The Inconvenient Indian

Author: Thomas King
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452940304
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

Book Description
In The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King offers a deeply knowing, darkly funny, unabashedly opinionated, and utterly unconventional account of Indian–White relations in North America since initial contact. Ranging freely across the centuries and the Canada–U.S. border, King debunks fabricated stories of Indian savagery and White heroism, takes an oblique look at Indians (and cowboys) in film and popular culture, wrestles with the history of Native American resistance and his own experiences as a Native rights activist, and articulates a profound, revolutionary understanding of the cumulative effects of ever-shifting laws and treaties on Native peoples and lands. Suffused with wit, anger, perception, and wisdom, The Inconvenient Indian is at once an engaging chronicle and a devastating subversion of history, insightfully distilling what it means to be “Indian” in North America. It is a critical and personal meditation that sees Native American history not as a straight line but rather as a circle in which the same absurd, tragic dynamics are played out over and over again. At the heart of the dysfunctional relationship between Indians and Whites, King writes, is land: “The issue has always been land.” With that insight, the history inflicted on the indigenous peoples of North America—broken treaties, forced removals, genocidal violence, and racist stereotypes—sharpens into focus. Both timeless and timely, The Inconvenient Indian ultimately rejects the pessimism and cynicism with which Natives and Whites regard one another to chart a new and just way forward for Indians and non-Indians alike.

The Truth about Stories

Author: Thomas King
Publisher: House of Anansi
ISBN: 0887846963
Category : American literature
Languages : en
Pages : 184

Book Description
Winner of the 2003 Trillium Book Award "Stories are wondrous things," award-winning author and scholar Thomas King declares in his 2003 CBC Massey Lectures. "And they are dangerous." Beginning with a traditional Native oral story, King weaves his way through literature and history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest, gracefully elucidating North America's relationship with its Native peoples. Native culture has deep ties to storytelling, and yet no other North American culture has been the subject of more erroneous stories. The Indian of fact, as King says, bears little resemblance to the literary Indian, the dying Indian, the construct so powerfully and often destructively projected by White North America. With keen perception and wit, King illustrates that stories are the key to, and only hope for, human understanding. He compels us to listen well.

The Back Of The Turtle

Author: Thomas King
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 1443431648
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 431

Book Description
This is Thomas King’s first literary novel in 15 years and follows on the success of the award-winning and bestselling The Inconvenient Indian and his beloved Green Grass, Running Water and Truth and Bright Water, both of which continue to be taught in Canadian schools and universities. Green Grass, Running Water is widely considered a contemporary Canadian classic. In The Back of the Turtle, Gabriel returns to Smoke River, the reserve where his mother grew up and to which she returned with Gabriel’s sister. The reserve is deserted after an environmental disaster killed the population, including Gabriel’s family, and the wildlife. Gabriel, a brilliant scientist working for DowSanto, created GreenSweep, and indirectly led to the crisis. Now he has come to see the damage and to kill himself in the sea. But as he prepares to let the water take him, he sees a young girl in the waves. Plunging in, he saves her, and soon is saving others. Who are these people with their long black hair and almond eyes who have fallen from the sky? Filled with brilliant characters, trademark wit, wordplay and a thorough knowledge of native myth and story-telling, this novel is a masterpiece by one of our most important writers.

Indians on Vacation

Author: Thomas King
Publisher: Harper Perennial
ISBN: 9781443460576
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
A #1 Indie bestseller and a Canadian bestseller for 22 weeks, the brilliant latest novel from one of Canada's foremost authors Inspired by a handful of postcards sent nearly a hundred years ago, Bird and Mimi attempt to trace long-lost uncle Leroy and the family medicine bundle he took with him to Europe. "I'm sweaty and sticky. My ears are still popping from the descent into Vaclav Havel. My sinuses ache. My stomach is upset. My mouth is a sewer. I roll over and bury my face in a pillow. Mimi snuggles down beside me with no regard for my distress. 'My god,' she whispers, 'can it get any better?'" By turns witty, sly and poignant, this is the unforgettable tale of one couple's holiday in Europe, where their wanderings through its famous capitals reveal a complicated history, both personal and political.

