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

[Music] Hi there, I'm Karla Nappy and this is the new books in history podcast. Welcome and thanks very much for joining me today. And thanks especially because I'm so excited to share this next interview with you. This was an opportunity to talk with a very dear colleague Cole Thresh about his new book, Indigenous London, Native Travelers at the heart of Empire. This came out in 2016 with Yale University Press. And it's a book that is as thoughtful about the form of the narrative as it is about the narrative itself. What Cole does is he offers us a story that weaves together Indigenous histories and urban histories to argue very compellingly I think that Indigenous people around the world in the words of the book have actively engaged with and helped create the world we call modern including its great urban centers. So he focuses on London and he does this by bringing together two forms of narrative that are both I think equally central to the story and that both offer different but compelling and vital aspects of the story in the book. One of these forms of narrative is a series of chapters that each take us into a particular moment, a particular time frame of the story of London and explore the stories of particular figures, individuals and cases within that story. And the other narrative form is a series of interlude and you'll hear us talk about these in the interview to come that are free verse poetry that Cole has written based on and sort of woven together with and oriented around archival fragments that each focus on a particular object. And so what these interludes do is they collectively give us a different way into the story that's very grounded in the affective experience of what he is writing about. So with that I will leave you to it and just say it's an extraordinarily beautifully written book, very narratively compelling as well as being a really important story. So highly recommended I really hope you have a chance to find a copy of the book to read it to get your hands on it so that you can experience all of the chapters and interludes that we mentioned but don't have a chance to talk about in detail. And with that I will leave you to it and just leave you with a thank you for listening for being with us and for your support of the channel. I hope you enjoy. I'm here today with Cole Thresh, a very dear and very brilliant colleague to talk about his new book, Indigenous London, made of travelers at the heart of Empire. Welcome Cole to new books in history. I am so excited to talk with you about this today. It's awesome to have you on the show. Congratulations on an awesome book, et cetera, et cetera. Welcome to the program. Thank you. Yeah, this is I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Me too. Okay, so let's start at the beginning with this super broad question that is traditional for my interviews. How did you come to the field? What specifically, what brought you to work in Indigenous studies and Indigenous history? I've kind of narrativized this for myself over the decades in many ways but I think what it really comes down to is where I grew up, I grew up in a border town, adjacent to an Indian reservation, not far from Seattle. It was an intensely segregated space but my mother happened to know some of the families on the reservation and so I had a little sense that there was something going on there and that there was this big story that nobody was talking about and my temperament is such that if there's a big story, nobody's talking about I want to go straight toward that. Yeah, that's I want to go straight there. But I think on a deeper level, you know, having at least been granted a little bit of access to some of those stories when I was young, I got a very clear sense that there was another way of being on the land, that another reality was possible, sort of adjacent to behind underneath the one that was dominant, the sort of settler paradigms that were there. And that was really illuminating for me early on and then as I got older I started doing some of this work as an undergrad and working as an activist in coalition with my native peers. That really kind of mobilized this in a new way for me and politicized it in I think a really powerful and useful way and that eventually got me into Indigenous history as a PhD plan and then over the last really five or ten years Indigenous studies as a field has just exploded and so it's been really exciting to be in part of that conversation. So the book that we're talking about today and I will use the words of the book here, this is a quotation from the book, is a history of London framed through the experiences of Indigenous people who traveled there from places that became Canada, the US, New Zealand and Australia. How did you come to this particular project called Why London and why this particular approach to London? Sure, my first book is called Native Seattle, History is from the Crossing Over Place and I became really interested in graduate school about the lack of intersection between Indigenous and urban histories, they're really treated as though they're mutually exclusive. And in that first book I argued that in fact Indigenous and urban histories are mutually constitutive, they actually create each other in a place like Seattle. So when that book came out in 2007 at the time I was married to a Londoner and we had been to London many times and he had always been kind of disappointed that we hadn't gone anywhere cool for my graduate research. The furthest of field I'd gone was Victoria, British Columbia and all my friends were in Beijing and Prague and all these other cool places and so he jokingly when Native Seattle came out, he said, "Well great, now write a book like that about London and we'll go there on your grant money." And I kind of laughed it off but within about 10 minutes I thought, "Holy crap, what a great idea! Nobody has tried to write an Indigenous centered history of the center of empire. What would that even look like? Is that even possible?" And quite quickly it became clear to me that there was really something there to work on. Yeah, awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much. Now let's get into it, right? Life's actually kind of diving. So what we're going to do is start somewhat broad in order to situate the project within some major historiographical themes that you identify at the beginning and then we'll continue on to the chapters afterwards. So you say early in chapter one, when I first embarked on this work, I thought I would be uncovering a hidden history but you go on to say, "Indigenous London was not hidden" and you go on to say, "The people in this book didn't need discovering Indigenous people never do." So can you maybe start us on this journey by talking a little bit about that and the importance for you of these issues in terms of orienting us to your approach for the project? Yeah, sure. The first chapter is called the Unhidden City and when I started this project as you say, I really thought I would be uncovering a hidden past and London has a long historiographical and sort of literary tradition of hidden cities within the