The Teachings Were Always There: Reading, Reckoning, and the Work of Belonging

The Teachings Were Always There: Reading, Reckoning, and the Work of Belonging

Most of what I publish here is technically focused, but this piece is different. It is a personal essay on growing up between two worlds, the writers who shaped how I see myself, and what I've been sitting with since some of those literary foundations shifted. I'm sharing this reflection because it is a fundamental part of how I show up in this work.

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"You have to be careful with the stories you tell. And you have to watch out for the stories that you are told."

• Thomas King, The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative

I grew up in Gesgapegiag, my home community in Mi'gmaq territory along the Baie-des-Chaleurs. My early years included some back-and-forth between my community and Fredericton. I came back to Fredericton for further post-secondary education, and that's where I spent years learning to move through a world that didn't always know what to make of me.

That movement shaped how I think about identity: not as a fixed thing, but as something you carry with you and come to understand over time, if you're willing to do the work. The teachings were always there. I just wasn't always ready for them.

The Books We Carry

In Grade 8, my teacher Ms. Brennan put Isabelle Knockwood's Out of the Depths on our reading list. Knockwood is a Mi'kmaw elder and survivor of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School. In that book, she and other survivors tell their own stories: the haircuts, the uniforms, the punishments for speaking their language.

I read it at thirteen. I understood some of it. The rest I carried with me without knowing what to do with it yet.

In Grade 9, I read Thomas King's short story "Borders." King wrote with a sharpness and humor that cut through the noise. That same year I watched I'm Not the Indian You Had in Mind, his spoken-word film. Over clips from old westerns and Hollywood movies, King and others recite a poem that runs through every stereotypical image - the warrior, the museum piece - and repeats: I'm not the Indian you had in mind. Then it shifts. The real Indian is the one down the street, the doctor, the CEO, the elder with her bingo tails. It can be uncomfortable to watch because it names something you've felt but couldn't put words to.

Two years later, my teacher Mr. Evans had us read Green Grass, Running Water, and I was hooked. Different narrators. Indigenous. Humor. A title that meant something.

King's way of braiding Indigenous storytelling with contemporary life was the first time I recognized myself in what I was reading. It was the beginning of understanding that the way we see the world as Indigenous people is not a footnote to someone else's narrative. It's its own framework entirely.

In my late teens, I would listen to The Truth About Stories in my car and read the book. Then I started going to libraries to find more of his work and the work of others that he recommended. King became someone I sought out, not just someone assigned to me.

Sitting with Complexity

In late 2025, the ground didn't just shift. It broke open. Thomas King published an essay in The Globe and Mail revealing that a genealogical investigation by the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds found no Cherokee ancestry on either side of his family.

It joined a growing list of high-profile identity reckonings in Canada, such as Buffy Sainte-Marie and Joseph Boyden, that have forced difficult but necessary conversations about who speaks for Indigenous communities and on what authority. But King’s revelation carried a specific, tragic irony. The man who warned us to “watch out for the stories that you are told” had spent eighty-two years living inside of one. He grew up being told by his mother that his father was part Cherokee, a narrative meant to explain why his skin was darker than his cousins'. It can be argued that he didn’t construct a lie. He likely inherited a myth. Yet, an inherited myth still leaves a wake of uncomfortable questions.

As King put it, the revelation left him feeling "ripped in half, a one-legged man in a two-legged story. Not the Indian I had in mind. Not an Indian at all."

I'm not going to pretend this was easy to sit with. King's work genuinely shaped how I think. At one point in time, I endorsed the worldview of The Inconvenient Indian, and there's still a lot of thoughtful content in it. It wasn't just a book on my shelf. It was one I actively placed in the hands of others as a gift. I gravitated toward his writing because, at the time, it felt like a voice deeply reflective of an authentic community experience.

With King, the complexity doubles because of intent. Unlike Grey Owl (a British writer who posed as Indigenous) or Iron Eyes Cody (an Italian-American actor famous for playing the 'Crying Indian'), who King pointed out knew they were performing a fraud, King wrote from a place of absolute certainty. He believed he was of Indigenous descent. Yet, the systemic benefits he points to in his own essay - the grants, the publishing access that might have otherwise gone to a connected member of a sovereign nation - remain an inconvenient truth.

I’ve since come to understand more deeply that no single Indigenous person can speak for other nations. Yet, there are profound, shared lived experiences between nations, such as common threads of history, systemic friction, and sharp survival, and King had a way of pulling those threads together into a necessary mirror for the world we live in. His way of laying out the history of Indigenous peoples in North America with interwoven humor stayed with me.

I still listen to CBC's Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour and laugh (Yelling out B8 for Blackout Bingo!). That show was doing something nobody else on Canadian radio was doing: sharp, dark, funny, unapologetically Indigenous. King was in my classrooms, on my shelf, in my ears. No revelation about the author can undo what his writing opened up in me as a teenager and carried forward into adulthood. But my feelings about it can change, and they have.

