The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King

The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America
by Thomas King
Anchor Canada, 2012
314 pages

I love Tom King's writing. It's magical. He is very funny, and very dark, and very lyrical. Poignant, clever, sharp, tender, furious, all that. Or at least, his fiction is. King writes beautiful, and beautifully necessary, fiction, and one gets the impression, while reading his fiction, that he loves to write it. This book is not fiction, and it's different. This reads like something that was burning King up inside, and not burning in a good way. This was a book Thomas King had to get off his chest.

So while this book was indeed funny, at points, and it was indeed furious, often, it wasn't quite what I'd hoped for, quite what I'd been lead to expect by the accolades it has received. It was a bit of a blunt instrument, where I was hoping for a sparkling scalpel. None of this is to say that I don't think this book is good. It's good. But I ran into a few things that I think diminished its impact on me.

King is very clear right off the top that this is not a history, in the formal sense of the word, in that he's not interested in footnotes and citations and so on; he's interested in stories. This is both a strength and a weakness. It's a strength because the book is a strangely fast read, a strangely simple read (I cannot say "easy," because it is not easy to read a lot of what King has to say.) One moves through this curious account very smoothly, because one is not hooked up on having to flip to the endnotes to see where that fact came from. It makes it easier to move through the book, less formal, and frankly has probably meant that The Inconvenient Indian has had a far wider audience than its more formal counterparts, the histories King is not claiming this book to be. Of course, for someone with a certain mindset, this is a weakness too. We have to take King at his word; we don't have his sources laid out for us. So it's not an academic read. This leads to problems when people disagree with the facts as presented. There is no way to go back to the exact source that King used, because we generally don't know what it is. This, in turn, makes it easier for those who wish to do so to dismiss each particular argument out of hand, and if they wish to do so, to throw out King's premise entirely.

To be clear: I don't. And I think the whole format actually makes an interesting point. History, as we are taught in school as kids and fed in the media as adults, is generally stories, with the same specious citation or lack thereof. How many of us looked at primary documents in elementary or high school? How many of us cite our source when stating a "known fact"? All King has done here is turn the class on its head, and presented the stories from a different perspective than the one we generally see. Was the American Indian Movement a violent terrorist organization, or a loosely (and in some cases poorly) organized group of individuals who were rightfully fed up with the garbage way their entire culture and society is treated? King argues, effectively, that we at least need to think about that question, among others.

King provides a litany, throughout the book, of the ways that Native people in North America have been cheated, abused, lied to, massacred, appropriated, rendered invisible, rendered impotent, ignored, misunderstood, and cheated and cheated again. Oh, there are so many ways. And while King's humour is present, it's not a funny book. Even the funny bits aren't really that funny. And he knows it. What it is, is an angry book. Thomas King is angry. Thomas King, one thinks, would like us to be angry too. And I think it would be a stone-cold person who wouldn't at least be a little angry, at some of the things King lists. But... lists.

And therein lies my first big issue.

This is a book of lists. There are lists of names and lists of grievances. It's a lot of lists. King even acknowledges that it's a lot of lists, and suggests that his partner Helen Hoy thought that listing isn't terribly effective. I agree with her. Lists do not an argument make. It is hard not to to feel swamped by the grievances rather than affected by them, even if King throws a bit of his sarcastic humour in there to liven things up.

My second big issue is another one King deals with by calling himself out and explaining his motives, but perfunctorily: everyone in the book who is a non-Native is White. And Whites get (justifiably) a fair bit of flack. Good enough, but the problem is, I don't see myself in that group. I don't see my own values, my own actions, or my personal history. So suddenly it's not my problem. I can be horrified by what Whites have done or haven't done without counting myself as part of that group, though King himself undoubtably would count me as part of that group. See, this is the problem with generalizing: I am no longer culpable, and there we have a big part of the problem. I don't like my government or its actions. I tend to be on the same page as King on Christianity and capitalism, which is rather a polar opposite from where our current federal government stands, but I didn't vote for them. Problem solved. I am now just another impotent cog in a wheel I didn't ask to be part of, and I don't think I am part of the problem that King's talking about. Not really.

Which is all part of the problem.