city, going all the way back to the late 18th, early 19th century with people like Thomas De Quincey and so on. And we can think about even things like Mary Poppins or Neil Gaiman or Harry Potter or platform 9 and 3/4 and all this is these kinds of hidden cities within the city. The Cracken. Yes, the kind of the. China Mieville, the Cracken is a brilliant example of that and that has a really powerful draw for me as an urban study scholar, these kinds of fugitive cities within the city. And I just assumed that I would be doing another one of those but what I learned very quickly doing the research was that the people that I'm writing about were in many cases celebrities, sometimes their daily activities were reported in the newspapers, they were highly visible figures, they were not hidden at all and in fact that hiddenness is kind of a function or an artifact really a broader historical amnesia and also a teleological apparatus that suggests that indigenous people don't blog in urban places and that their history is impossible in urban places. And so what I was really interested in then doing was kind of recovering, not discovering, that unhidden past of these travelers, many of whom were at the highest echelons of British society. And I think once we come and we'll hear this in the course of talking about the book and certainly when we come to the end, by the time we get to the end of the book you revisit the nature of these pasts and make the point I think very persuasively and very powerfully that the past is not in the past, the past is still being made. And this is I think a really important kind of work that the book is doing, not just for London, but more broadly for how we think about these issues and practice these issues. Okay, so the book, as you have already mentioned, brings together the narratives of urban studies and indigenous histories and it argues that indigenous people around the world in the words of the book have actively engaged with and helped create the world we call modern, including its great urban centers. So this speaks to what you just mentioned. Let's talk briefly about two of the major historical kind of themes or claims that come up early in the book and then in this first chapter and then we'll move on from there. Okay, so there are two claims that the book makes about the connection between London and Indonesia. history right at the outset. I'm just going to name them and then invite you to speak briefly about whatever you want us to understand that you think is significant about that for us to then move on into the story. Claim one, words of the book. London has been entangled with indigenous territories, resources, knowledgees, and lives from the very beginning of its experiments with colonization. Okay, so Cole, why is this an important point that needs to be made? Well, I think it's really typical in broad studies of empire for indigenous people to be kind of passive recipients of modernity rather than co-creators of that modernity. And so that was something I really wanted to push very hard in this book. And then I also wanted to return a kind of contingency to London itself and to those larger processes of of empire building to show that that London really had to learn to become a global city, and had to learn to become a colonial space. And the argument I'm making particularly in the early part of the book is that indigenous presence in the city was far more than a metaphorical presence that shows up in Shakespeare or Ben Johnson or whatever. Beyond the metaphorical Indian, so to speak, there are real indigenous bodies and minds in the city that are actually informing this process that we come to call empire. And that physicality, the bodies, but also objects, right, and stuff and things. Tobacco. Tobacco, and we'll get to that actually in a few moments, I think, because that's a very, the materiality of this history comes out, not just in the chapters, but also in the interludes we'll talk about. So listeners, you don't know what those are yet, but you will in a few moments, and they're amazing, and we're going to talk about them. Okay, so the other claim that the book makes early on is one of its historiographical contributions. Actually speaks to some of what you've already said, but if you want to elaborate this any further, you can we can do that. So this is the claim. This is again the words of the book. The urban spaces of London have been one of the grounds of settler colonialism. So anything more that you'd like us to know about that before we move on? Sure. I mean settler colonialism is an analytical framework is really ascendant right now. I would say an indigenous studies, and I wanted to reclaim London as a space where that plays out, partially because a lot of the motivations for empire emerge from the metropole. And as we think about the kind of triangulation within settler colonialism of the metropole, the settler, and the quote native, there is this kind of triangulation where settlers are speaking back to the metropole, often in relationship to their fractious relationships with native peoples. So those two sides of the triangle have been really well established, but the relationship between the native and the metropole has not been particularly well established by scholarship. And so that that kind of leg of the triangle I really wanted to sort of explicitly take on. Awesome. Yeah, and I think settler colonialism is not, when I say settler colonialism, I'm thinking of the broad structures of power, but I'm also reserving space for really significant agency within those structures for both indigenous people and other actors. Thank you so much. Okay, so let's get into it even further. The book is organized around what it calls at the beginning domains of entanglement. And each chapter follows a particular set of travelers to explore some way, some concrete way that urban and indigenous histories are linked. And so the chapters will successfully take us through and we'll talk about some of these in detail, maybe not all of them, but here's what they are. Knowledge, disorder, reason, ritual, discipline, and memory. So we'll talk about at least some of those in the hour to come. Okay, so as I mentioned just before, the book also includes not just these chapters, but also interludes that bridge these chapters. There are six of them. And they are, as is described early on in the first chapter, again, the words of the book, attempts to sidestep a traditional scholarly approach by insisting on the affective. So these are free verse poetry interludes that are built in part out of archival fragments. And we can see in these interludes those are set off in italics. And that each focus on an object. And so here's where the kind of material histories come in very powerfully. A mirror, a debtor's petition, a pair of statues, a lost museum, a hat factory, and a notebook. Okay, so cool. We need to talk about this. I want to talk about this. I love this part of the book. Can you, can you talk about for you the importance of these as part of the book? And also importantly, the importance of writing this free verse poetry with these archival fragments as part of your practice as a historian. Yeah, it