Thomas King is presented the Governor-General's Literary Award for fiction by then-Governor-General David Johnston in Ottawa in 2014.PATRICK DOYLE/The Canadian Press
This is a column I wish I didn’t have to write. I do so reflecting on my teachings, as an Anishinaabe – a member of Anemki Wajiw – on how to walk in a good way in this world.
Thomas King is an author I revered, right up there along with Lee Maracle and Murray Sinclair. Mr. King and the late Ms. Maracle were close friends; she spoke of him often. I met him at the Eden Mills writers’ festival, and told him I admired his work.
So I did not want to believe the rumours I had heard over the years – that he was not actually Cherokee, as he claimed. I did not believe it because I did not hear it from him. At least, not until earlier this week, when Mr. King wrote an Opinion piece in The Globe and Mail in which he declared he was “not the Indian I had in mind. Not an Indian at all.”
Inconvenient Indian author Thomas King says he is not part Cherokee
This was a blow. I found it unbelievable that the person who wrote The Truth About Stories in 2003, a book I leaned on for its brilliant tear-down of the myth of the “noble savage,” was not, in fact, Cherokee.
Mr. King is also the author of An Inconvenient Indian, an oft-cited history of Turtle Island that is found on the curricula of many universities and high schools and which won numerous awards. How could a clearly deft historian not turn the lens as firmly on himself?
Mr. King has said he lived his life believing that the man he believed to be his father was of Cherokee ancestry, until, as he wrote, the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds told him recently he was not.
I sent him an e-mail on Tuesday. I wrote that many people were angry, and that I felt betrayed. He responded to say he was “very sorry” I felt this way. “The article I wrote is, I thought, clear,” he told me. “There was never any question about being Cherokee. I knew from my mother and later from my aunt that this was the case. The question that pushed me along was whether I could find family back in Oklahoma. Living in Salt Lake for a while and then California and Alberta made that search difficult, but I did try, but with no result. I’m sure that there are Kings and Hunts and Phillips kicking around but I haven’t been able to find them.”
Thomas King withdraws next novel from publication after revelation he is not part Cherokee
He added: “The hidden question that I think you are asking is whether or not I’m a liar. I’m not, but you’ll have to make that decision for yourself.”
Until Mr. King can prove that he is Indigenous, or a member of another First Nations community via his paternal side, his work cannot be understood as being told from the perspective of an Indian, but of an ally, and it must be read through that lens. His books should not be added to courses on Indigenous literature and history; unless he proves otherwise, his work must move to the Canadian literature section.
Being First Nations is about being in relationship with each other. Our communities are glorious, welcoming, loving. They are wondrous places of enrapturing story, beautiful music, hot tea, fried Klik, moose-hide tanning gatherings, hunting trips and love that knows no bounds. But yes, they are sometimes hard. Many of us have also experienced the worst of humanity; we know what genocide has done, through our ripped-apart families, our stolen and murdered people.
The searing harm of Mr. King’s story, as it stands, is that it plants doubt into the many sisters and brothers out there who want to find us and come back home. It leaves other truly Indigenous authors overlooked. It crowds out our own truthful stories from education curricula, from the zeitgeist, from Canadian arts spaces. It also makes the racists and denialists smile.
Mr. King appears to be another person who truly believed they were First Nations – and profited from that identity – but does not have living blood ties to a family, to a community, to anyone on or around the rez.
That is not to say you can’t be an Indian – what the government of Canada calls us under the Indian Act – if you don’t know where you are from. After all, you may have been displaced, or perhaps your lineage was hidden by your family for reasons they call their own. But here’s the rub: once you know you’re Indigenous, you look for your kin. You don’t stop. When you find them, they welcome and accept you, and help you heal.
Now we all have to find healing, again.