Wait, What? ‘Inconvenient Indian’ Author Thomas King Admits Zero Cherokee Roots — Now What’s the Truth?
Added on November 25, 2025 inMovie News Cards
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Isn’t life just full of little cosmic curveballs? Just when you think you’ve got your story all figured out—BAM!—the universe tosses in a plot twist worthy of Mercury retrograde mischief. Take Thomas King, for example, whose documentary Inconvenient Indian was yanked from Sundance after questions about the director’s Indigenous identity stirred up a storm. Now, King himself has dropped a bombshell: the man who’s been chronicling the Native experience in North America has admitted he’s not part Cherokee at all. Talk about an inconvenient truth to reckon with! At 82, King shares feeling like “a one-legged man in a two-legged story,” grappling with an identity that turned out to be more elusive than a Virgo’s love of chaos. Does this revelation reshape our understanding of authenticity, or is it just another episode in the tangled drama of identity and art? Buckle up, because this is one story that’s anything but straightforward. LEARN MORE
In Dec. 2020, the documentary Inconvenient Indian, an adaptation of Thomas King’s book The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of the Native People in North America, was pulled from the Sundance Film Festival after the indigenous identity of the film’s director was called into question.
Now King, the American-Canadian writer of the 2013 meditation on what it means to be “Indian” in North America, has had to apologize after revealing the inconvenient truth about his own Indigenous identity: He is not, as long claimed, part Cherokee.
“No Cherokee on the King side. No Cherokee on the Hunt side. No Indians anywhere to be found,” King wrote Monday in a column for the Globe and Mail newspaper after a recent investigation by the U.S.-based Tribal Alliance Against Frauds told the California-born writer, actor and screenwriter he had no known Indigenous ancestry after a genealogical search was completed.
The shocking reveal is the latest embarrassing twist for a Canadian media industry that has been supporting Indigenous artists and filmmakers, including with the offer of generous production subsidies. Earlier this year, Canadian American singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie was stripped of the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honor, after a 2023 investigation by the CBC’s The Fifth Estate series alleged Sainte-Marie had been fraudulently posing as Native over the course of her 60-year career.
Sainte-Marie in 1982 earned a best original song Oscar for co-writing “Up Where We Belong” as part of the score for the movie An Officer and a Gentleman. She shared the Oscar trophy with lyricist Will Jennings and co-writer Jack Nitzsche.
King, whose literary career has been built on telling Indigenous stories, long claimed to be the son of a Greek mother and a Cherokee father. After being raised in California, he moved in 1980 to take a teaching post at the University of Guelph, northwest of Toronto.
As a screenwriter, King penned episodes of the 1990s mystery crime drama North of 60 set among Aboriginal people in the fictional town of Lynx River, Northwest Territories. And he directed the 2007 short film I’m Not the Indian You Had in Mind, where King appeared on screen alongside fellow Canadian First Nations actors Tara Beagan and Lorne Cardinal.
In his Nov. 24 essay, King insisted he never knowingly tried to deceive about claimed Cherokee roots. And after approaching the Tribal Alliance Against Frauds to address recent speculation around his Indigenous identity, King added he had been devastated by the findings.
“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,” King wrote.
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