Encounters in the city: Coll Thrush, ‘Walking the Indigenous city: Colonial encounters at the heart of empire’, in Ann McGrath, Lynette Russell (eds), The Routledge Companion to Global Indigenous History, Routledge, 2021
Abstract: Global Indigenous history is on the rise. Increasing numbers of scholars and writers, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, are examining and articulating the ways in which Indigenous peoples have engaged, and even co-created, the larger processes we call globalisation and globalism. From studies of diasporic Indigenous populations and communities to accounts of Indigenous exploration and travel, this Indigenous history ‘out of bounds’ promises to radically reframe both Indigenous and global histories. This essay adds to that reframing by showing the ways in which Indigenous people from many nations have encountered London, England over the past 500 years (and then some). Drawing on the stories of particular spaces and places within the imperial urban landscape, the essay shows how Indigenous people – whether as poets or performers, activists or emissaries, captives or critics – actively informed and challenged larger processes of colonialism. In doing so, it challenges the very idea of London as solely the centre of empire by arguing for its position as a contingent, peripheral, and yet crucially important place within Indigenous territorialities and meaning-making.
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