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

Content Warning: Both the source material and this guide contain extensive discussion of racism against the Indigenous peoples of North America, including the genocide of Indigenous peoples and forced assimilation.

Throughout The Inconvenient Indian, King explores how racist narratives and stereotypes presented Indigenous people as inherently savage or backward. Such narratives helped justify white violence against Indigenous people and validate the idea that the death of Indigenous civilization was a historical inevitability.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, European anthropologists and scientists began arguing that the human species could be divided into distinct racial categories, with each race having inherent traits and characteristics. Individuals like Charles Darwin argued that some races were inherently more fit and capable than others, advocating for “the superiority of Europeans over other races” (28). Writer James Fenimore Cooper wrote in his novel The Deerslayer that “White is the highest color” and that Indigenous peoples were the lowest of human races and could be described as “half human” (29). Such writers manipulated scientific arguments to present the hierarchization of race as “a scientific certainty” and often suggested that Indigenous people represented a primitive stage in mankind’s evolution (29). King argues that “the need for race precedes race” (29), meaning the concept of race was created to justify the poor treatment of groups judged to be inferior to white Europeans.