328 pages
English language
Published Sept. 10, 2017 by Yale University Press.
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Even the so-called “centre” of empire has an Indigenous history. London is famed both as the ancient center of a former empire and as a modern metropolis of bewildering complexity and diversity, and Indigenous London offers a 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 medicine people, poets and performers.
Some, like the Powhatan noblewoman Pocahontas, are familiar; others, like an Odawa boy held as a prisoner of war in the eighteenth century, have almost been lost to history. In drawing together their stories and their diverse experiences with a changing urban culture, Indigenous London also illustrates how the city on the Thames learned to be a global, imperial …
Even the so-called “centre” of empire has an Indigenous history. London is famed both as the ancient center of a former empire and as a modern metropolis of bewildering complexity and diversity, and Indigenous London offers a 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 medicine people, poets and performers.
Some, like the Powhatan noblewoman Pocahontas, are familiar; others, like an Odawa boy held as a prisoner of war in the eighteenth century, have almost been lost to history. In drawing together their stories and their diverse experiences with a changing urban culture, Indigenous London also illustrates how the city on the Thames learned to be a global, imperial place and how Indigenous people were central to that process. Including six poems built from archival fragments and three self-guided tours of Indigenous sites across the city, Indigenous London offers a usefully disorienting and powerfully illuminating perspective on one of the world’s great cities.
Subjects
- London (england), description and travel