It is easy to dismiss a story that doesn't land. It is much harder when the work is masterful. I think of reading Joseph Boyden's Through Black Spruce, a book I genuinely enjoyed for its texture and its rendering of the North. It felt like a window into a world I recognized.

But that's the sting: stylistic excellence can be a very effective mask. When the artistry is that high, the realization that the author isn't rooted in the people they wrote about feels like a specific kind of betrayal. It turns a shared truth into a polished commodity. I hold both things now: gratitude for what the work did for me, and discomfort with the ground it was built on. I don't think those two things cancel each other out. I think holding them together honestly is more useful than pretending I've arrived at a clean answer. The discomfort doesn't erase what stuck.

One of King's ideas that has stayed with me is this: for most of our shared history, Indigenous peoples had to learn from Euro-Canadians. That was the direction of it. Learn the language, learn the systems, learn the rules. And we did. But there is a shift happening now, a growing expectation that Euro-Canadians learn from Indigenous peoples and nations. That shift is real, and it matters.

And I'm Not the Indian You Had in Mind, that title keeps evolving for me. It meant one thing when I first watched it in Grade 9. It means something different now. But its place in my story and its power as an idea haven't gone anywhere. The Indian you had in mind will keep changing, because Indigenous peoples will keep evolving, keep solving new problems, keep refusing to be frozen in someone else's image of us.

For me, King's body of work retains its power to offer something vital to Indigenous readers. Even so, the discomfort will linger. But you'll still find me ready to dab B8 in Blackout Bingo.

The Teacher and the Taught

What it has reinforced for me is this: identity is not a performance. It is a lived relationship: with community, with land, with language, with the people who came before you and the ones coming after.

That relationship doesn't require perfection, but it does require a constant, quiet honesty. I've realized that I spent a long time looking for my identity in the pages of books, looking for a reflection that would tell me who I was. But as these literary foundations shift, I find myself looking less at the shelf and more at the ground beneath my feet.

The teaching was always offered. The question was whether I had done enough living to meet it where it was.

One teaching that has come to me in various forms over the years is simple: you are never stuck. When the Indian Agent could tell someone in a community that they couldn't leave the reserve to hunt or fish, folks went hunting and fishing at night. The problem in front of you is there to challenge you, not to define you. You are never stuck. That teaching didn't come from a book. It came from people who lived it, passed down through the kind of telling that doesn't need a reading list or a classroom. Just someone willing to share it and someone ready to hear it.

I don't have an answer for what defines Indigenous identity for every nation or community. I don't think that's my place. That question belongs to each nation and their membership. It's theirs to define, on their terms, in their own time. What I can speak to is my own journey, thoughts, and what I've learned along the way: that the teachings were always there. The work is in being ready to receive them, and then carrying them into everything you build.

Wela'lioq

References

1. Knockwood, Isabelle. Out of the Depths: The Experiences of Mi'kmaw Children at the Indian Residential School at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia. 4th ed. Fernwood Publishing. https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/out-of-the-depths-fourth-edition

2. King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. House of Anansi Press, 2003. (CBC Massey Lectures series) https://houseofanansi.com/products/the-truth-about-stories

3. King, Thomas. "Borders." In One Good Story, That One. HarperCollins, 1993.

4. King, Thomas. I'm Not the Indian You Had in Mind. Spoken-word film. National Film Board of Canada, 2007. https://vimeo.com/39451956

5. King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. HarperCollins, 1993.

6. King, Thomas. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. Doubleday Canada, 2012.

7. King, Thomas. Dead Dog Cafe Comedy Hour. CBC Radio.

8. Boyden, Joseph. Through Black Spruce. Hamish Hamilton, 2008.

9. CBC Fifth Estate. Investigating Buffy Sainte-Marie’s claims to Indigenous ancestry. CBC, October 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMsqCWNCUc4

10. APTN National News. Author Joseph Boyden’s shape-shifting Indigenous identity, CBC, 2016. https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/author-joseph-boydens-shape-shifting-indigenous-identity/

11. King, Thomas. "A most inconvenient Indian." The Globe and Mail, 2025. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-a-most-inconvenient-indian/

12. CBC Arts. "Thomas King revealed he isn't Indigenous. Should we keep reading his work?" CBC, 2025. https://www.cbc.ca/arts/commotion/thomas-king-revealed-he-isnt-indigenous-should-we-keep-reading-his-work-9.6993654

13. APTN National News. "Celebrated Inconvenient Indian author Thomas King says he's not Indigenous." APTN, 2025. https://www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/celebrated-inconvenient-indian-author-thomas-king-says-hes-not-indigenous/