What this book does do well is make a person think. It makes one look at the issues of North American Native land, religion, culture, sovereignty, and so on, and realize it's not a single problem, but a complex of problems. Those lists are trying to articulate things that haven't necessarily been articulated to a wider audience before, or at least a wider audience that's willing to pay attention. This is an ugly situation. It's not hopeless, but it's not going away, and it's not easy. People on both sides are going to get hurt, and I might as well come right out and admit that I am of King's opinion that maybe North American Native peoples have done enough of the suffering. (Does this mean I am willing to suffer myself in order to correct those grievances - give up my family cottage on the shores of Georgian Bay, for example? Um... I probably won't surprise anyone if I suggest that I am relieved that question remains rhetorical, for now.)

What exactly can be done to stop it is a question King never answers, and that's because there is no answer; there's certainly not a singular answer. But it is clear that something has to be done, because such injustices, even (or especially) ones that have been around for so long, are not good for anyone.

Yes, probably everyone should read this book. It absolutely should be a component of high school curricula around North America. As I said, it's not a hard book to read, and it provides some badly needed perspective. It's pretty clear to me that not everyone's going to be reached by this book, though. I didn't have far to go to be convinced by King's arguments; I was already mostly there, and I read this book as an exercise in getting a better background on the issues. People who are not already somewhat interested in or sympathetic to the plight of Native North Americans are unlikely to be swayed at all by this particular book, because it's too easy for them to dismiss it as biased, angry rhetoric from someone with a vested interest. It would be a useful exercise for those people to investigate their own biases and vested interests, but this book isn't the sort of book to encourage them to do that. And that's a shame.

Second Nature by Michael Pollan

Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
by Michael Pollan
Blackstone Audio, 2009 (book originally published in 1991)
8 discs, unabridged

This truly is an excellent book, deserving of the accolades it has received over the years (yes, I can even see how it might be considered "a new literary classic" as the blurb on Goodreads would have it.) It also fits quite nicely into my pattern of waiting until the garden is safely under snow before getting excited about gardening again, usually at the impetus of a book like this. I didn't agree with everything this book offers - I'll get to my objections in a moment - but I loved that I was challenged by it without being shamed, and that I can feel, even at the end, that though I do disagree with at least one of Pollan's fundamental points, this book is still incredibly valuable and powerful and necessary. Perhaps I feel this so strongly even because I disagree with it.

It starts out as a seemingly simple, straightforward gardening memoir, though Pollan tells us right off where we're going, and straightforward gardening memoir is not it. I think I would have enjoyed it even if it had stuck to that. What lifts it above, however, is that Pollan transitions between gardening memoir to philosophical tract to history to manifesto, in and out, often all four things in the same chapter. And while that might sound like an awful lot of weight for a single gardening book to bear, Pollan writes so well that we move seamlessly from philosophy to history to personal anecdote to ethics to practical gardening info without blinking. One rarely feels weighed down, even when Pollan is talking about something as weighty as the history of landscape design in Western culture or the culture of the rose, largely because of the author's enthusiasm for the subject and his wry sense of humour. Pollan is fascinated by each subject he turns his pen to; the reader (or listener, in my case) is drawn along for the ride.

Even though he's very United States-centric (this is fair) and this book was originally published in 1991, I think Pollan's argument that we need a new environmental ethic is a very pertinent one in this decade and particularly in this country. I agree with him that the paradigms we have operated under have failed us as we operate as stewards of this planet. He suggests the "wilderness ethic" that requires complete isolation of wild places, an entirely hands-off approach, a la Thoreau, has lead us to believe that anything that is not untouched wilderness is therefore fair game for development of whatever sort we happen to feel we need, generally things like roads and suburbs. There is no middle ground. He proposes a "garden ethic" as the middle ground, a way towards a "second nature" in which human culture and wild nature can coexist, where the dichotomy of culture vs. nature no longer applies. He argues persuasively that generally gardeners already practice this garden ethic, even if they themselves don't recognize it as such.

Each chapter in the book essentially goes to reinforce this argument in one way or another. I found that the chapter in which he discusses ecological restoration to be particularly edifying; I could clearly and absolutely see his point, and found that I agreed with him more than I thought I did.

