10
Out of a past, I make truth for a future.
—Beth Brant, Mohawk Trail
Since The Inconvenient Indian is set in North America, and since North Americans love happy-ever-after endings, I thought I’d try to close the book on an optimistic note. So, I asked Native friends who keep abreast of current affairs if they’d noticed any encouraging signs that Native-White relations were moving in positive directions. I wasn’t expecting that we’d be talking about outright victories or triumphs for, in the tumble of Native history, in the ongoing pursuit of Native sovereignty and self-determination, such things don’t yet exist.
That being said, two contemporary topics came up in our running conversations with some regularity: the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement.
But before I tackle the two largest land-claim settlements in North American history, I want to take a moment and begin with another affair that was widely publicized at the time, though now mostly forgotten. Unlike the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act or the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, the creation of the Gwaii Haanas National Park and Haida Heritage Site was not a land-claim settlement. It was one of those rare occasions when Aboriginal concerns, environmental ethics, political will, and good sense came together in common cause.
In the 1980s some of the large wood-product companies began pressing the British Columbia government for access to timber stands largely untouched by logging activities. In 1983, MacMillan Bloedel received permits to cut old-growth cedar on Meares Island in Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The reaction was immediate. By the time logging crews arrived on the island in November of 1984, they were met by a blockade of Natives and non-Natives. “This land is our garden,” Tla-o-qui-aht Chief Moses Martin told the loggers. “If you put down your chainsaws, you are welcome ashore, but not one tree will be cut here.”
MacMillan Bloedel and the Tla-o-qui-aht took the matter to court, and, in what must have been a surprise to the corporation, the judiciary sided with Native people, issuing an injunction that suspended logging activities on Meares Island until such time as Native land claims in the area were settled.
The following year, 1985, across the water on Haida Gwaii, logging interests turned their attention to Lyell Island. This was Haida territory, and the Haida immediately threw up a blockade to stop any cutting. The Haida were tired of having their territory destroyed, and they were joined by environmentalists who shared the tribe’s concern about preserving old-growth forests, animal habitats, and watersheds. People who worked in the timber industry were furious at what they saw as an assault on their livelihood, and, predictably, tempers flared. In November of that year, the police moved in and began arresting protestors, many of whom were Haida elders who had insisted on being on the front lines.
Generally protests of this sort can be tense, sometimes even lethal events. But the confrontations over Lyell Island were— from time to time—unexpectedly civil and periodically humorous. The Haida shared their food with the police and the loggers. Guujaaw, one of the Haida leaders, told a reporter that the police ate with the Haida because the Haida had the better food. The RCMP, in the spirit of community, arranged for satellite service so that everyone could watch the B.C. Lions beat the Hamilton Tiger Cats 37–24 in the Grey Cup. At one point, a truce was struck in which loggers agreed not to cut any trees while the Haida left Lyell Island to attend a funeral.
For the next twenty-one months, the Haida, the loggers, the environmentalists, and the police moved back and forth among each other, arguing jobs, culture, land claims, environmentalism, and the law, sometimes heatedly, sometimes calmly and with respect. And then, in July of 1987, Ottawa, British Columbia, and the Haida signed a memorandum of agreement that created Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site.
In May of 1996, my family and I, along with Greg Staats (Mohawk), a fine-art photographer from Toronto, began a monthlong tour of remote Native villages along the west coast of British Columbia, where Greg and I offered workshops in photography and writing. At the end of our time on the coast, I packed Helen and two of our three children, Benjamin and Elizabeth, into a very small seaplane and flew down to Rose Harbour in the middle of Gwaii Haanas. We took a Zodiac from there across the water to Sgaan Gwaii to see the Haida village of Ninstints and the stand of old totem poles on the island.
I think that many non-Natives find it hard to understand why Native people are willing to fight so hard to protect their land. In the case of Gwaii Haanas, all you have to do is stand at the ocean’s edge with the cedars at your back and the sky on your shoulders, and you will know.