was, for me, it was a really powerful return to a kind of writing I did long before I ever became a historian. And so there's a deeply personal element to this. But in terms of how they function within the book, I realized that it kind of started with the first one, which is about an Aztec obsidian mirror that belonged to a man named John D who was an advisor to Elizabeth the first. And he's the man who coined the phrase the British Empire in the 1570s. And he was using this mirror for scrying, for kind of communicating with angels and so on. And so from the beginning, the British Empire is already entangled with indigenous objects. But as I was writing about this piece, I was finding that traditional academic prose just was not getting it for me. It wasn't, was not getting me where I wanted to be. And I realized what I needed to do was write an invocation. An invocation to Tess Katli Poka, the Aztec obsidian god. And that was picking up partially on the literature around Aztec ritual objects, but also John D's own writings, which have a really kind of devotional almost quality to them. And so I wanted to put those two things in conversation and have text and voice from the Nahwa, Aztec side of things as well as from John D's own writings and put those together. So it really began as kind of a ritualized form of writing. And in doing that, I realized there's something here that I could actually carry through the whole book. Originally, I thought it would be a standalone piece like a forward almost. And then I realized there are these moments throughout the book where I could really do this. Another function, they sort of couple of functions, but one function is, as you quoted from the book, is to insist on the affective. So they're written in the present tense. They're meant to kind of, as I said, sidestep or short circuit almost, the kind of purely cerebral approach to this subject. And then I also, because the chapters themselves focus so much on the agency of indigenous travelers, I wanted to remind the reader, let's not forget the human costs of colonialism. And so they tend to be darker. They tend to really talk about pain in many ways. And at the same time, I don't want to overstate pain narratives because that's so typical in talking about the history of colonialism. But I thought it was really important to have that piece there, particularly because some of the sources that I've used in these interludes are so intimate. How did you, so there are archival fragments that are woven in with the other aspects of the free verse poetry that make up these interludes. So was there anything about the process of choosing those particular archival fragments to constallate around these particular objects that you'd want to talk about? Why those fragments and those moments for those objects? Well, in many cases, the fragments are all there is. And one of them, in particular, about an O'Dawa war captive, an 11-year-old boy who became the model for some statues in Westminster Abbey, the letter from Thomas Gray that I cite, the poet Thomas Gray, that I use as the archival fragment. That's the only acknowledgement that this boy ever existed in the archives. And so that's all I had to work with. And so to, as you say, constallate around that, an actual story, was kind of the goal of that particular piece. For me, the sort of collage approach made a lot of sense and to really not just take, not just some of these things weren't even archival fragments. They were archival sources which then I fragmented. And interspersed with either other sources or my own writing or place names or whatever. Some of them I turned backwards to sort of play with narrative, to play with temporality a little bit. And to try to bridge these really vast spaces. So, you know, a debtors' prison in London with Massachusetts or Sydney with a museum in Sutherland. And to try to really bridge these vast spaces and show how intimate these two worlds, if they even are two worlds, are with each other. I mean, there's so many we could talk about this for the next couple of hours, right? And we have talked about that. And we have. There are a couple of really interesting things about this that you've mentioned that I just want to pull out and highlight as being particularly important. One of them is the work that you're doing to give body to fragments. and to take the initiative and embrace the agency of the historian in fragmenting also. I mean, I think there's some really interesting conversations happening across different history disciplines right now about and around fragmentarianist, fragmentation as a process and how to materialize a fragment in a story. And I think what you're doing here is a really fascinating and important way of doing that. Yeah, I mean, I think the nature of history generally, of course, is working with just this posity, this oblivion, right? That's particularly true, I would say, working in indigenous history just given the nature of the history. While so much has been retained in terms of oral tradition and other forms of knowledge, so much has been lost as well. And in fact, I'm thinking about the Matyskaller Zoi Taud who writes about indigenous people already living in a post-apocalyptic world. And that's reflected in the archive in many ways. And so I wanted to really kind of step right up to that edge of that oblivion and kind of eliminate, you know, outline it a bit and say, here's this thing we can't see. Here's this place we can't go any further. But I think the free verse poetry, that genre, allow me some speculative space to start to fill in some of that oblivion. And of course, that's a troubling and problematic process. You know, it's an imperfect process, but I'm not convinced that we can do much else, right? Given the nature of the history, the artifacts that we're left with. And it's in a way the exception that highlights the rule of what historical practice is, right? Which is making of a body of a story out of fragments. Yeah. And another thing before we move on, that I just want to highlight here is I think a really important part of the work that these interludes do. Given the larger impact of the book itself, as well, and given the larger themes that some of the book are, is taking on, is the way that the experience of the reader moving through the book, moving from chapter to interlude to chapter, is very much an experience of shifts in temporality. Shit, like the time slows down. You're asking us to experience a story and experience these characters and these moments on very different temporal scales, right? Things slow down, they speed up. And given what I take to be the larger interest of the book in asking us to think about the constant making of the past, and our responsibility in that process, I think this works in a really effective way to do that without our necessarily being aware that that's happening as we work through. Yeah, I thought it was I was writing this. It's written with a broad audience in mind, very much so. I want to speak to the average educated Londoner and really mess with their sense of place. That's something I did with my first book with Seattle and it seems to have worked quite well. So I'm