Thomas King and Candace Savage

Book cover picture from CBC Books

The Inconvenient Indian, by Thomas King (Doubleday 2012) recently hit the top of the bestseller Non-fiction list in The Vancouver Sun. The author begins his discussion with the lack of shared assumptions between "Indians" and "whites," the terms he has settled on for the purpose of this discussion.

For one thing, the Canada - US border is a construct that has no intrinsic meaning for native tribes, says King.

Though this book is discursive, funny and personal, the author's academic rigour is unimpeachable as he exposes the propaganda and bombast behind the history we've been taught. King's unique history should be required reading for high school students.

This author is a master storyteller, as he demonstrated in the Massey Lectures of 2003. In "The Truth about Stories, a Native Narrative" King discussed the white man's irrational antipathy towards Indians. Five lectures were done in the format of a single story, re-told five times with new variations. These series showed King at his most brilliant, as he moved from comedy to tragedy and back in a powerful act of oral storytelling.

The current book has recently been reviewed in the Vancouver Sun, the Star (Toronto), and the Montreal Gazette.

Though Candace Savage was interviewed about her book on CBC radio, her book, A Geography of Blood: unearthing memory from a prairie landscape, (Greystone, 2012) is not on the lists. Her work resembles King's in that it reports the author's personal experience, in her case, coming to terms with the fact that the proud mythology of the prairie settlers is a partial fabric with gaping holes.

Savage's description of opening herself to the consciousness of the morally reprehensible aspects of our nation's history is impressive. She writes of the slaughter of the buffalo, and of the painful displacement of aboriginal peoples who paid in suffering so that land could be surveyed for settlers, and the unifying railroad built. She describes the horror of the Cypress Hills Massacre, so little known though it happened such a very short time ago.

It's interesting that these two works came out so close in time, and so near the time of  the hunger strike by Theresa Spence and the associated Idle No More movement of aboriginal people from all over Canada to get some serious recognition from the federal government, which is in the process of passing legislation that deeply affects the future of aboriginal groups, once again without having consulted them.