The place is magic. No doubt about it. Now, I know that not everyone is going to understand the affinity that the Haida have for their land. Which is why the creation of the Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site was such an important event. The agreement protects an astonishing landscape and allows North America the time to mature and to come to an appreciation of what the oft-abused term “sacred” truly means.
Okay, the moment’s over. Let’s get back to work.
The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA)
When Alaska became a state in 1959, one of the contentious issues that followed it into statehood was the matter of Native land claims. The Alaska Statehood Act, which had passed the year before, allowed the territory to help itself to over 100 million acres of “vacant, unappropriated, and unreserved” public land. At the same time, the Act forbade Alaska from selecting lands that were held by Native tribes. As a result, for most of the next decade Native groups and the state spent a great deal of time, effort, and money arguing over who owned what.
Then, in 1966, Alaska Natives came together, formed the
Alaska Federation of Natives (AFN), and began an organized and concerted effort for a comprehensive, state-wide, land-claim settlement. In that same year, Stuart Udall, the Secretary of the Interior, announced that he would refuse to approve any of the land selections that Alaska had made until the state first settled Native claims. Three years later, in 1969, Udall made his earlier order permanent, with Public Land Order 4582. Predictably, this did not go over all that well with Alaska’s Governor Walter J. Hickel or the state’s petroleum lobby. Not only did the order stop Alaska’s land selection, it also halted the sale of oil leases and blocked the construction of a much-anticipated 800-mile oil pipeline that was to bring Arctic crude from the Beaufort Sea down to Prince William Sound.
The federal moratorium was a strong incentive to settle the claims, but what put the train on the track was the 1968 discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska’s North Slope. Now, with the scent of money in its nose, and with the oil industry pushing it from behind, the state began the process in earnest.
The land-claim issue in Alaska was massive. Natives claimed most of the state. Alaska claimed most of the state. This should have been a recipe for political disaster. Instead, in three short years, a time frame unheard of in such negotiations, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANSCA) was passed by Congress, approved by the Alaska Federation of Natives, and signed by President Richard Nixon.
ANCSA, in many ways, resembled early treaties, with Aboriginal people giving up claim to large chunks of territory in exchange for smaller portions of guaranteed land. Under the settlement act, Natives in Alaska received about 44 million acres of land and some $963 million in cash. To put that settlement into perspective, 44 million acres is more land than is currently held in trust for all other Indian tribes in the United States. The cash compensation is nearly four times the combined amount that Native people had won from the U.S. Indian Claims Commission over the twentyfive years the commission was in business. On paper, the settlement looked to be a reasonable compromise. A win-win situation. Alaska was able to abrogate all Native claims with one slash of the pen, and Alaska Natives came away with the largest land-and-cash settlement that Aboriginal people had ever negotiated.
Prior to ANCSA, Native land in Alaska was trust land, subject to the control and protection of the U.S. government. But from the start of the negotiations, it was clear that neither Alaska nor Washington was interested in continuing this arrangement. Instead, federal and state authorities insisted that any land that was transferred to Alaska Natives be transferred as fee simple.
This should have set off alarm bells. The conversion of trust land to fee-simple land had been the centrepiece of earlier legislation: the 1887 Allotment Act, and termination in 1953. Both policies had been a disaster for Native people. But for whatever reason, when the Alaska Federation of Natives met in December of 1971 to consider the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act as passed by Congress, the delegates voted 511 to 56 to support the legislation and to take the land designated in the settlement as fee simple.
Native people have complained for years about the paternalism of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the extent to which this agency has tried to micro-manage Aboriginal affairs, so I can only suppose that AFN believed that a fee-simple land arrangement would allow for more control than was possible under a federal trust agreement. Certainly, the lived experience of the tribes in North America would seem to support this conclusion.
But while ANCSA may have contained some elements of allotment and termination, it was neither. Both allotment and termination were blunt weapons that had been used to relieve tribes of their land. Under those two policies, tribal lands were broken into fee-simple pieces, and Native people who had been part of a communal whole suddenly found themselves set adrift as private landowners. Within one generation, much of the land was lost and the people scattered.
