The All-too-convenient Indian

There has been much discussion of the Thomas King affair in my circles. I don't think it has gotten much coverage outside Canada and, even in Canada, only a few people seem to care that Thomas King turns out not to be Cherokee after decades of claiming otherwise. 

 

I don't know that King himself requires much more comment and, even if he does, I'm far from the best person to do so. But it seems to me that a lot of people starting with me should be taking a good look in the mirror. The thing that spurred me to this are the following comments:

'Hayden King, who is Anishinaabe from Beausoleil First Nation on Gchi’mnissing in Huronia, Ont., and is not related to the author, says the fact that Thomas King was one of the first Indigenous writers to really “break through” in Canada should compel some introspection from Canadian publishers and universities.

'“The foundational writers on Indigenous issues in Canada, some of the first were actually not Indigenous people,” he said. 

'“And I think that that provokes questions of the institutions that curate the public discussion on Indigenous issues, and which authors get platformed and which don't.”'

I'm a tiny fish who never had the power to platform or deplatform anyone. That said, I embraced Thomas King enthusiastically when he came along. I read and enjoyed Green Grass, Running Water and I tried to never miss an episode of the The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour. I was more than willing to accept the vision of Indigenous life and culture that Thomas King was peddling.

 

The thing is, I should have know better. I grew up knowing Mi'kmaq people. There was a significant contingent of Mi'kmaq boys and girls in my classes at Saint Dunstan's School. They were by far the largest visible minority at the school, with anywhere from six to ten kids per class in a school where all the classes had fewer than thirty students. I went to class with them, ate lunch with them, played hockey and baseball with them. 

 

I didn't think about it one way or another because it was the only world I knew so it just seemed normal. I noticed that Mi'kmaq students, like Acadian students, had a tremendous resistance to schooling. Looking back, I can see both groups had very good reasons to distrust authorities. Authorities treated them horribly. I can also say that while I understand, I wish both groups hadn't had that resistance. I say this because I think they would have been better off. That said, people used to say the same of my Québécois ancestors in the first half of the twentieth century. It's not surprising that people tend to ignore advice coming from people who treated them like shit in the past.

 

The Mi'kmaq boys I played with all had two first names; that is to say both their first and surname were what a typical English speaker would consider a first name. For example, one of my classmates was named "Peter Paul". Even at the time, the suspicion that wasn't his real name occurred to me but I never asked and he never said.

 

He and I talked a lot because we both loved fishing. We never managed to go together because we both came to school by bus from opposite directions and it was too long a bike ride to manage it. He told me he could catch brook trout with is bare hands. Could he? I doubt it but I knew it was possible because I had an uncle who could do it and I suspect he did too.

 

"Peter" also told me he was only staying in school until his sixteenth birthday, at which point he would be legally entitled to drop out and he planned to do that the second it was possible. If you'd asked me, I would have claimed to not like school and lived for vacation but the truth was I couldn't imagine my life without school. Looking back I have nothing but fondness for Saint Dunstan's (which, alas, has been converted to condos for many years now).

 

My family moved away after Grade 6 so I have no idea what happened to him.

 

So why did the highly romanticized stories that Thomas King pushed have such resonance with me? Well, I think to ask that question is to answer it. "Peter Paul" lived a life that was utterly foreign to mine and he liked it that way. Thomas King craved the acceptance and admiration of people like me and used his claimed Cherokee status to achieve it and we gave it to him.

 

And, let's not kid ourselves, that romantic vision was morally and politically validating for us in ways that the real life of Indigenous people in Canada is not. We so this over and over again. We take an interest in marginalized groups when it suits us and then drop them when it doesn't. Elijah Harper was a hero when people needed him to stop the Meech Lake Accord and then utterly forgotten five seconds later. All indications are he had an unhappy life but no one cared about the actual man; they cared about the seemingly heroic figure holding an Eagle feather onto whom they could project their romantic vision.

 

A lot has changed since then. My experience working in Ottawa has made me more cynical about authorities and whatever vestiges of respect I might have had for them vanished with the Covid shenanigans. I don't listen to the CBC anymore and when I visit their website it's only to see what they are saying. I can't trust the CBC as a source of news anymore—they've lied to me far too often. As a consequence, I have no idea who the likely replacement for Thomas King as official peddler of Indian lore is and I have no inclination to find out.