Reddit mentions of The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

If anyone has the time/interested... Thomas King's book called "The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America" addresses this assimilation technique (and many others). What is great about this book is that it not only looks at Native American/Canadian assimilation but rather it encompasses a wide range of topics from the arrival of Christopher Columbus, the portrayal of Native American culture in media, legal status versus band/tribe identity issues etc. It is very interesting and extremely eye opening.

However, just a warning! He can be quite sarcastic and blunt throughout the book which can throw the reader off but honestly I think it's mostly a rhetoric technique.


Anyways! TL;DR read Thomas King's book! https://www.amazon.com/Inconvenient-Indian-Curious-Account-America/dp/0816689768/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1493837986&sr=8-1&keywords=inconvenient+indian

First Nations is definitely the preferred term in Canada, but Indian isn't necessarily derogatory for many people. A good source on this is The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King. He uses the term throughout because he thinks any collective noun referring to Indians as a group is somewhat insufficient because it doesn't take into account distinct tribal identities. So he uses the tribe name, i.e. "Mohawk", whenever possible, and Indian when he's speaking generally.

I highly recommend the book, it's super informative and very funny.

Not verified with the mods but I have a degree in History from UBC and have taken several local/regional histories.

The Canadian/British government was brutal in their own way to aboriginal populations, as mentioned the residential school issue has had an amazingly profound impact on first nations culture, community, and history.. it essentially destroyed their civilization down to the family unit.

This included institutionalized sterilization - the government would pay the operators of the schools to do so either through surgery or radiation - intentionally housing students with other sick and contagious (TB, etc) students, your usual gambit of molestation, physical and mental abuse, beatings etc for using their own language, no real "education" to speak of, forced labor... all of this to school age children.

The result has, in general, resulted in huge poverty, huge over representation in the prison population, mental health, addiction, and suicide stats, etc.

That being said we have recently started to negotiate some treatys in good faith (for now) with bands/nations.

A couple of sources to check out... This documentary is quite popular though the creator is a problematic historian in some respects and some people take issue with him:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88k2imkGIFA

Again, hes not an ideal source but for someone just trying to get an idea of what went on, the primary source interviews with people who lived it are hard to hear.

If your interested this is a great read on the topic from a very respected first nations academic: http://www.amazon.com/The-Inconvenient-Indian-Curious-Account/dp/0816689768/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1377665377&sr=8-1&keywords=the+inconvenient+indian His writing style is very laid back and funny, mixed with some very interesting ideas. Does a good job at giving one first nation man's perspective on the treatment of the various groups since contact. He admits his bias, but he also does a good job not coming off as purely nutty as Kevin Annet.


All that negative aside, there are many nations who are doing amazingly well and healing themselves. There is still a lot of healing to be done though.

Have a look at either of these books and see if it changes your mind:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1491:_New_Revelations_of_the_Americas_Before_Columbus

https://www.amazon.com/Inconvenient-Indian-Curious-Account-America/dp/0816689768

They had a very rich, very diverse culture, including full scale urban civilizations, architecture, art, some novel forms of government, etc. People that hate native american culture are generally fairly ignorant of it.