hoping I can do that with London as well. And so these, as you say, these shifts in temporality, in some ways that wasn't even explicitly a goal. It's just kind of the way the story emerged. But it was really important to me because it's written with a broad audience in mind, to not have too much scholarly apparatus in there to say, okay, now I am going to do this and I'm telling you I'm going to do it and then I'll do it and then I'll tell you I did it. I didn't want to have too much of that. Just like, you know, there's a chapter on the displaying of bodies, for example, that obviously is influenced by Foucault and others, but you don't see Foucault in there, right? It's just that's those aren't discourses that I was interested in having as explicit kind of conscious parts of the text. I wanted it to be more of an experiential thing without those kinds of intrusions. Well, it works really well. So as we move into the chapters after chapter one, we move into these chapters that take on these major themes that I need before, chapter two looks at knowledge, right, the space of knowledge. Now there's so much that we could talk about in chapter two that the Thomas Harriet and helping create an alphabet for Asamukamok. There's some really fabulous examples and cases and stories here, but what I want to just do is briefly touch on one of the points that you bring up here and ask you to talk a little bit about what you're most interested in, the work that this is doing for the book. This is a series of questions, right? How do we understand what indigenous travelers made of London? What access do we have to those perspectives? This becomes a question that's raised in the chapter. And would you speak a little bit to that? Yeah, I mean, it's one of the top two or three questions that I get asked about this project. What did indigenous travelers think and how do you get at that? And so for the early modern period, when we've got indigenous travelers coming on the 1570s and the 1610s, the sources for what any Londoner thought of these people are pretty fragmentary anyway, right? This is the archive of early modern London is pretty sparse generally. And then you add the sort of archival problems around indigenous sources to that, it just becomes doubly more doubly so. One of the things I tried to do though was to really ground the experience in what indigenous scholars and writers from those communities have said in later generations and to really operate from those sorts of ontologies, worldings and so on. And that's an imperfect process for sure. And it's something that scholars debate. Sometimes people dismiss it as upstreaming and that it's something we're not supposed to do. And I think that simply becomes a good reason to not do the work. So I'm just trying to do the best I can. And to try to make the speculative possibilities really explicit in the writing, this is one way Pocahontas might have experienced that 12th-night performance at court or here's this other way that she might have experienced or maybe all of those ways are true. And it just makes some of my thinking a little bit more explicit with again, without bogging down the reader in my own academic processes. And overall I would say there are some commonalities in terms of indigenous perspectives on the city across time. One really has to do with the critique of the ecology of the city. A sense of how do these people feed themselves, which is a really salient issue for the city's history. And then also a really trenchant critique of inequality in the city of the really stark disparities between the wealthy and the poor. And sometimes we have this explicitly in the archive saying we would never treat our poor like this. In fact we would never have poor like this. And there are houses here that are so big that there's nobody at the windows and being quite shocked at that level of wealth and kind of ostentatiousness. There's another, and you highlight some of these key patterns early on in the book, right? There's another pattern that you highlight that actually I think nicely brings us into the next chapter, which is a chapter on disorder. Right, and this is a chapter. I should mention the chapter we were just talking about extends from 1580 to 1630. And as we move into the next chapter we move into a period between 1710 and 1765. And we move into a chapter that explores disorder and violence specifically in this context. Now I mention that this engages one of the patterns that you mentioned because early in the book in addition to highlighting the trenchant critiques of the ecology and also the disparities of wealth that were common to many of these travelers, you also mention gender. And you mention the fact that many of them were men. Now the interweaving of issues of gender and indigenity is also something that you look at as an issue in chapter three, right, this chapter that looks at the work of William Hogarth. Right, as a window into this it looks at the experience of the four kings of Canada, right, an example. But you also talk about the nature of the treatment of women in these stories. So maybe this is a good opportunity to talk about that set of issues and whatever way you want to. Well, I think the word for me that I think captures a lot of this. I don't remember if I even use it in the book is refraction. The gender relations in London are being refracted through these visitations by indigenous diplomats in the 18th century. So for example, one of the few indigenous female travelers during this period is a woman named Sennaki from the Yamacra people of what's now Savannah, Georgia. And she is routinely portrayed as superior to British women who are scolds, who are body, who are vulgar, and so on, whereas she's, you know, sort of prim and chased, and so on. And there are so many opportunities that Londoners, male Londoners as far as I can tell, take to use these visitations as opportunities to critique British women. of sex workers encountering Cherokee visitors, for example, and the sort of the reputational problems of the British around that and so on. So there are all these moments where female gender is really being articulated through these moments, but male gender as well, right? And so we particularly as it relates to urban violence. And so after the three Mohawk delegates come in 1710, a couple years later, there's this huge outbreak of gang violence and the most notorious of the gangs calls themselves the Mohawks. And so there's this thing about this kind of robust muscular, masculine criminal engagement with the landscape of the city that becomes refracted through savagery, through the imagined savagery. And so you see this language of savagery being applied to the urban, particularly urban poor again and again and again, particularly through the 18th century, which then really does bring it in nicely to people like Hogarth, where he's illustrating that world in highly allegorical ways. And that was one of the interesting things for me with this project was when I realized I'd be writing about people like William Hogarth and Samuel Johnson and so on, I was like, finally I'm doing real history. And I realized, oh my god, I'm so colonized. But there was