One of the major differences between ANCSA and allotment or termination was that the fee-simple land Alaska Natives received in the settlement was protected in a number of ways. Neither the land nor the cash was given to individuals. Both were placed under the control of twelve Native regional corporations (a thirteenth corporation was added later) and over two hundred Native village corporations. Not a trust relationship exactly, but close enough for government work.
In addition to cash and land, Alaska Natives also retained surface and sub-surface rights to the land, all of which promised a much-needed economic base. As a rough and loose rule, subsurface rights, such as oil, were vested with the regional forprofit corporations, while surface rights, such as timber, were vested with the village corporations, which could be either profit or non-profit in nature.
In quick order, tribal and village councils were whisked through the corporate looking glass, emerging on the other side as boards of directors, while individual Alaska Natives, who had been members of the Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Aleut, Yupik Nations, et al., were suddenly, presto change-o, shareholders in the Sealaska Corporation or Doyon Limited or the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation or the Bering Straits Native Corporation or Cook Inlet Region Inc. or one of the seven other ANCSAcreated corporations.
When I was in Juneau in 2011, a Tlingit friend of mine told me that, since the advent of ANCSA and the changes the act has had on traditional Native culture, there is a generation of Tlingit who “no longer know their clan or their house, but they sure know the name of their corporation.”
Corporations. The new reservations.
From a distance, ANCSA looked good. But the devil, as usual, was in the details. What quickly became clear was that Alaska Natives were simply not prepared to move from the heart of the country to the boardroom in one generation. Nor were they ready to take on the financial and legal complexities that attend corporations. ANCSA contained provisions to protect the land from loss and seizure for the first twenty years, but by the late 1980s, it was clear that if the protections were lifted in 1991 as scheduled, all Native land in Alaska would be exposed and vulnerable.
By the by, this twenty-year protection provision was remarkably similar to the twenty-five-year provision that was supposed to have protected Native land under the policy of allotment. And everyone knows how well that turned out.
To their credit, Native leaders went to work, and, in 1991, Congress passed House Resolution 278 (HR 278), which amended the original 1971 settlement act. While the new amendments dealt with wide-ranging concerns, the two most critical changes were in the area of corporate stock and protection of the land base. Under the 1971 agreement, stock in the regional corporations was given only to Alaska Natives who were born before 1971 and who met ANCSA criteria for enrolment. Alaska Natives born after 1971 received no stock, though they could inherit it. Under HR 278, corporations were given the flexibility to issue different categories of stock as they saw fit, and to set the rules as to how the stock might be voted and conveyed. Still, the amendments did not solve the problem completely, and Native corporations in Alaska are currently looking at the somewhat absurd spectacle of generations of Alaska Natives who may have no stock and no vested interest in the very corporations that were formed for their benefit.
Equally important, HR 278 extended protection for ANCSA land, granting it immunity from bankruptcy, civil judgments, liens, taxation, and the like, so long, in some cases, as the land remained undeveloped.
These amendments were welcomed by Alaska Natives, but I suspect such amendments are temporary at best. The lessons of history tell us that, at some point, both the State of Alaska and the federal government will move to eliminate any and all shelters, and force Native corporations into the marketplace. Corporations raise money in a variety of ways. They can issue and sell stock, they can adjust the price of their goods and services, and they can borrow against assets. Because ANCSA corporations are closed corporations—more or less—they can’t really sell stock on the open market, since such a move would allow Native corporations to be taken over by non-Native interests. The prices of goods and services are, in large part, dependent on the economy and market fluctuations, over which Native corporations have little control. The easiest way to raise capital is to borrow against corporate assets using the land as collateral. It is also the most dangerous.
The eminent Canadian jurist Thomas Berger warned of such a scenario. In his book Village Journey: The Report of the Alaska Native Review Commission, Berger urged that the land held by village corporations be returned to tribal ownership. “My objective,” said Berger, “is to ensure that Native people do not lose their land. The only way to do that, the only way to ensure that Native land remains in Native ownership, is to re-tribalize the land. I do not see any alternative. As long as the land is a corporate asset, it will be vulnerable.”