Green Grass, Running Water

Author: Thomas King
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 1443419125
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Book Description
Strong, sassy women and hard-luck, hard-headed men, all searching for the middle ground between Native American tradition and the modern world, perform an elaborate dance of approach and avoidance in this magical, rollicking tale by award-winning author Thomas King. Alberta, Eli, Lionel and others are coming to the Blackfoot reservation for the Sun Dance. There they will encounter four Indian elders and their companion, the trickster Coyote—and nothing in the small town of Blossom will be the same again. . . .

Truth & Bright Water

Author: Thomas King
Publisher: Grove Press
ISBN: 9780802138408
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
The lives of the inhabitants of two towns, Truth and Bright Water, separated by a river running between Montana and an Ottawa Indian reservation, intertwine over the course of a summer as seen through the eyes of two young boys.

We Are Not a Vanishing People

Author: Thomas Constantine Maroukis
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816542260
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Book Description
The early twentieth-century roots of modern American Indian protest and activism are examined in We Are Not a Vanishing People. It tells the history of Native intellectuals and activists joining together to establish the Society of American Indians, a group of Indigenous men and women united in the struggle for Indian self-determination.

The Nation City

Author: Rahm Emanuel
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0525566627
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
At a time of anxiety about the effectiveness of our national government, Rahm Emanuel provides a clear vision, for both progressives and centrists, of how to get things done in America today--a bracing, optimistic vision of America's future from one of our most experienced and original political minds. In The Nation City, Rahm Emanuel, former two-term mayor of Chicago and White House Chief of Staff for President Barack Obama, offers a firsthand account of how cities, rather than the federal government, stand at the center of innovation and effective governance. Drawing on his own experiences in Chicago, and on his relationships with other mayors around America, Emanuel provides dozens of examples to show how cities are improving education, infrastructure, job conditions, and environmental policy at a local level. Emanuel argues that cities are the most ancient political institutions, dating back thousands of years and have reemerged as the nation-states of our time. He makes clear how mayors are accountable to their voters to a greater degree than any other elected officials and illuminates how progressives and centrists alike can best accomplish their goals by focusing their energies on local politics. The Nation City maps out a new, energizing, and hopeful way forward.

Ravensong—A Novel

Author: Lee Maracle
Publisher: Canadian Scholars’ Press
ISBN: 0889615977
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
WHERE DO YOU BEGIN TELLING SOMEONE THEIR WORLD IS NOT THE ONLY ONE? While Stacey, a 17-year-old Native girl, struggles to save her family and community from a devastating influenza epidemic, a white classmate’s suicide hints that the village is threatened by forces more sinister and powerful than the epidemic itself. Ravensong, the first novel of celebrated author Lee Maracle, tells an extraordinary story about a young woman’s quest for answers, combining both tragedy and joy in its unforgettable depiction of an urban Native community in the 1950s. Maracle speaks unflinchingly of the gulf between two cultures: a gulf that Raven says must be bridged. Evocative and prescient, filled with oral traditions, humour, and deep insight, Ravensong is more than just a novel—it is a necessary story for our time.

Borders

Author: Thomas King
Publisher: Little, Brown Ink
ISBN: 0316593036
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 195

Book Description
A People Magazine Best Book Fall 2021 From celebrated Indigenous author Thomas King and award-winning Métis artist Natasha Donovan comes a powerful graphic novel about a family caught between nations. Borders is a masterfully told story of a boy and his mother whose road trip is thwarted at the border when they identify their citizenship as Blackfoot. Refusing to identify as either American or Canadian first bars their entry into the US, and then their return into Canada. In the limbo between countries, they find power in their connection to their identity and to each other. Borders explores nationhood from an Indigenous perspective and resonates deeply with themes of identity, justice, and belonging.