thomas king (author)

[milehighsalute]

i'm posting this on behalf of a well known member of the cherokee nation  and works for the tribe

thomas king, author, http://www.uoguelph.ca/atguelph/00-01-19/people.html there is also a wikipedia entry on him

i never read his books myself nor am i cherokee so i cannot tell you guys what is bullshit or what is not

but the friend, he maintains that thomas king is absolutely NOT cherokee in any way shape or form

i dont know if he sells ceremony of anything else....but i know he is selling books and sold himself as a native to get a job at a college.........(sound familiar?)

my friend just asked for that to be put out there.....im also going to invite him to join this site

[Sandy S]

Author of Inconvenient Indian discovers he has no indigenous roots

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cze83804nyzo

[Sandy S]

Archived "A most inconvenient Indian
At 82, I feel as though I've been ripped in half, a one-legged man in a two-legged story. Not the Indian I had in mind. Not an Indian at all"

https://web.archive.org/web/20251124212744/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-a-most-inconvenient-indian/

[Sparks]

TAAF's entry on "Non-American Indian" Thomas Hunt King:

https://tribalallianceagainstfrauds.org/thomas-king

Includes "Fan chart" and "Ahnentafel" going back 8 generations.

[educatedindian]

King is one of the biggest names in Native studies and Native lit. From Wikipedia:

---------
Books
Medicine River (Viking Canada, 1990), novel
A Coyote Columbus Story (Douglas & McIntyre, 1992),– Governor General's Award finalist
Green Grass, Running Water (Houghton Mifflin, 1993), – Governor General's Award finalist
One Good Story, That One (1993), stories                Borders (1993)          Coyote Sings to the Moon (1998)
Truth and Bright Water (HarperFlamingo Canada, 1999)
The Truth About Stories (House of Anansi Press, 2003); US edition (U. of Minnesota Press, 2005) – Massey Lectures
Coyote's New Suit (2004)   
A Short History of Indians in Canada (HarperCollins, 2005), stories – McNally Robinson Award winner
A Coyote Solstice Tale (Groundwood Books, 2009)
The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (Doubleday Canada, 2012)
The Back of the Turtle (Doubleday, 2014) – Governor General's Award winner
77 Fragments of Familiar Ruin (2019) - Poems          Indians on Vacation (2020)         Sufferance (2021)
Aliens on the Moon (2025)
DreadfulWater Mysteries: Dreadful Water Shows Up (2002), The Red Power Murders (2006), Cold Skies (2018), A Matter of Malice (2019), Obsidian (2020), Deep House (2022), Double Eagle (2023), Black Ice (2024)
As editor
The Native in Literature (1987)
An Anthology of Short Fiction by Native Writers in Canada (1988)
All My Relations: An Anthology of Contemporary Canadian Native Fiction (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990)
Scripts
Four Directions (CBC Television, 1996), drama anthology series, as editor and sometime writer
The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour (CBC Radio, 1997 to 2000) and its sequels (2002 and 2006)
I'm Not The Indian You Had In Mind, 2007, short film also directed by King

Awards and recognition
Literary awards
Nominated for a Governor General's Award in 1992 for A Coyote Columbus Story.
Nominated for a Governor General's Award in 1993 for Green Grass, Running Water.
Won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour in 2021 for Indians on Vacation
Green Grass, Running Water was chosen for the inclusion in the 2004 edition of Canada Reads, and championed by then-Winnipeg mayor Glen Murray. In the 2015 edition of Canada Reads, his non-fiction book The Inconvenient Indian was defended by activist Craig Kielburger.
A Short History of Indians in Canada won the 2006 McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year Award.
The Inconvenient Indian won the 2014 RBC Taylor Prize,[14] and was a finalist for the 2013 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction and the 2014 Burt Award for First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literature.
The Back of the Turtle won the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction at 2014 Governor General's Awards
Indians on Vacation was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and for the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction at the 2020 Governor General's Awards.

Honors
In 2004, King was made a Member of the Order of Canada.
In November 2020, King was named a Companion of the Order of Canada.[22] The naming was because of King's "enduring contributions to preservation and recognition of indigenous culture, as one of North America's most acclaimed literary figures.

---------

I really wonder why TAAF investigated him. 83 and retired for 5 years, no sign of willful fraud at all, a long history of accomplishment and doing good.

