An imaginative retelling of London’s history, framed through the experiences of Indigenous travelers who came to the city over the course of more than five centuries
London is famed both as the ancient center of a former empire and as a modern metropolis of bewildering complexity and diversity. In Indigenous London, historian Coll Thrush offers an imaginative vision of the city's past crafted from an almost entirely new perspective: that of Indigenous children, women, and men who traveled there, willingly or otherwise, from territories that became Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, beginning in the sixteenth century. They included captives and diplomats, missionaries and shamans, poets and performers. Some, like the Powhatan noblewoman Pocahontas, are familiar; others, like an Odawa boy held as a prisoner of war, have almost been lost to history. In drawing together their stories and their diverse experiences with a changing urban culture, Thrush also illustrates how London learned to be a global, imperial city and how Indigenous people were central to that process.
Author(s): Coll Thrush
Series: Henry Roe Cloud Series on American Indians and Modernity
Publisher: Yale University Press
Year: 2016
Language: English
Pages: 329
Cover......Page 1
Half-title......Page 2
Title......Page 4
Copyright......Page 5
Contents......Page 8
Acknowledgments......Page 10
Maps......Page 14
1. The Unhidden City: Imagining Indigenous Londons......Page 20
Interlude One: A Devil’s Looking Glass, circa 1676......Page 47
2. Dawnland Telescopes: Making Colonial Knowledge in Algonquian London 1580–1630......Page 52
Interlude Two: A Debtor’s Petition 1676......Page 81
3. Alive from America: Indigenous Diplomacies and Urban Disorder 1710-1765......Page 87
Interlude Three: Atlantes 1761......Page 118
4. “Such Confusion As I Never Dreamt”: Indigenous Reasonings in an Unreasonable City 1766–1785......Page 122
Interlude Four: A Lost Museum 1793......Page 152
5. That Kind Urbanity of Manner: Navigating Ritual in Maori and Kanaka Maoli London 1806–1866......Page 158
Interlude Five: A Hat Factory, circa 1875......Page 188
6. Civilization Itself Consents: Disciplining Bodies in Imperial Suburbia 1861–1914......Page 192
Interlude Six: A Notebook 1929......Page 223
7. The City of Long Memory: Remembering and Reclaiming Indigenous London 1982-2013......Page 228
Epilogue: The Other Indigenous London......Page 257
Appendix: Self-Guided Encounters with Indigenous London......Page 264
Notes......Page 278
B......Page 322
E......Page 323
I......Page 324
M......Page 325
P......Page 326
S......Page 327
V......Page 328
Y......Page 329
