Feb
13
Book Review
By Jim Gerwing
Imagine that your family has been living in an enormous house on a very large acreage for over 300 years. The house is so big that you still haven't examined all the rooms. You are more than dimly aware that it is possible that the previous owners have not completely left the place. You know almost nothing about those people except that they seem mysterious, even a bit scary at times. So you shrink from going into the darkest places and avoid learning about them.
That, to some extent, is the history of Canada. We, who are immigrants to this land, mostly from Western Europe, have been proclaiming our ownership of it for centuries. The previous owners have been driven off their traditional land, marginalized, disenfranchised, and impoverished. We have, by conquest and treaty, taken over much of their lands and made laws to enforce those rights. Our institutions, government, churches, police, law courts, have done everything they could to keep them in an inferior state. But they haven't disappeared. In fact, in recent years they have become downright inconvenient.
That is the underlying theme of Thomas King's The Inconvenient Indian; a Curious Account of Native People in North America, published by Doubleday Canada in 2012. This book deserves a thoughtful reading by every Canadian who is even a little curious about how the First Nations of this land view the Canadian story. Without that knowledge, it is impossible to understand the emergence of Native activism.
Our own stories give us one view of our history. This book looks at the same history from a different point of view, one that is both fresh and depressing. Thomas King is a brilliant Canadian writer, one who tells the story with humour, passion, and a generous sprinkling of anger. I believe this little volume should be compulsory reading in every high school class of Canadian history.
We can choose to bury our heads in the sand and continue to refuse to listen to the people whose lands we have usurped and whose culture we have attempted to destroy. It is very uncomfortable to admit our studied ignorance of the previous owners of this land, who do not agree that they have given up all interest in their traditional territories. IDLE NO MORE is much like OCCUPY, a bit disorganized, somewhat unclear is its objectives. What they are certain about is that something has to change. But read the book, and you will never again think the same way about our First Nations.