The Alaska settlement is substantial. The economic potential of the land and resources, along with the profit-sharing agreements that have been negotiated among the Native regional corporations, should be able to provide a strong financial base for generations to come. Yet Berger isn’t the only one disturbed by this fee-simple business model. It makes me uneasy as well, makes me suspect that corporations are just the latest fashion in assimilation.
Still, apart from my alarmist apprehensions, there is no reason to believe that Native people in Alaska won’t prosper. All that is needed is a little traditional imagination, a modicum of generosity, and some political goodwill.
Along with a skid of lawyers and a truckload of accountants.
The Nunavut Land Claims Agreement
Canada, until 1993, consisted of ten provinces and two northern territories, the Yukon Territory and the Northwest Territories. In that year, Parliament passed the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement (NLCA) and the Nunavut Act. Six years later, on April 1, 1999, the new territory of Nunavut came into being.
The initial step in this process was, of course, the abrogation of all Aboriginal rights. “In consideration of the rights and benefits provided to Inuit . . .” the agreement read, “Inuit hereby: cede, release and surrender to her Majesty The Queen in Right of Canada, all their aboriginal claims, rights, title and interests, if any, in and to lands and waters anywhere within Canada and adjacent offshore areas within the sovereignty or jurisdiction of Canada; and agree, on their behalf, and on behalf of their heirs, descendants and successors not to assert any cause of action, action for a declaration, claim or demand of whatever kind or nature which they ever had, now have or may hereafter have against her Majesty The Queen in Right of Canada or any province, the government of any territory or any person based on any aboriginal claims, rights, title or interests in and to lands and waters . . .”
Human beings were not involved in the formulation of the preceding sentence, but the views expressed do reflect the attitudes of management.
Jean Chrétien, the prime minister du jour, used the occasion to take a bow. “Canada,” he said, “is showing the world, once again, how we embrace many peoples and many cultures.”
Nunavut, which means “Our Land” in Inuktitut, was the end game of a land claim that the Inuit began in 1976. The Inuit could have argued for a homeland within the existing Northwest Territories, but they correctly concluded that, if that happened, they would find themselves at a substantial disadvantage as a minority within a much larger non-Native, non-Inuit population. They could have insisted on the establishment of an exclusively Inuit enclave, but instead, they lobbied for a new territory that would include Inuit and non-Inuit citizens and that would have the same standing within Canada as the other two territories.
Nunavut is a 2-million-square-kilometre chunk of Canadian arctic carved out of the eastern portion of the Northwest Territories, and whenever I look at a map of the area with its raggedy, puzzle-piece geography, I’m reminded, more than anything else, of a Rorschach test. Under the terms of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, the Inuit received over 350,000 square kilometres of land within the new territory, along with over a billion dollars in cash to be paid over a fourteen-year period.
I’m tempted to compare the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement with the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act to see who got the better deal. Under ANCSA, Alaska Natives received about half the land that the Inuit negotiated, while both groups came away with the same amount of cash. The difference that stands out between the two agreements is the status of the land. Inuit land is divided into two types. Of the 350,000 square kilometres that the Inuit received, 315,000 square kilometres is Crown land held in trust for the Inuit by the Canadian government, while 35,000 square kilometres, about 10 percent of the total, is fee-simple land managed by the Inuit under the corporate aegis of Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated. In Alaska, all the land that Alaska Natives received under their agreement is fee simple.
But such comparisons are of little value. The situation of Alaska Natives is considerably different from that of the Inuit in Nunavut. In Alaska, Native people make up approximately 14 percent of the state’s population. In Nunavut, the Inuit make up 85 percent of that territory’s inhabitants. In Alaska, Native people have access to state government primarily through the ballot box. In Nunavut, at least for the time being, the Inuit are the government.