something again about this history gets to be legitimate because it involves Elizabeth I or it involves Victoria or whatever that suddenly I was tapping into things where I don't have to push for this being seen as legitimate history in a way as a scholar of native history. Well, isn't what you do just really have to apology. And so on, so finally tapping into these major figures in British history to again refract them through an Indigenous centered approach. And for listeners who are particularly interested in the way that these stories intersect with issues of gender, that also will come up later on in a later chapter where you take us into discipline to bodies and we'll get to this. And gender also becomes really important there as you show us because of, it seems that increasing suburbanization becomes an issue and if suburbia increasingly is the domain of women, then there's this kind of call to urban masculinity through sport. And this is going to motivate some really interesting story that we'll get to in a few moments. Yeah, and that was something I really wanted to do with this was not to just recount the stories of Indigenous travelers but actually try to say something new about the city. This book is as much about the city as it is about the travel. That's right. And we see that coming through in the next chapter as well. Chapter four, which looks roughly at the period 1766 to 1785 and has or takes us as organizing a thing of reason, right? Now this chapter looks at some of the ways that travelers in the words of this chapter reasoned themselves and the city into a broader transatlantic world. There are some fascinating figures here. You introduce us to a Mohican minister that helps us map the kind of religious landscape of London. You introduce us to an Inuit Shaman and his family. You introduce us to a Mohawk military leader. For you, Cole, is there a particular figure in this chapter that you are perhaps most kind of viscerally fascinated with or interested in or want to kind of give voice to? Can you tell us or tell listeners a little bit about just a kind of an example of some of the stories here? Sure. I mean, the one that really stuck out for me all along in this research process was a woman named Kavik. And she's an Inuit woman who was brought to London in 1772 with this Shaman named Ateop, brought by a man named George Cartwright and taken around the city, huge crowds following them everywhere. And only of the five people in the family only Kavik survives the voyage. She's the only one that makes it home. And when I was working with Cartwright's journals at the Huntington Library, the story of that family, their demise, Kavik's survival, and what happened after she returned back to Labrador really spoke to me on an absolutely visceral emotional level. It was one of those moments in the archives that I think many of us have had where we just have to stop. And I really felt like this was very early on in the research. I felt like I was being told to start with us. And so I have a standalone article that came out in the journal of British studies about that family. But they've been kind of interleaved into this chapter. But Kavik's story is really a powerful one because it really speaks to both her agency but also, again, the cost of empire. You know, the other four people in her family die of smallpox on the return voyage. She survives but is apparently still contagious. And so within the next year about half the enuate people at Labrador die of smallpox, probably brought back by her. And the account of her return to Labrador is just so powerful that I just thought this is where I have to start. So she's submerged a little bit in the chapter within the book. But in many ways, the book has a lot of souls. But she is one of them, I think. One thing I do feel quite strongly about though is that I'm not giving voice. You know, these people already had and have voices. And so it's not my place to give them anything. But to sort of amplify is what I'm trying to do. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, you bet. For me, so you were calling back to a moment in your experience in the archives here, or here meaning in this set of stories that we're talking about, where something called to you or sort of spoke to you or something. I had a similar moment in the next chapter actually where I was just like bold over and had to stop reading the book for a moment. And this was a moment where you describe the last words of the king of Hawaii. Yes. Okay, so this is a chapter, chapter five that takes us into a period, 1806 to 1866, and looks at the power and importance of ritual, right, in blending these worlds or in these worlds that are with single entangled world. Okay. So the stories here focus on travelers from New Zealand and Hawaii. And you talk about the ways that these stories open up a Pacific London that is in the words of the book shaped by shared ritual. So I want to ask you to talk about that. But first, I want to just thank you for this moment where you give us the last words of this king of Hawaii. He and his and the queen had died from measles and his last words are, and I'm now, I'm going to say this as a way of just vocalizing the words of the book, not the words of the king. Okay. The last words are, I shall lose my tongue. I shall lose my tongue. Farewell to you all. I am dead. I am happy. At that moment, I had to close the book and put it down and just, you know, kind of plots. So I paused at that moment. Okay. So the larger theme here of shared ritual and the power of shared ritual and how this manifests for you specifically as a theme here. Can you talk about that? What's important to you that we understand about what you think is important here? Well, I really wanted to sort of take apart these highly organized rituals of Victorian London that are so, they seem to us, I think, so rigid. I wanted to show them kind of being misogized or interpolated or whatever the word is by Māori and Kanaka Māori or native Hawaiian rituals. And the death of Liho Liho and Kamamalu who you're talking about is a really great example of that. They're funeral, for example, when they lie in state. They're surrounded by kahili which are these tall feathered poles that are signs of manna of royal sort of sovereignty, really. They have feathered cloaks draped over the coffins but it's surrounded by candles and red roses and so it's this mix of kind of, you know, intensely British ritual grief but also absolutely a manifestation of Hawaiian sovereignty at St. Martin's fields on Trafalgar Square, right? And so what I really wanted to show with this chapter was the ways in which urban ritual actually had space for kind of this cosmopolitan cross-cultural encounter where, you know, a Māori sailor could be giving a toast and a pub but it's also Fakorero, it's also Māori oratory at the same time. So we have these moments of kind of shared, complicated, fraught humanity really expressed through ritual. And some moments or these moments include objects like Jeremy Bentham's head. Yes. You know, I need to ask you about that, right? You know I'm going to ask you about that. So call, what's up with Jeremy Bentham's head in the