Coll Thrush, “Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire” (Yale UP, 2016)

New Books in Indigenous Studies · Nov 18, 2016 · 47m

Scholars have long treated cities as spaces in which indigenous people have little presence and less significance. This notion that urbanity and indignity stand at odds results from a potent mix of racist essentialism and the historical myth of progress from savagery to civilization. Just as this paradigm excludes native peoples from the City, it excludes them from modernity.

Perhaps no city expresses this erasure of Indigenous bodies, minds, and histories so effectively as London, the capital of the British Empire. Yet as Dr. Coll Thrush demonstrates in his new book Indigenous London: Native…