Since the Inuit are Nunavut’s primary constituency and since Inuktitut is the main language, you might expect to find Inuktitutspeaking Inuit professionals in the majority of government positions in the territory. You might expect that Inuktitut would be taught in the schools with English and/or French offered as a secondary language to help insure bilingualism. In fact, this was the general sentiment of the Bathurst Mandate that the Government of Nunavut released in 2000. The Mandate set forth a series of ambitious objectives that the territory hoped to meet by 2020. One of the objectives was that Nunavut be “a fully functional bilingual society, in Inuktitut and English, respectful and committed to the needs and rights of French speakers,” while a second objective committed the territory to “a representative workforce in all sectors.”
Yet, in spite of the population advantage, the strength and range of Inuktitut, and the commitment the territorial government has to education and training, there seems little hope that either of these objectives will be reached. The high school graduation rate for Inuit students hovers at around 25 percent, and few graduates go on to colleges and universities. Article 23 of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement calls for Inuit participation in the territory’s public-service sector “to match the proportions of Inuit in the population,” but that hasn’t happened. Most estimates of Inuit in government positions are around 45 percent, with the majority of those jobs at the lower levels of administrative support. While Inuktitut is taught in the schools, it is only taught until grade three/four. Instruction beyond that is in English. In his 2008 discussion paper, “Aajiiqatigiingniq,” York University professor Ian Martin looks at the “long-term threat to Inuit language from English” and warns that abruptly dropping Inuktitut in favour of English in elementary school risks the consequence that Inuit students will develop neither language to its full potential.
Equally worrisome is the role of the federal government. Financial support for teaching French in Nunavut is around $4 million a year, while support for teaching Inuktitut comes in at the $1 million mark. Ottawa may be philosophically inclined to multiculturalism, but it has yet to provide the Inuit with the necessary funds and assistance to establish and maintain an Inuktitut bilingual language program that starts at kindergarten and runs through to grade twelve.
Interestingly enough, the concerns that currently face the Inuit are the same concerns that the 1960 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism considered when it recommended that French be encouraged and supported, that Frenchspeaking Canadians have adequate educational opportunities, and that they have access to their fair share of jobs in the country’s public service. These recommendations were echoed in the Official Languages Act of 1969 and embedded as constitutional guarantees in the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
I was going to say that it’s too bad the Inuit aren’t French, but using that logic, they would be even better off if they were English.
The Nunavut Legislative Assembly currently consists of nineteen members, including a Premier and a Speaker of the Assembly, the majority of whom are Inuit, and I’m confident of the government’s commitment to Native language, bilingualism, education, and jobs. Unfortunately, the problem isn’t commitment. The problem is time. And resources. Each year that these matters go unresolved intensifies the situation and invites consequences over which the Inuit may have little control.
If an object lesson is needed, Nunavut might want to consider the history of Manitoba. When that province came into Confederation in 1870, the population was overwhelmingly French-speaking Métis. The Manitoba Act set out French and English as the two official languages, guaranteed public funding for Catholic schools, and established a Métis land base. But within a dozen years, intense settlement had changed the demographics of the province dramatically, and the Métis found themselves a minority. Predictably, subsequent provincial legislatures began clawing back or ignoring the guarantees contained in the Manitoba Act, and the Métis spent the next hundred years in court trying to get those promises honoured.
I’m not suggesting that Nunavut should be a territory where Inuit culture and philosophy frame governmental and social interaction, where residents are expected to be bilingual with Inuktitut as the primary language and English or French as the second, but neither do I see any reason why it shouldn’t.
Nunavut. The Quebec of the North.
Both the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement are flawed accords. Some of the flaws were apparent even before the agreements were signed. Others have appeared after the fact. Now that the “honeymoon” is over, perhaps it’s time for Alaska Natives and the Inuit to ask the question: how are the needs of our people served by these documents? There is nothing to stop Alaska Natives from returning to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, and there is no reason that the Inuit in Nunavut can’t revisit the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. After all, both Ottawa and Washington have been rewriting treaties and amending agreements to suit themselves for the last two centuries.