Basically he was told a false story of who his grandfather was. Grew up outside the culture but definitely learned it and became a leading advocate and activist, including several runs for Canadian parliament.

No ceremony selling or abuse. No spreading falsehoods or stereotypes like imposters such as "Jamake Highwater." No sign of deception by him, or by anyone involved except his grandmother. No gatekeeping to keep actual Natives out as we've seen with many imposters.

In fact when King found out, he was the one most hurt. I'm reminded of when Carlos Montezuma discovered he was Yavapai when he believed he was Apache his whole life. King says he'll give back one award intended for Natives only. But the others no. They were awarded for merit. And King, like nearly all Natives in academia, was hired based on ability. No such thing as "Native professor positions."

[Advanced Smite]

Peggy Blair, a Canadian author and attorney, wrote an assessment of the Thomas King situation on her blog. She deftly points out inconsistencies and contradictions in Thomas King's narrative.

My thoughts on the Thomas King scandal
Posted on November 26, 2025 by Peggy Blair
Direct Link: https://peggyblair.wordpress.com/2025/11/26/my-thoughts-on-the-thomas-king-scandal/

I've been thinking about this business with Thomas King a lot. This was the week when he admitted he wasn't Cherokee at all.

First of all, I come from this as someone who is white and who has never pretended to be otherwise, although like King, I have a doctorate. His was in Indigenous studies. Both my LLM and LLD were in Indigenous law and legal history. But my engagement with First Nations started long before then. My father taught at non-residential Indian schools as a shop teacher. I spent my grade 10 as one of two white kids at a school in Masset, Queen Charlotte Islands, now known as Haida Gwaii. My classmates were people like Reggie Davidson and Jimmy Hart, who went on to become renowned carvers (Jimmy Hart is now the chief there).

As a lawyer I spent over 30 years working with First Nations on treaty cases, mostly around treaty fishing rights, always on the First Nation side, never for government. I was a policy advisor to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and to the Indian Claims Commission among others. I spent six or seven years as a senior adjudicator in the Indian residential school claims process hearing claims of horrific sexual and physical abuse before I burned out.

I wrote a critically-acclaimed book about the Williams Treaty process in Canada called LAMENT FOR A FIRST NATION and published dozens of peer-reviewed articles in law and historical journals. I taught as a sessional law professor at Queens and Ottawa U's Faculties of Law, but I could never get a position as an associate professor. This is because, as the Dean of Common Law at the University of Ottawa told me, I was "a white woman who wanted to teach Indigenous law."

By contrast, King, presenting as Cherokee, secured a position in Indigenous Studies in 1980 at the University of Alberta, and in 1995 at the University of Guelph. I don't know if he would have been hired if he had not been widely believed to be Cherokee. In 1980, which was the same year I graduated from the U of A with my LLB, there weren't many Indigenous scholars around with doctorates so I have to think his "Indigeneity" played a role. (As an aside, Olive Dickason, who I knew very well, was the first Indigenous scholar to graduate with a PhD in Indigenous History in Canada and she got hers in 1977.)

While it is possible that King's career would have been as distinguished had he not presented as Cherokee, I think it's unlikely.  THE INCONVENIENT INDIAN, published in 2012, examines relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples based on King's so-called lived experiences as an Indigenous person; it wouldn't have been published if the truth had been known. He won the RBC Taylor prize for it in 2014.

King writes in THE INCONVENIENT INDIAN about how the Cherokee Nation (there are actually three of them) has a set of fifteen very detailed historical rolls that establish Cherokee citizenship. He then criticizes the rolls as "self-serving and self-defeating" and incomplete. He is the only scholar I know of to do so. I'm aware of at least one instance where he was cited as a scholar challenging the accuracy and completeness of the rolls. This was when the identity of a visual artist whose ancestors were not on them, but who claimed to be Cherokee, was questioned. He was quoted as writing:

"Among the Cherokee, you have Cherokees who are Cherokee by blood and who have an ancestor on the required rolls, and you have Cherokee who are Cherokees by blood but whose ancestors are not listed on the required rolls. The one group is 'authentic.' The other group is not. To my way of thinking, such a distinction is self-serving and self-defeating at the same time."