Where he did lose me, at first, and where I still disagree with him, is in his interpretation of naturalists and the wilderness. He argues that naturalists are too romantically engaged with the idea of wilderness, are too hands-off, are too anti-culture to accept that some human activity in the wilderness can be a good thing and might be a necessary thing. We are too blindly protective of our wild spaces, even to the detriment of the wild space. (He also suggests, a couple of times, that naturalists are lazy gardeners - this point, I am afraid, at least in my own experience I must concede, though in my grandmother's case I take issue.) He rails against wilderness - non-garden green spaces - as trying to encroach on human space, in fact setting up the sort of dichotomy he speaks against: nature is constantly trying to take back her own, in an indifferent, entropic sort of way. He suggests, in one of the earliest chapters, that no wild forest could ever have taught him as much about nature as his grandfather's garden did as a child.

To this I would suggest that Pollan just didn't have the right teachers, or the right role-models, for understanding how to learn from a wilderness. Were his eyes open to the right sorts of things, a forest has an awful lot to teach, has an incredible amount of value to humans. If you can walk through the forest like I can, and my mother, and my grandmother, and the way my grandfather did, and see and identify birds, and see and identify the various plants, insects, mammal tracks, lichens - if you can do this, you are never at a loss for something to learn. Every walk is different, each minute brings something new. (This is why I cannot really go for a hike for exercise purposes; I stop every few minutes to look at something.) And there is something valuable about going into a place with the mindset that doesn't involve "how do I put my human stamp on this, how do I change it [for the better]." This is not, in contrast to Pollan's suggestions, a lazy way to view nature. In fact, I think for many, it's harder to realize the patient openness of the naturalist's perspective than it is to go in and try to "fix" things.

That said, I get what Pollan is trying to say: that most landscapes, green or wild or otherwise, bear the stamp of human interference, and we'd do better to reconcile ourselves to interfering than to locking nature away to be something we only go visit on weekends, otherwise we're going to lose it entirely. I agree with that, fundamentally. I agree that wildlife management is probably necessary both for human enjoyment and for the good of the species involved. Pollan maybe should acknowledge a little louder that we don't always get it right, with our management techniques - Asian Ladybeetles, anyone? - but on the other hand, I agree too with the premise that basically what we're doing is managing nature in order to keep the planet habitable and pleasant for ourselves. Otherwise we're going to squeeze ourselves right out of this place. And the planet will do just fine once we're gone, keeping on keeping on, in the way it does. Pollan's point of view is unabashedly anthropocentric, whereas I think mine leans a little further towards viewing the species we share the planet with as having a right to exist for their own sake and not just ours, but we share a lot of common ground. In the spirit of his garden ethic, I think there's places to meet in the middle where we can come to compromises that don't devalue either point of view.

The audio is well-produced, though the CD breaks are at weird spots; but maybe it's just me who notices when a chapter starts and then a paragraph later you have to switch the CD? At any rate, Pollan reads the book himself, and is a good reader. It's nice to hear the words spoken the way the author intended them to sound. He's got a dryly humourous, self-deprecating way of reading that I think probably plays up those aspects of the text, and it works really well. Though he's serious about what he's saying, it never devolves into pedantry or self-important schlock. I wondered a time or two if reading the book would have felt like more of a slog than listening did.

As you can tell, lots of fodder for discussion and thought here. You don't have to be a gardener to enjoy this book, but you might find yourself curious to try growing something yourself. And even if you don't think that will ever happen, I think this is a valuable piece of writing as an effort to establish new ground, new ways of thinking and talking about humans and the environment. If it is so ambitious that it sometimes misses its mark, at least it tries. A brave book, and a necessary one.

Winter by Adam Gopnik

Winter: Five Windows on the Season

by Adam Gopnik

House of Anansi Press, 2011

210 pages

Disclaimer: I love winter. So does Adam Gopnik. And I have decided that I'm going to try to stop apologising for this love of mine, as fashionable as complaining about the snow and cold weather is: winter is a wonderful season, and Gopnik spends quite a lot of time validating my fondness of it. If you thought that maybe five lectures and 210 pages was too long to spend talking about winter, you would be wrong. Gopnik manages it and one gets the impression he could have kept going. And this reader - and most readers, I'd wager, even those who have no love of cold and ice - would have been pretty happy to keep following.

Winter is part of the Massey Lectures series, the printed version of the spoken lecture series heard every year on CBC's Ideas. I quite like the idea of reading each of the lecture series, although I haven't gotten very far with this mission and they just keep on piling up (there is a new one every year. How am I supposed to keep up with that?) 