In the meantime, old attitudes continue to bluster about with each new storm. Certainly, as I’ve travelled around the continent, and around the world for that matter, there’s always been someone willing to sit me down and set me straight on the matter of Native history. You people, I’ll be told, really have to stop complaining. What happened can’t be undone. None of us is responsible for the sins of our ancestors. Times have changed. Attitudes have changed. Get over it.
You can’t judge the past by the present.
It’s a splendid slogan. It permits us to set aside the missteps of history and offers a covenant with the future, allowing us to be held blameless for the decisions we make today. Ignorance. That’s our defence. Our grandparents didn’t know any better. We didn’t know any better. If we knew then what we know now, we wouldn’t have done what we did.
You can’t judge the past by the present. One of history’s grand maxims. It’s convenient, and it’s specious.
This needs to be said. In the history of Indian-White relations, it is clear that politicians, reformers, the clergy, the military, in fact the whole lot, knew the potential for destruction that their policies and actions could have on Native communities. They were betting that something good would come out of the devastation. And they were able to make these decisions with easy confidence, because they weren’t betting with their money. They weren’t betting with their communities. They weren’t betting with their children.
Ignorance has never been the problem. The problem was and continues to be unexamined confidence in western civilization and the unwarranted certainty of Christianity. And arrogance. Perhaps it is unfair to judge the past by the present, but it is also necessary.
If nothing else, an examination of the past—and of the present, for that matter—can be instructive. It shows us that there is little shelter and little gain for Native peoples in doing nothing. So long as we possess one element of sovereignty, so long as we possess one parcel of land, North America will come for us, and the question we have to face is how badly we wish to continue to pursue the concepts of sovereignty and self-determination. How important is it for us to maintain protected communal homelands? Are our traditions and languages worth the cost of carrying on the fight? Certainly the easier and more expedient option is simply to step away from who we are and who we wish to be, sell what we have for cash, and sink into the stewpot of North America.
With the rest of the bones.
No matter how you frame Native history, the one inescapable constant is that Native people in North America have lost much. We’ve given away a great deal, we’ve had a great deal taken from us, and, if we are not careful, we will continue to lose parts of ourselves—as Indians, as Cree, as Blackfoot, as Navajo, as Inuit— with each generation. But this need not happen. Native cultures aren’t static. They’re dynamic, adaptive, and flexible, and for many of us, the modern variations of older tribal traditions continue to provide order, satisfaction, identity, and value in our lives. More than that, in the five hundred years of European occupation, Native cultures have already proven themselves to be remarkably tenacious and resilient.
Okay.
That was heroic and uncomfortably inspirational, wasn’t it? Poignant, even. You can almost hear the trumpets and the violins. And that kind of romance is not what we need. It serves no one, and the cost to maintain it is too high.
So, let’s agree that Indians are not special. We’re not . . . mystical. I’m fine with that. Yes, a great many Native people have a long-standing relationship with the natural world. But that relationship is equally available to non-Natives, should they choose to embrace it. The fact of Native existence is that we live modern lives informed by traditional values and contemporary realities and that we wish to live those lives on our terms.
I’m sorry that I won’t be around when the next millennium rolls into town. Just to see how we managed. Just to hear the stories. If the last five hundred years are any indication, what the Native people of North America do with the future should be very curious indeed.
The Inconvenient Indian has been a work-in-progress for most of my adult life. Its origin dates back to at least the early 1970s, when I worked at the University of Utah’s American West Center where Floyd O’Neil rode herd on a motley crew of graduate reprobates that included myself as well as Greg Thompson, Laura Bayer, John Alley, Geno Defa, David Lewis, and Kathryn MacKay. Native history was the topic of research and conversation at the Center, and we spent our time reading oral histories and treaties, drawing maps, working with tribes in the Southwest, and engaging in running pranks that involved potatoes. Floyd introduced me to the discipline of history. More than that, he was a mentor and a friend who, along with Edward Lueders and William Mulder, professors in the English Department, helped to drag me through the rigours of a Ph.D. Floyd also introduced me to many of the historians and scholars whose work is a part of this book: Richard White, Alvin Josephy, Francis Paul Prucha, Patricia Limerick, David Edmunds (Cherokee), Brigham Madsen, Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe), S. Lyman Tyler, Terry Wilson (Potawatomie), Richard Hart, Louis Owens (ChoctawCherokee), Robert Berkhofer, and Arrell Morgan Gibson.