context of the story? Yes. Well, I'm sure many of our listeners will know about Jeremy Bentham and when he does he wanted his body to be made into what he called an auto icon. It's this massively narcissistic event, right? But what's less known about this is the fact that he was very impressed and fascinated with the process, the Maori process, the mummification of heads, loved ones, important enemies, and so on. And he wanted that done to himself, totally screwed it up. And if the listeners can Google Jeremy Bentham's head and you'll see the result, it's really grim and kind of horrifying. And for me, that became a metaphor for the kind of haphazardness of empire. The sort of not always very well thought out practices of empire. The macabre nature of empire as well, and so I wanted to end that chapter with, here's a ritual that went wrong. Because Bentham was woefully, and the doctor who did this to his body, were woefully ignorant about Māori practice. It was just this kind of purient fascination that just ended up going really wrong. And it resonates with the present where Māori ancestral remains continue to be held in museums around the world and are sometimes repatriated and sometimes not. And so it taps into issues that are still relevant today. And I think it was quite clever to go from Jeremy Bentham's head to an injured lute about a hat factory. Yes. Very clever. We're super into that transition. Yeah, the hat factory is one of my favorite moments. Oh really? Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Yeah, so in Oxford Street, which is one of the main shopping streets of London, that I'm sure many people will know, there is a building from the 1870s that has beaver gargoyles on top of it. And when I saw it, I thought, oh my god, those are beavers. Not something I would have expected on the top of the building in London. And in the 19th century, this was one of the premier places to buy beaver top hats. And so as I started thinking about it, I'm really starting thinking about the nature of the fur trade. What it did was it allowed me to recenter London, not as the center of the fur trade, but as the periphery of the fur trade. That the fur trade was possible because of the labor and knowledge of Indigenous people, especially women, in sort of upper Canada, for example, in what was called Rubrit's Land. So Cree and Inishinabe and dead-aid territories. And so we can think of this space in London, that building was only possible because of the capital that was raised by the labor of Indigenous people, thousands of miles away. And so I started really thinking of Oxford Street as, you know, denate territory. And so it was one of those flippings of the script that I think I was, that I'm really committed to trying to do with this book. Yeah. And that was an interlude for our listeners. That was Interlude 5, the Hat Factory circa 1875. Really great. Okay, so as we move from here onto the next chapter, we move to the chapter that does the work that we briefly mentioned before. And this is the work of going into discipline and specifically disciplining bodies. This is a chapter that covers the period 1861 to 1914. And include just some amazing figures and stories. So I mean, I want to talk, I want to ask you to talk about all of them. But we don't have time, so I'll just give you just free reign to talk about whichever of these you want to highlight for listeners. And these include a man known as Dearfoot. And we have this image of him running. They include Indigenous peoples from what's now Australia, poor cricket players, Maori rugby players performing a haka. And we have another emote we'll get to the Wild West show in a moment. But can you maybe just tell a little bit about any of these figures, just kind of as an example of what's happening here? Yeah, I mean, one of the biggest debates, I would say, in British imperial history or British history for this period, has to do with the extent to which Britain's even knew that they had an empire. And the degree to which it even shaped their lives on a daily basis. You know, they might be marinating in tea and a wash in calico or whatever and have those beaver for hats and so on. But do they really understand that they have an empire? And one of the things that I'm trying to argue with this chapter. And really with the book generally is that absolutely when these Indigenous bodies are present in the city, people know they have an empire and they're anxious about it. And this is happening at the late 19th or 20th century when, as we talked about a little bit before, the city becomes very suburban. You know, men are traveling by omnibus from made of veil into the city for work and so on. And there's this anxiety that they're becoming soft and that they're not going to be fit to rule anymore. And so there becomes this really strong emphasis on things like rugby and cricket. And so on, these sort of manly sports, which are also really popular in the colonies in places like New Zealand and Australia. And so there's this disciplining of both urban and Indigenous bodies in these spaces that really come together through these really, again, fraught anxieties about masculinity and its relationship to empire. And that is an urban crisis largely. And so some of these travelers, people like Jangan Ginnonuk, whose Indigenous Australian man, who's one of the sort of leaders of this cricket team, you know, and he's showing off his prowess as a warrior. I'm something that's increasingly difficult to do back home. But he and his teammates are called on to engage in these kinds of acts of masculinity in front of thousands and thousands of Londoners. And so again, it really highlights the agency of these folks at the same time that it also highlights these really overweaning structural processes of empire that lead to things like the lost generation or the stolen generations in Australia and the larger campaigns of genocide and so on. But it's, I guess the thing I really wanted to get across in this chapter again was the idea that Londoners are constantly being confronted with their empire. They're constantly being confronted with it. And the sense that they make out of it, that's where the story gets interesting. So where does Buffalo Bill's Wild West show fit into this? Because we're going to see that coming up again in the final chapter. