The Inconvenient Indian

King — Cherokee and Greek, raised in California, living in Canada — writes the most sardonic and necessary account of the relationship between Native people and the settler state ever published in North America. Part history, part memoir, part cultural criticism, completely uninterested in making the reader comfortable. He catalogs the ways North American society has simultaneously romanticized and erased Indigenous people — the cigar store Indian, the sports mascot, the Hollywood chief — with a wit so precise it makes the violence funny, which makes it land harder.