London is famed both as the ancient centre of a former empire and as a modern metropolis of bewildering complexity and diversity. In his recent book, Indigenous London, historian Coll Thrush offers an imaginative 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. In this talk, focusing on the city’s imperial entanglements with Indigenous history – entanglements of knowledge, disorder, reason, ritual, discipline, and memory – Thrush shows how London learned to be a global city and how Indigenous people and peoples were central to that process.
Coll Thrush is Associate Professor of History at the University of British Columbia, where he is is also affiliated with UBC’s Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. Originally from the Seattle area, he lives in Vancouver on unceded Coast Salish territories.
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