Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire

The John Carter Brown Library invites you to its annual Sonia Galletti Memorial lecture by Coll Thrush, Professor of History at the University of British Columbia. Urban and Indigenous histories have usually been treated as though they are mutually exclusive. Coll Thrush’s work, however, has argued that the two kinds of history are in fact mutually constitutive. In this presentation, Dr. Thrush will share material from his most recent book, a history of London framed through the experiences of Indigenous people who traveled there, willingly or otherwise, from territories that became the US, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. Stories of Inuit captives in the 1570s, Cherokee delegations in the 1760s, Hawaiian royals in the 1820s, and more – as well as the memory of these travelers in present-day communities – show the ways in which London is one ground of Indigenous history and settler colonialism. [Image credit: America Meredith (Cherokee), London Calling 1762 (2012)]