"The Conservatives have completely stonewalled native people."
by Steven Chase for The Globe & Mail
Although he is best known for his fiction – Medicine River and Green Grass, Running Water, among many others – Thomas King is also a scholar of native history in Canada (where he has been based for decades) and the United States (where he was born). In his latest work, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America, the Cherokee writer presents an alternative account of the relations between native people and new arrivals. “Whites,” he argues, have steadily ignored, marginalized and wreaked havoc on aboriginal people. We talked to Mr. King by phone from his home in Guelph, Ont., about his book and his take on a week of major aboriginal news.
Your latest book is about the long struggle between natives and non-natives. Where does the Idle No More movement fit into that?
It’s part of a continuum of protests that have been around since the 19th century. Each generation comes up with its own method for dealing with the problems that they see in the cities, on the reserves. Given the attitude of any number of governments – Liberal and Conservative – I am always surprised that there aren’t more of these.
The current protests – not just Idle No More but also Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike — seem to speak to what you write in your book: “The primary way that Ottawa and Washington deal with native people is to ignore us.”
I get asked as I go around, “What is Theresa Spence doing?” I don’t answer that because she can speak for herself. What I do say is, “Do you really think that she wants to sit in a tepee on an island on a hunger strike?” She is doing this because everything else has been taken away. There aren’t any other alternatives. The Conservatives have completely stonewalled native people, and with the recent omnibus bill it’s very clear they’re going back to a 1950s mentality – when the idea was to abrogate treaties, divide up native land and make it vulnerable for private enterprise. It’s easy enough to do. What you do is, you starve reserves, you ignore them; it’s not by chance that water services on reserves, for example, are as bad as they are, or health care and education. It’s not the fault of native people….
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