Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire

329 Pages·2016·30.331 MB·English

by  Coll Thrush

Indigenous London
the henry roe cloud series on american indians and modernity
Named in honor of the pioneering Winnebago educational reformer and first
known American Indian graduate of Yale College, Henry Roe Cloud (class of
1910), this series showcases emergent and leading scholarship in the field of
American Indian Studies. The series draws upon multiple disciplinary perspec-
tives and organizes them around the place of Native Americans in the devel-
opment of American and European modernity, emphasizing the shared, rela-
tional ties between indigenous and Euro-American societies. It seeks to broaden
current historic, literary, and cultural approaches to American Studies by fore-
grounding the fraught but generative sites of inquiry provided by the study of
indigenous communities.
Series Editors
ned blackhawk
Professor of History and American Studies, Yale University
kate w. shanley
Native American Studies, University of Montana
;
Indigenous London
Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire
Coll Thrush
new haven and london
Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund.
Copyright © 2016 by Yale University.
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ISBN 978-0-300-20630-2
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In memory of those who did not return
It is in the nature of the city to encompass everything.
—Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography, 2001
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Maps xiii
1. The Unhidden City: Imagining Indigenous
Londons 1
Interlude One: A Devil’s Looking Glass, circa 1576 28
2. Dawnland Telescopes: Making Colonial
Knowledge in Algonquian London, 1580–1630 33
Interlude Two: A Debtor’s Petition, 1676 62
3. Alive from America: Indigenous Diplomacies
and Urban Disorder, 1710–1765 68
Interlude Three: Atlantes, 1761 99
4. “Such Confusion As I Never Dreamt”: Indigenous
Reasonings in an Unreasonable City, 1766–1785 103
Interlude Four: A Lost Museum, 1793 133
5. That Kind Urbanity of Manner: Navigating
Ritual in Ma¯ori and Ka¯naka Maoli London,
1806–1866 139
Interlude Five: A Hat Factory, circa 1875 169
6. Civilization Itself Consents: Disciplining Bodies in
Imperial Suburbia, 1861–1914 173
viii contents
Interlude Six: A Notebook, 1929 204
7. The City of Long Memory: Remembering and
Reclaiming Indigenous London, 1982–2013 209
Epilogue: The Other Indigenous London 238
Appendix: Self-Guided Encounters with
Indigenous London 245
Notes 259
Index 303
Acknowledgments
This book has its origins in a conversation with my former husband, a Lon-
doner by birth, back in 2007. My first book, Native Seattle: Histories from the
Crossing-Over Place, had just been published, and was receiving good press.
But London always called. Every time I’d been there, I’d wondered why I
hadn’t chosen British history as my field of expertise; the city is a powerfully
alluring place and text. So when Simon half-jokingly asked, “Why don’t you
write a book like Native Seattle about London, so you could go there on
your research grants?” I at first laughed. Who was I, after all, to write about
London? But within about five minutes, I realized, That’s it. That’s the next
book. What would it be like to take the central concept of Native Seattle—
reframing the history of a city through Indigenous experience—to the cen-
ter of empire? That is the project here, so my first acknowledgment is to
Simon Martin.
My second acknowledgment is that I write from occupied territory.
With the exception of several sojourns in London and elsewhere, the vast
majority of this book was produced in Vancouver, which stands on Indige-
nous land. More specifically, the University of British Columbia (UBC) is a
guest of the Musqueam Nation, which has inhabited this space for thousands
of years, since time immemorial. I wish to honor the graciousness and hos-
pitality that I, like many of my colleagues, have received in this, their tradi-
tional, ancestral and unceded territory.
I also want to acknowledge my own embeddedness in this story. For
me, London is a place of ancestry. My forebears, at least on one side of my
family, called the city home. Some appear in genealogical records from the
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