in order to preserve their cultural ideal of communal living.
Themes
But Indian Gaming is not without its critics. After the Tohono O’odham Nation purchased a parcel of land in Glendale, Arizona and announced their plans to build a $600 million casino there, Glendale’s city attorney Craig Tindall expressed his concern about having to deal with “people step[ping] off that land onto [Glendale] jurisdiction,” implicitly perpetuating a negative stereotype of “wild and uncontrolled Indians,” suggests King. Furthermore, the city of Glendale sued the federal government in 2010, claiming that the 1986 federal law that allowed the Tohono O’odham to purchase new land was unconstitutional.
The widespread upset over the Tohono O’odham Nation’s plans to construct a casino seems unwarranted, given the U.S.’s persistent attempts to absorb Indian Nations into the broader U.S. economy and culture. In this context, it makes little sense that the state would frown on this attempt at economic enterprise. What King seems to be alluding to is that it’s not what Native people do that’s the issue: it’s the fact that they exist at all. Once again, King’s idea that America prefers Dead Indians holds true.
Themes
King connects Glendale’s disapproval of the Tohono O’odham’s land purchase back to words spoken 150 years ago by Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, who lamented how the land the U.S. government allotted for reservations ended up being more valuable than the government had originally thought and would be wasted by Indians, who didn’t know how to effectively cultivate it and take advantage of its resources. King sees Schurz’s criticism imbedded in Glendale’s opposition to the Tohono O’odham casino: both complaints stem from a fear that Indians will take away land from Whites. King notes the irony of this situation: for centuries, Whites believed that private land ownership would force Indians to assimilate into Western society, yet Native peoples have learned that purchasing land can actually enable them to uphold their cultural traditions.
Schurz’s comment about wasted land suggests that any land Whites can’t control is useless. It matters little what Indians do with their land; ultimately, the U.S.’s central gripe stems from their desire to control all the land it possibly can.
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