The last time I mentioned this (on Patreon) feels like a very, very long time ago.
"From 1997 to 2000, King wrote and acted in a CBC radio show, The Dead Dog Café Comedy Hour…" —it is really impossible for any of you to imagine how influential this was (1) for the Cree people and (2) for the tiny minority of white people who cared about the fate of the Cree people and their language at that time.
Radio itself, as a medium, doesn't matter in the same way anymore, but in 1997 it hadn't yet been devoured by the internet. And, of course, the very nature of that medium entailed that I knew Thomas King by his voice, only, and I never saw his face.
That show explicitly addressed the extent to which King was an outsider who struggled to find a foothold in Cree culture, in contrast to Jasper Friendly Bear and Gracie Heavy Hand, who were insouciant in their self-confidence —and who spoke English with the indescribable Cree accent that many pretendians (including Buffy Sainte-Marie) have tried (and failed) to imitate. He was presented as an indigenous person who had the advantages and disadvantages of an urban education, having assimilated into English-speaking culture and lost touch with what had presumably been —at some earlier stage— his own culture. I do not recall hearing an episode in which he discussed being (ostensibly) Cherokee rather than Cree, but I did not hear every episode, and my recollection may be imperfect.
The show was both implicitly and explicitly politically provocative, while being genuinely comedic —and, above all, warm. It was a rare example of warm, well-intentioned comedy, in an era of mean-spirited (and largely self-indulgent) satire.
The recordings of that radio show are a huge percentage of "the literature" worth talking about: it was certainly more politically significant than Wapos Bay.
Here's APTN covering the news in 5 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BynoyTD6u6w
And APTN discussing it in a roundtable format for 14 minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NPiX6SJvD4
———Appendix A———
Michelle Latimer —also a proven pretendian— worked with Thomas King on the following film and —I observe— the two have offered closely parallel excuses for their pretendianism (claiming —implausibly— that they didn't lie themselves but were merely misled by lies told to them by their own parents). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inconvenient_Indian
…aaaaaand you can see Michelle Latimer weeping on stage while dramatically making false claims about her own culture, politics and ancestry starting nine minutes and thirty seconds into THIS video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHEl-A8_2Gk