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the Wild West show, I included along with the story of these other Indigenous athletes because we can really think about the performers, particularly Lakkota, people who I focus on in the chapter, are, you know, they're engaging in practices again that in the sort of confinements of the reservation system, which is well established by the late 19th century, you know, the sort of the warrior culture, the horsemanship and so on, is not, there's no place for that in that reservation, carceral space. And yet people are making a living, traveling the world, engaging in these activities, four kings, four queens, and so on. And it's just a wonderful moment to again highlight these urban anxieties, these British anxieties about what do we do about the American, you know, who seems to be more masculine because of his encounter with savagery. And then what do we do with people who are carrying spheres to within several feet of the monarch? To show off their own cultural prowess. What does that mean for the future of the empire? Is there a future for the empire when we're being presented with these much more virile vital kind of bodies? Thank you. Now we move, we see Buffalo Bill's Wild West show coming up again in the next chapter. This is a chapter that extends from 1982 to 2013, so bringing it to the fairly recent past that looks at the significance of memory. So we need to talk about this. Yeah, it's my favorite chapter in many ways. Okay, good. So I want to hear about why it's your favorite chapter. But let's kind of give listeners an entree into it by maybe talking a little bit about the link between Buffalo Bill's Wild West show that we see again here. And this is a moment where you describe relatives of long wolf, one of the performers in that show gathering at his grave over a century later to remember him. Okay, so for you, what's happening here? What's significant about what's happening? And can you just take us into your sense of that? I don't use this word in the in the book as far as I remember, but this chapter of memory is not actually about the past, it's actually about the future. It's about indigenous futureity, which according to the logics of empire and colonialism shouldn't be a thing. Indigenous peoples have no future in those logics. Right? And so what I'm really interested in this chapter is showing the way in which even though London has over the course of the 20th century largely forgotten its empire, either forgotten or disavowed its empire, I'm still on the fence about that. Indigenous communities, descendant communities are still remembering the city as the space where the crown lives, as the space where their relatives went to indigestion. and come home in the case of Long Wolf who died in the late 19th century there. This is a kind of repatriation of the city and sort of constant refrain of indigenous people saying, no, we were here, we continue to be here, we will still be here. And London is a place where that plays out. Even though the chapter is to some extent, largely about death, there's a whole section of the chapter that's about travelers who didn't return and how they're being remembered, how their graves are being kept active, and so on. - Yeah, why is it your favorite chapter? - I think because it works most powerfully against those structural narratives of sort of the logic of elimination. That it is so key in my work and I think to any of us that work in indigenous history to try to make the indigenous world bigger, intellectually, politically, culturally, legally, temporally, spatially, and this chapter, I think, does that work. It's also the chapter where I'm the most present in many ways through leading walking tours, engaging in performance art interventions in the city related to indigenous history and so on. So it's the chapter that's most vital. It's the one that's where sort of, you can see me doing the work. - Would you talk for listeners a little bit about some of those interventions on the walking tours that perform inside? - Sure, there's a Talten artist and scholar named Peter Moran, who was doing some acts that he calls cultural graffiti in the city, so he would do things like go to one of the statues of Columbus in the city and put a blanket over him and retire him, where he'd lie down at the gates to bucking him palace and sing Talten songs into the earth and so on. And so we happened to meet through some mutual friends and he had asked me, are there other sites of history, of indigenous history in the city that he should engage with? And I told him about St. Olaf Hart Street, this little church in the heart of the city, where in 1577, an enuit baby was buried and he became very fascinated with this story. And so we did an intervention, kind of a ritual intervention with several other people at that site. As a way to, you know, 376 years later, however many years it was, to commemorate that child. And it was a really intense experience that I go into at some length, both through my own words and through Peter's words in terms of what our intentions were with that. But again, you know, Peter's work really speaks to the idea indigenous people have survived, not all enough. And such a really highlight that in this chapter was really one of the goals. - And you mentioned walking tours, and in fact, not only are you involved with that, but you also make the book into technology for readers to accomplish their own walking tours. There's an appendix at the end called self-guided encounters with indigenous London that readers can use to have their own experience. So can you talk about that a bit? - Yeah, my first book, Native Seattle, has an atlas at the back of it, of indigenous Seattle and 127 place names that are all translated and we talk about how those sites might have been used and so on. And I wanted to do something like that. I'm very much a place-based historian. So I wanted to do something like that with the London book as well. And London has a great history of sort of walking tours as a kind of urban ritual. That's really, that's something you do in London and, you know, in all kinds of themes. And I so, it felt like a very London thing to do to offer up three self-guided tours. So two of them are walking tours. The third is on a Thames ferry. And it's a way to really disorient, orient and disorient the reader and the walker and the ferry writer to the city to take a space like Trafalgar Square, for example, and say, look, there's Mohawk history in this space. There's Hawaiian history here and so on. And really take spaces that seem familiar and render them unfamiliar. One of the great ironies is that, you know, compared to Seattle, for example, where the landscape has been so transformed, that those 127 places are very difficult to imagine. In London, the spaces of Indigenous history are all still there. You know, it's St. James Palace. It's the tower. These are sites of power that have remained. And so in some ways, it's almost easier to imagine Indigenous history at the center of empire than it is in a place like Seattle or here in Vancouver. - So there's also, and I don't think we can not talk about this. I just wanna ask you to talk briefly about this. There's also a ghost in chapter seven. And this is a ghost of Pocahontas in London. What's going on there? - Yeah, Pocahontas is kind of the only touchstone that most Londoners, if they know anything about this history, they've heard of Pocahontas. She dies on the return voyage in 1617, and it's very to Graves End, just east of the city. And so in the earlier chapter where she appears in the late, or in the early 17th century, I tried to submerge her there a little bit alongside, you know, in favor of other Algonquin people who were traveling during that period, including some that were part of her same journey. But she's the only figure that's been kind of remembered, but she's remembered in a particular way. She's remembered in a very isolated way as kind of this doomed figure, and a figure of indigenous disappearance