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

Chapter 3 discusses the various ways in which Indigenous people exist in “real life” North American society (53). King argues that there are three types of “Indians”—“Dead Indians, Live Indians, and Legal Indians” (53)—which he will discuss throughout the chapter.

Dead Indians are fictional representations of Indigenous people that conform to an imagined idea of how Indigenous people exist and behave, assembled from “the stereotypes and clichés that North America has conjured up out of experience and out of its collective imaginings and fears” (53). King calls these images a simulacrum, comprised of “bits of cultural debris—authentic and constructed”—that represent “something that never existed” (54).

These images of Indigenous people often consist of stereotypical clothing and accessories, like “war bonnets, beaded shirts, [and] fringed deerskin dresses” (54), with little consideration of the “truth” of what these accessories signify or whether the specific Indigenous people being depicted would actually wear them (54). The Dead Indians image can be found throughout American culture and is often used to sell products, such as “American Spirit cigarettes” or “Crazy Horse Malt Liquor” (57). King also notes that real-life Indigenous people often have to dress like Dead Indians if they want whites to accept their Indigenous identity as authentic.