I find it interesting, then, that according to the Globe and Mail story, when TAAF, the group that had examined King's background and determined that he was not in fact Cherokee, presented him with this genealogical information via a Zoom call, he immediately and readily agreed that it was conclusive. He admits he is not Cherokee.

King says he has no plans to apologize. He says he will surrender his Aboriginal Achievement Award but claims that his other accolades were based strictly on his own merits and had nothing to do with his ethnicity. He says his claim was based on a misunderstanding and not wilful misrepresentation. The most charitable interpretation I can come up with for his behaviour, however, is one of wilful blindness.

About ten years ago, I read a post by a highly regarded Cherokee genealogist who said then that he had examined the rolls and concluded that King had no connection to the Cherokee Nation. As noted, King wrote in detail about the rolls in THE INCONVENIENT INDIAN. I assume from what he wrote there that he had consulted them and didn't find a family connection and decided they must be incomplete, based on his family's oral history.

The Cherokee do not rely on oral history, however, because it is all too often unreliable. They do not rely on DNA tests either because those tests are so frequently wrong. Every time I hear about someone getting a DNA test to establish their "blood line" as Indigenous, I think of the Toronto man who sent in a sample of his girlfriend's dog's DNA and got a result back that said the dog was Indigenous. (Cree scholar Kim Tallbear has written about the problems with DNA to establish Indigeneity for decades: it's simply not useful.)

Being a member of a First Nation in Canada or a tribe in the U.S. isn't about which one you claim to belong to, it's about which nation or tribe claims you. The Cherokee have never accepted King's claims of kinship; as noted, one of their own genealogists expressly rebutted it.

Since the scandal erupted, I've seen people post things like, "I love his books anyway, so who cares?"

Well, I do. It's hurtful to the First Nations peoples who trusted him, who amplified his voice, and who took pride in the success of an Indigenous writer and scholar. He accepted awards that were intrinsically linked to his supposed cultural identity, not just his writing, and occupied positions that might have been filled by Indigenous scholars if not for his misrepresentation. His name has frequently appeared on lists of recommended books by Indigenous writers. He can't simply say that this was all about his writing, and has nothing to do with the identity he claimed.

Is it enough for him to say, "I believed what my mother told me"?

Perhaps up to a certain point, but not after he became an expert in the field. He knew what was required to verify if he was Cherokee or not. He should have done his homework and consulted the Cherokee rolls. If, as I suspect, he did, and discovered his father's ancestry wasn't on them, he should have admitted then that he might not be Cherokee instead of attacking the highly reliable records of the very nation he claimed to belong to.

There have been calls for accountability from King for over a decade. The fact that King is owning up now, and only after he was challenged by TAAF with irrefutable evidence, is the first step towards achieving that accountability, but there should be others. Among those, I think he should apologize to those Indigenous (and other) writers and scholars he displaced, and retract his erroneous statements about the validity of the Cherokee records.

[educatedindian]

My thoughts on the Thomas King scandal
Posted on November 26, 2025 by Peggy Blair
Direct Link: https://peggyblair.wordpress.com/2025/11/26/my-thoughts-on-the-thomas-king-scandal/

....King writes in THE INCONVENIENT INDIAN about how the Cherokee Nation (there are actually three of them) has a set of fifteen very detailed historical rolls that establish Cherokee citizenship. He then criticizes the rolls as "self-serving and self-defeating" and incomplete. He is the only scholar I know of to do so.

....I think he should apologize to those Indigenous (and other) writers and scholars he displaced, and retract his erroneous statements about the validity of the Cherokee records.

[/quote]

That first paragraph is either an amazing falsehood to try to gain favor with King critics, or more likely a sign of how little she knows about this matter. Rolls, and the Dawes Rolls in particular, are widely regarded as necessary evils at best, and more often as colonial constructs overcoming traditional ways of acknowledging who your people are or not. A hostile federal govt created them, and plenty of the Five Tribes were enrolled against their will. It was done primarily for allotment, to take away lands. Not protection, not to guard against pretenders, and not by the Five Tribes themselves.

Also look at the Cherokee and other Freedmen cases. Or the widespread criticism of how OK Gov Kevin Stitt had an ancestor who enrolled fraudulently.

So for that one matter, King has no reason to apologize. Thousands of people in Indian Country have similar public criticisms.