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His answer, and one that will resonate particularly with other Anglo-colonized First World Indigenous peoples in places as far flung as Tasmania, Australia, Aotearoa, Canada, and Hawai‘i, is that they want the land.

And the question King asks in chapter 9-“What Do Whites Want?”-is the heart of the book.

It is their story of how they took, and continue to take, the North American continent for themselves, told through the eyes and from the perspective of a Native American. And while the title is The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of the Native People in North America, the book’s subject is actually Euro-­ Americans/ Canadians. It is be humorous or be angry, and, as we all know, nobody likes an angry Native. At another level, the strategy of ironic humor seems to be the only viable option to demonstrate the cognitive dissonance between the acts Euro-­ Americans/Canadians perpetrated (and continue to perpetrate) against the Indigenous populations of North America and their much tended self-image as adventurous, brave, caring, hard-working, industrious, pioneering folk and as nations built on the notions of liberty, egalitarianism, and individual human rights. The story of colonization, up to and including the present day, as King demonstrates to great effect, is essentially a continuing tale of mass murder (inside and outside the artifice of war), greed, dispossessing violence, deceit, duplicity, corruption, tragedy, mistreatment, willful indifference, cold-hearted theft, damning contempt, and dehumanization, to name just a few of its pejorative aspects. King’s narrative is beautifully written, intelligent, critical, finely detailed, and historically solid, wrapped in personal, personable, and at times ironically humorous presentation. NAIS 1:1 SPRING 2014 Reviews 113 MAGGIE WALTER The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America by Thomas King University of Minnesota Press, 2013 THIS BOOK PRESENTS THE NARRATIVE of Anglo-French (but particularly Anglo) colonization, historic and contemporary, of the North American continent. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: