Quotes from Thomas King

Dans notre monde bien protégé et si moderne, il n'y a plus de fautifs, plus de fautes non plus. Des incursions ruineuses comme celles de Cuba, du Vietnam, de l'Irak et de l'Afghanistan ne sont plus le fait d'un seul responsable. Par un tour de passe-passe bien pensé, notre propagande donne à croire que les gens et les pays que nous attaquons ont provoqué notre agression.

Stanley told me that's how everybody does business these days. They make up swell corporations so no one can find them." "It's shell corporations." "That's what we should have done when that Columbus guy showed up.

It was just another of those sharp shards of bigotry you find when you run your fingers across the Canadian mosaic.

I think that many non-Natives find it hard to understand why Native people are willing to fight so hard to protect their land. In the case of Gwaii Haanas, all you have to do is stand at the ocean's edge with the cedars at your back and the sky on your shoulders, and you will know.

Nascent residential schools might prove to be the answer to the "Indian Problem," but educating and assimilating children would take one or two generations, and delayed gratification is not a North American trait.

Ignorance has never been the problem. The problem was and continues to be unexamined confidence in western civilization and the unwarranted certainty of Christianity. And arrogance. Perhaps it is unfair to judge the past by the present, but it is also necessary.

More than that, in the five hundred years of European OCCUPATION, Native cultures have already driven themselves to be remarkably tenacious and resilient.

For the sake of law enforcement, Thumps told himself, it was probably a good thing that most of the criminals in the world were men.

In our cynical world, where suspicion is a necessity, insisting that something is true is not nearly as powerful as suggesting that something might be true.

A hundred years? In political terms, that's when dinosaurs ruled the planet.

If you had more friends, maybe you wouldn't spend so much time with your demons.

As I pass the Plaza Hotel with its beaux arts facade, I run into Bob Loomis coming out the front door. Loomis looks slightly startled, as though he's been caught voting NDP.

Maribelle Wegman is known as the widow Wegman. Married four times. Three dead husbands. Not her fault, but having managed the hat trick already, she has been given the trophy to keep.

We spend our waking moments," he said at last, "trying to be successful, because we can't think of anything else to do.

Real stand off," Florence reported over coffee. "Almost had a hockey game on our hands.

Today, I'll simply wander. Head off in one direction or another and keep walking. Until I feel like stopping.

I've been pulling up the wood crosses and replacing them with limestone slabs that I pry out of the dry riverbed in the belief that the children buried here deserve better than having their graves marked with the talisman of the cult that killed them.

For an individual, one of the definitions of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again in the same way and expecting different results. For a government, such behavior is called . . . policy.

Most of us think that history is the past. It's not. History is the stories we tell about the past. That's all it is. Stories. Such a definition might make the enterprise of history seem neutral. Benign.

Most of us think that history is the past. It's not. History is the stories we tell about the past. That's all it is.

the [Hawthorn] report revealed the logical fallacy that has haunted Indian history and policy in North America since contact - to wit, that all people yearn for the individual freedom to pursue economic goals. Indians are people, ergo, they want to make money and create wealth for themselves and their families.

The resort had been a sanitary bubble designed to shield you from the realities of culture and to limit your interaction with the local people. They were there to serve you, and you were there in your role as an ATM with a camera.

The truth about stories is, that's all we are.

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