Abstract: Grand Portage National Monument preserves the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century site for and history of the fur trade between the Anishinaabeg and Britain’s North West Company. The Monument’s remote location means tourists’ travel experiences getting there are an important part of their total heritage tourism experience of the site. The 150-mile drive up Minnesota’s North Shore of Lake Superior is dotted with historic and popular state parks, decades-old resorts and cafes, and visible remnants of settler colonialism centered on extractive industries. This context makes this example of heritage tourism a diffuse and complex text combining Indigenous Native American culture and identity, conflicting environmental sensibilities, the Monument itself, various tourist attractions, and settler colonialism. This chapter uses cultural discourse analysis to examine tourism along the road to the Monument and the juxtaposed voyageur/fur trader and Anishinaabeg tourism narratives at the Monument, bringing points of understanding to how the Monument’s heritage narratives attempt to position the tourists and their attitudes, values, beliefs, behaviors, and memories during their visitor experiences.
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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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settler colonial studies blog 