Dead Indians are dignified, noble, silent, suitably garbed… and dead. Live Indians are invisible, unruly, disappointing. And breathing. One is a romantic reminder of a heroic but fictional past. The other is simply an unpleasant, contemporary surprise.
— Excerpt from Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian, first published last year by the University of Minnesota Press. The book is subtitled A Curious Account of Native People in North America; the publisher calls it “brilliantly subversive”.