A breezy, conversational, and crushing overview of the relationship that First Peoples in North America (principally Canada and the US) have had with European settlers and their governments over the years. Despite King's friendly, funny, chatty tone (or perhaps exacerbated by it), the book is case after case of misdeeds that range from massive fraud to all-out-atrocity. It's not just that the system of the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and settlers is rotten, it's that it was fundamentally flawed from the beginning, and it's only gotten worse.

On the one hand, I would have loved to have learned more about each of the cases King raises, because I feel as though he skims across so many histories so quickly that I'm not left with a great sense of the specifics, though that's not his goal. His goal is to prove that settlers and their governments have never had any plan of keeping any promises with Aboriginal people, and have concerned themselves primarily with the value of the land on which those people live, which they intend to have themselves. That much comes across loud and clear and despairing.

That said, I noticed one significant error in the text with regard to the James Bay Crees of Eeyou Istchee--they successfully fought the damming of the Great Whale River, which he claims was dammed. My suspicion was that he was thinking of La Grande River, which DID get dammed under James Bay I in the 1970s. Because of that, I wondered how well the book was fact-checked and whether any of the other arguments were loose. Nonetheless, the book itself is powerful and necessary. I intend to recommend it widely.