Free The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King

conceals that there is none.”
    God, I love the French theorists. For those of us who are not French theorists but who know the difference between a motor home and a single-wide trailer, a simulacrum is something that represents something that never existed. Or, in other words, the only truth of the thing is the lie itself.
    Dead Indians.
    You can find Dead Indians everywhere. Rodeos, powwows, movies, television commercials. At the 1973 Academy Awards, when Sacheen Littlefeather (Yaqui-Apache-Pueblo) refused the Best Actor award on behalf of Marlon Brando, she did so dressed as a Dead Indian. When U.S. Senator Benjamin Nighthorse Campbell (Northern Cheyenne) and W. Richard West, Jr. (Cheyenne-Arapaho), the director of the American Indian Museum in New York, showed up for the 2004 opening ceremonies of the museum, they took the podium in Dead Indian leathers and feathered headdresses. Phil Fontaine (Ojibway) was attired in the same manner when he stood on the floor of the House of Commons in 2008 to receive the Canadian government’s apology for the abuses of residential schools.
    I probably sound testy, and I suppose part of me is. But I shouldn’t be. After all, Dead Indians are the only antiquity thatNorth America has. Europe has Greece and Rome. China has the powerful dynasties. Russia has the Cossacks. South and Central America have the Aztecs, the Incas, and the Maya.
    North America has Dead Indians.
    This is why Littlefeather didn’t show up in a Dior gown, and why West and Campbell and Fontaine didn’t arrive at their respective events in Brioni suits, Canali dress shirts, Zegni ties, and Salvatore Ferragamo shoes. Whatever cultural significance they may have for Native peoples, full feather headdresses and beaded buckskins are, first and foremost, White North America’s signifiers of Indian authenticity. Their visual value at ceremonies in Los Angeles or Ottawa is—as the credit card people say—priceless.
    Whites have always been comfortable with Dead Indians. General Phil Sheridan, famous for inventing the scorched-earth tactics used in “Sherman’s March to the Sea,” is reputed to have said, “The only good Indian I ever saw was a dead one.” Sheridan denied saying this, but Theodore Roosevelt filled in for him. In a speech in New York in 1886, some sixteen years before he became president of the United States, Roosevelt said, “I suppose I should be ashamed to say that I take the Western view of the Indian. I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”
    Which brings to mind that great scene in the 1994 film
Maverick
, in which Joseph, a Native con man played by the Oneida actor Graham Greene, spends his time pandering to the puerile whims of a rich Russian grand duke, played by Paul L. Smith. Smith is on a grand tour of the West and has become a bit bored with all the back-to-nature stuff. He has shot buffalo, lived withIndians, communed with nature, and is casting about for something new and exciting to do with his time. Greene, dressed up in standard Dead Indian garb, asks Smith if he would like to try his hand at the greatest Western thrill of all.
    “What’s the greatest Western thrill of all?” asks Smith.
    “Kill Indians,” says Greene.
    “Kill Indians?” says Smith. “Is that legal?”
    Sure, Greene assures him, “White man been doing it for years.”
    So Greene gets Mel Gibson to dress up like a Dead Indian, and the grand duke gets to shoot him. The greatest Western thrill of all? You bet.
    And you don’t necessarily have to head west to find Dead Indians. In one of Monty Python’s skits, a gas official comes into a British household with a dead Indian slung over his shoulder. The Indian, who isn’t quite dead, turns out to be part of the special deal the homeowner got when he bought a new stove. The free dead Indian was “in the