Thomas King CC (born April 24, 1943) is an American-born Canadian writer and broadcast presenter who most often writes about First Nations.

After flunking out of Sacramento State University, he joined the US Navy for a brief period of time before receiving a medical discharge for a knee injury.

Following this, King worked several jobs, including as an ambulance driver, bank teller, and photojournalist in New Zealand for three years.

[7] His 1986 PhD dissertation[8] was on Native American studies, one of the earliest works to explore the oral storytelling tradition as literature.

He noted that legislatures in the 1800s in the United States and Canada withdrew aboriginal status from persons who graduated from university or joined the army.

King has also worked to identify North American laws that make it complicated to claim status in the first place, for example, the US Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990 or Canada's 1985 Bill C-31.

His notable works include A Coyote Columbus Story (1992) and Green Grass, Running Water (1993) – both of which were nominated for a Governor General's Award (the former for children's literature, and the latter for fiction[9] – and The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America (2012), which won the 2014 RBC Taylor Prize.

King explored the Native experience in oral stories, literature, history, religion and politics, popular culture and social protest in order to make sense of North America's relationship with its aboriginal peoples.

King uses a variety of anecdotes and humorous narratives while maintaining a serious message in a way that has been compared to the style of trickster legends in Native American culture.

[13] A by-election was called in the riding due to the resignation of incumbent Liberal Member of Parliament Brenda Chamberlain, effective April 7, 2008.

In the 1990s, he served as story editor for Four Directions,[14] a CBC Television drama anthology series about First Nations which was held up by production and scheduling delays before finally airing in 1996.