ultimately, and she becomes ghosted. And so what I really wanted to do is contrast that with how she's remembered in descendant communities who, including some who have made journeys to London to kind of follow in her footsteps and commemorate her, where she's seen as a very vital figure. She's seen as a figure that represents the collectivity of her nation, the Powhatan Confederacy, which continues to exist in some ways as descendant tribes today. And I really wanted to push back against this ghosting because that ghosting of indigeneity is absolutely one of the most powerful and pernicious aspects of the logics of settler colonialism. - Thank you. - Awesome. - Yeah. - Now before we, there's one final question that I wanna ask you that opens up the epilogue a little bit. And this is a question that's just going to just task you to talk about the last line of the book. The last line of the book poses a question to us that is powerful and fascinating and important and speaks to all the things that we've been talking about. And here's what it is. When did we become real human beings? So cool. Can you talk about that as an ending and the significance of that question for you? - It's been really important for me with every book I write to end it with a question, to open a door to dialogue and to further scholarship and to some self-examination on the part of the reader. In Native Seattle, the last sentence was what happened here. And in here, it's, you know, when did we become real human beings? And for me, that's almost an indictment of empire where there's such a radically dehumanizing process in that. And dehumanizing not just the people on the receiving end of empire, but a dehumanizing ultimately of the imperial population as well, that I believe really strongly that the process of empire dehumanizes everyone it touches. Right? And so in this epilogue, which is looking at how ancient Londoners are being portrayed in a museum, often refracted again through ideas about living indigenous people, I wanted to really highlight this struggle that I think many people have trying to recognize humanity across either temporal or cultural distances. And to really ask that question, when did we become real human beings? Have we yet? And it's also riffing on the fact that in many indigenous languages, the name for the people, the self-name for people means the real human beings. And so I wanted to kind of riff on that. So there's a little bit of a gesturing there to that particular pattern. But yeah, I just, you know, I feel very strongly that, you know, this is not meant to be the end of the conversation. This is meant to be the beginning where I'm kind of carving out some territory and hoping that scholars will go deeper. You know, I wasn't able to have close ethical relationships, sort of collaborative relationships with communities because there's so many communities represented in this book. So I'm hoping that, you know, Ojibwe scholars may take stories deeper. You know, our Aboriginal Australian scholars might take it deeper or scholars allied with Aboriginal Australian people to take it deeper. And I think having that question at the end really provokes that, that's really the goal for me. The, you know, I'm very committed to the idea that history is a collective endeavor. And that, you know, I'm, this is not the end. - What a perfect note on which you come to the conclusion. - That's right. - So cool. You are an amazing person. This is an amazing book. I would love to talk for another few hours for listeners about this. Unfortunately, we don't have that time. And we really, there's so much in here. We really just scratched the surface. But given that, is there anything that we didn't have a chance to talk about that you'd like to mention for listeners before we close. >> I think just the part. possibility of this kind of history exists in so many other places. And so what I'm really hoping is that, you know, this may provoke other kinds of histories like this. You sort of indigenous history out of bounds instead of just in traditional territories, which is super important, but also in places like Paris. I have a graduate student who's in Rome right now looking at indigenous presences in Rome in the early 20th century. What would it mean for us to kind of claim those spaces for indigenous history? What does that do politically? What does that do intellectually? And how might we facilitate conversations between and across fields? People who haven't talked to each other before. Next year, I'm headlining the North American Victorian Studies Association Conference. And that's a place I have no business even attending, let alone key noting, given my training, you know, I was trained in the 19th and 20th century American West. And that's what research does, right? It takes us these really surprising places. And if I can, you know, get to a place where Londoners and scholars who work in British history really take indigenous history seriously, some of its methodologies, its approaches, its politics, and so on. If people can really take that seriously, then I feel like my work's done. But of course your work is not done because you're working on new things. So now that the book is done, what's next for you? What are you currently inspired by? Well I'm returning to the Pacific Northwest with a book that's going to be a meditation on historical trauma and landscape set in my hometown, which is called Auburn, Washington. It's about an hour southeast of Seattle. I'm again, paired with the reservation. And it's about four traumatic events that happened there. So Treaty War in the 1850s with massacres on both sides between Native people and settlers. The destruction of a river around 1900. The internment of about a fifth of the town's population in 1942 because they were Japanese. And then in the 1980s, the town became the center of the US's largest serial killer case, the Green River Killer Gary Ridgeway. And so it's about those four events and how they're remembered or silenced. But it's also going to be about my own family's westward migration to that town. A story that involves a lot of intergenerational violence. And the book is really going to be about the violence that are at the core of American history. At the same time, it's going to be a little bit of a peon to the subtle beauties of this particular place, which is kind of the poor fringe of suburbia. It's kind of a meth country, but it's still a beautiful place. And the book's going to be called Slotter Town because the town was originally known as Slotter before it was renamed Auburn. And it was built on top of an indigenous community called Confluence. And so the idea of these histories coming together. And so that's where I'm headed next. And again, it's going to be some more genre crossing. So maybe not poetry, but certainly memoir. Well, thank you for taking time out of that work to talk with me about this one. And I hereby invite you for another interview day to talk about that when it's done. You bet. Okay, thanks so much, Col, it's really been a pleasure. Right on, thanks. You've been listening to new books in history. Thanks very much for joining us. And we'll see you next time. [MUSIC]