Gopnik's love for this season - this accident of nature, this clockwork shift to ice due to an axial tilt as our planet orbits the sun - is incredibly well-informed. If you look at the tags on this post, you'll get an idea of the sorts of range this book has. He starts with an exploration of the way the way winter has been viewed through the years has shifted, from being a season of bitterness, loss, and hardship, to being a season of warmth, light, and fellowship. He proceeds to an investigation of the polar winter, winter as place, and specifically the draw it held for Victorian explorers. The third lecture is essentially about Christmas, and the place it holds in the Western secular holiday year, as our festival of cold and light. Then there is an extended digression into winter sport, which is mostly about ice hockey, though he spends a serious amount of time looking at the advent and evolution of ice skating period. (Gopnik is a hockey fan, and is quite clear about that, so the entire chapter devoted to expressing his love of the game is not a surprise.) And finally he looks at what it may mean to us to lose winter, either by moving away from it, or by the self-inflicted wound of climate change. Throughout each chapter he is looking at the psychology of winter; that is, what does winter instill in us, culturally, individually? What ideas and thoughts and meanings do we instill into the season? What is winter, exactly, and what has it been?

Books like this that investigate a single idea from so many angles tend to really capture me, particularly if they're done well, and I think this book is. The writing style is very informal - Gopnik's introduction explains that things, as written out, are essentially transcripts of some practice lectures he gave, with a bit of tightening for readability. At times, when a sentence construct felt a little weird, I read it out loud to myself and that fixed the problem. Gopnik is thoughtful, funny, insightful, and relaxed. He circles around particular points and draws his arguments tighter and tighter. He lets the reader in on secrets, he tells us fascinating facts, he laughs at the absurd even as he respects it.

But there was a bit of a thing, and I almost hesitate to even bring it up, because the problem with noting something like this is that, these days, it can be enough for people to pillory the book and the author unfairly. (It can also be enough to earn me the label of "too sensitive" and I hope I don't deserve it in this case, but I am wary of that too.) It was noticeable, and it did bug me, so:

Gopnik is looking a lot at history, and it is a primarily male history. There are not a lot of women in this book. Franny Mendelssohn, sister of the more familiar composer, gets a brief, positive mention. Anna Brownell Jameson, the writer of Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada - her diary, essentially - gets a lot of page time in the first lecture. And that is about it, except for some nameless skaters flirting with men in images of skating in Central Park, affectionate mentions of his wife and daughter, the Snow Queen from Hans Christian Andersen, and then - the throwaway and unnecessary reference that solidified my feeling that maybe Gopnik should have been paying a bit more attention to the issue of gender in his lectures - a Playmate makes a very baffling metaphorical appearance. It's not that the book feels like a frat party, exactly. I don't think Gopnik is generally disrespectful of the female, the feminine, and certainly not of individual women. But I was noticing a lack, and then the Playmate comment made me actually wince. It wasn't offensive on its own, but given the lack of female presence in the book, it took on a bit more of a profile than it should have.

The thing is, history, as written by most, and as enrolled in these lectures by Gopnik, is very heavy on men and very short on women, and these lectures are a look into the history of our relationship with winter. Men feature prominently. Women don't as much, so when they do feature, I'd like it to matter. I'd like it to not be played for laughs. I'd like it to not feel a little bit as though we are the temptresses, the objects of desire, that our only relationship with winter is as it allows us to express our otherwise forbidden sexuality (as in his argument about the social role ice skating fulfilled for women and gay men around the turn of the twentieth century). Given his admiration and respect for Anna Brownell Jameson, I don't actually think Gopnik really does think of women only in this way. Unfortunately the book doesn't quite reflect that.

There is still lots to love about this book, and lots of really excellent things about it. Sure, Gopnik overreaches his point sometimes, or gets a little repetitive as he circles around his argument; but mostly it's well-written, very accessible, entertaining, thought-provoking, funny, gentle, kind. He captures the feeling of winter, particularly in his first chapter and the chapter on Christmas, the awe and wonder and affection and respect that I hold for the season. It is hard for me to know if someone who isn't as fond of winter as I am would be swayed by his argument, but I think it would be pretty difficult not to be touched by it. Recommended, for Canadians especially: we whinge a lot about this season. I don't think it would hurt us to think about it a little more deeply than just complaining about shoveling and cold.