Jesse Wente, who worked as a producer on the screen adaptation of The Inconvenient Indian, speaks in a heartfelt and thoughtful way about the personal and professional impact of King's admission.
Listen to the podcast episode on Commotion, or a slightly edited Youtube video version, both linked in the CBC article I'm linking to below.
The fall out from Thomas King's admission last week continues.
Tanya Talaga writes:
"The searing harm of Mr. King’s story...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."
Robert Jago takes a more critical view, writing in today's Toronto Star that the "revelation of King’s true ancestry was far from a surprise to Indigenous people. This has been a persistent rumour in Indian Country for years."
Jago quotes from a Facebook post by "Crystal Semaganis of the Ghost Warrior Society (a Pretendian hunting organization)" that "He was trying to get ahead of an imminent public relations disaster"
I guess King's story is closer to that of Joseph Boyden, who also grew up believing he was indigenous.
Boyden faced heavy criticism for not investigating his own roots earlier. But Thomas King's acknowledgement of his new truth and identity is more forthright than Boyden's initial public responses.
Still, you have to wonder why so, so many of the most famous and prominent "indigenous" personalities in Canada are turning out not to actually be indigenous at all.
Wow. Famous Canadian author Thomas King recently discovered that he is not indigenous.
King grew up believing his father was part Cherokee. His acknowledgement of this newly learned truth in Monday's Globe is a sharp contrast to Buffy Sainte Marie's refusal to address conflicting genealogical records.
But these stories are all so damaging and painful to both Canada and its indigenous communities.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-a-most-inconvenient-indian/
In an essay titled "A most inconvenient Indian" for the Globe and Mail, the Guelph, Ont.-based King says he learned of rumours several years ago that questioned his heritage. The California-born King says he made a concerted effort this year to find their origin, which brought him to a U.S. organization called Tribal Alliance Against Frauds.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-a-most-inconvenient-indian/
I'm sure many have you have heard the buzz about #thomasking...he's not #cherokee at all, not #indigenous, and never was.
According to King, he's devastated by this knowledge claiming he never knew and this has given him an identity crisis.
What do you think? Is he a #pretendian? Or was it honestly a case of mistaken heritage?
TBR Pile: October 2025 Reads -
Titles of Italian heritage, democracy support, and horror.
#books #literature #bookreviews #bookworm #tbrpile #tbrlist #halloween #13DaysofHalloween #robertrose #valuablefriction #umbertoeco #baudolino #aijiang #linghun #heathercoxrichardson #democracyawakening #milankundera #thebookoflaughterandforgetting #thomasking #theinconvenientindian #masaakinakayama #ptsdradio
Philip Kiff
Doug Baker - Elbows Up! 🇨🇦
Rachel W.
Waywords Studio
Laureen Wreggitt 🇨🇦
Jeri Wolf