As important were the conversations that I had with fellow graduate students in the English department—Steve Tatum, Robert Haynie, Bob King, and Barry Sarchett—who were engaged in the disciplines of western literature and western history. We all played on the English department’s inter-mural softball team, the Hot Tamales, which contributed nothing to this book, but was fun nevertheless.
When I was working and studying in Salt Lake City, I met Leroy Littlebear (Blood) who was finishing a law degree at the university. We became friends, and when he returned to the University of Lethbridge in Lethbridge, Alberta, to head up the Native Studies Department, he offered me a job teaching Native literature and Native history. I spent the next ten years on the high Alberta prairies, braving the wind and the cold winters, working with Native and non-Native students, and hanging out with folks on the reserve. I even played (badly) in an Indian basketball league with Narcisse Blood (Blood), Martin Heavyhead (Blood) and Morris Manyfingers (Blood), in which tribal history was always a topic of conversation. My time in Lethbridge with colleagues such as Christine Miller (Blackfeet), Marie Small Face-Marule (Blood), Don Frantz, Meno Boldt, Alfred Youngman (Cree), Tony Long, and Amethyst First Rider (Blood) was an intensive course in contemporary reserve politics, oral history, small-town sociology, and very bad puns.
I should mention that I also met my partner, Dr. Helen Hoy, at the University of Lethbridge. Which just goes to show that treasures can be found in unlikely places.
Helen and I went on to the University of Minnesota in 1990, where I taught Native literature, got an interesting though not always pleasant crash course in urban Indian politics, and had the pleasure of working with other scholars on that campus—Carol Miller (Cherokee), Alan Kilpatrick (Cherokee), Ron Libertus (White Earth Ojibway), Terry Collins, Jean O’Brien (White Earth Ojibway), George Lipsitz, John Wright, Brenda Child (Red Lake Ojibway), Elaine and Lary May, and Carter Meland (White Earth Ojibway)—whose thoughts and ideas are a part of this book.
I landed at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario in the summer of 1995 and began the actual work of writing The Inconvenient Indian sometime in 2006. In that enterprise I had the help of a great many people, Native and non-Native, throughout North America, many whose work I’ve read, and others who took the time to talk with me—in many cases, pointing out the errors in my research and in my thinking: Jace Weaver (Cherokee), Linda Vandenberg, Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, Jeannette Armstrong (Okanagan), Christine Bold, Basil Johnston (Anishinaabe), Ric Knowles, Drew Hayden Taylor (Ojibway), Harry Lane, Douglas Sanderson (Opaskwayak Cree), Philip Deloria (Standing Rock Sioux), Buzz and Judy Webb, Craig Womak (Creek-Cherokee), Evan Connell, Paul Chatt Smith (Comanche), Robert Warrior (Osage), N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa-Cherokee), Robert Conley (Cherokee), Donald Smith, Pamela Palmater (Mi’kmaq), John Ralston Saul, and others whom I have forgotten at the moment. I will be embarrassed by my memory lapse when I am reminded of their contribution. I should also recognize the University of Guelph, especially the English Department, for the support and encouragement of my research and writing.
In particular, I want to acknowledge Carol Miller (Cherokee), Brian Dippie, Daniel Justice (Cherokee) and Margery Fee, all of whom took time from their hectic schedules to read early drafts and provided me with critical comments and sage advice. My thanks also to Benjamin Hoy who helped with the research at a crucial stage of the book.
Yet for all this, The Inconvenient Indian wouldn’t have happened had it not been for the presence in my life of my partner, Helen Hoy, who is always prepared to wrestle me to the ground on points of Native literature and history. It was her intelligence, kindnesses, and perseverance that helped keep me and the book on track when all I wanted to do was to run away to Tofino and hide out in a fog bank. This book is as much hers as it is mine. No one knows that more than me. Now you know it, too.