He portrays history not as an objective set of facts but as a culmination of the “stories we tell about the past.” He asks the reader to “forget Columbus” and begins his account elsewhere, with the description of a plaque in a small town in Idaho that purports to commemorate an Indian massacre of White pioneers that never actually took place. King laments the difficulty of beginning a history of Indian-White relations in North America without talking about Christopher Columbus. He also says that throughout the book he will be using “Indians” for Native Americans and “Whites” for white settlers.Ĭhapter 1 explores the concept of constructing a history and the impossibility of presenting a completely neutral account of the past. In the Prologue to The Inconvenient Indian, Thomas King explains his use of fiction and nonfiction to tell the history of relations between Native Americans and white settlers in North America.
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