An imaginative retelling of London’s history, framed through the experiences of Indigenous travelers who came to the city over the course of more than five centuries London is famed both as the ancient center of a former empire and as a modern metropolis of bewildering complexity and diversity. In 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. They included captives and diplomats, missionaries and shamans, poets and performers. Some, like the Powhatan noblewoman Pocahontas, are familiar; others, like an Odawa boy held as a prisoner of war, have almost been lost to history. In drawing together their stories and their diverse experiences with a changing urban culture, Thrush also illustrates how London learned to be a global, imperial city and how Indigenous people were central to that process.
Cover -- Half-title -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Maps -- 1. The Unhidden City: Imagining Indigenous Londons -- Interlude One: A Devil's Looking Glass, circa 1676 -- 2. Dawnland Telescopes: Making Colonial Knowledge in Algonquian London 1580-1630 -- Interlude Two: A Debtor's Petition 1676 -- 3. Alive from America: Indigenous Diplomacies and Urban Disorder 1710-1765 -- Interlude Three: Atlantes 1761 -- 4. "Such Confusion As I Never Dreamt": Indigenous Reasonings in an Unreasonable City 1766-1785 -- Interlude Four: A Lost Museum 1793
'A landmark in the process of decolonizing imperial Western knowledge.' Walter Mignolo, Duke University To the colonized, the term 'research' is conflated with European colonialism; the ways in which academic research has been implicated in the throes of imperialism remains a painful memory. This essential volume explores intersections of imperialism and research - specifically, the ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and tradition as 'regimes of truth.' Concepts such as 'discovery' and 'claiming' are discussed and an argument presented that the decolonization of research methods will help to reclaim control over indigenous ways of knowing and being. Now in its eagerly awaited second edition, this bestselling book has been substantially revised, with new case-studies and examples and important additions on new indigenous literature, the role of research in indigenous struggles for social justice, which brings this essential volume urgently up-to-date.
Winner of the 2008 Washington State Book Award for History/Biography In traditional scholarship, Native Americans have been conspicuously absent from urban history. Indians appear at the time of contact, are involved in fighting or treaties, and then seem to vanish, usually onto reservations. In Native Seattle, Coll Thrush explodes the commonly accepted notion that Indians and cities-and thus Indian and urban histories-are mutually exclusive, that Indians and cities cannot coexist, and that one must necessarily be eclipsed by the other. Native people and places played a vital part in the founding of Seattle and in what the city is today, just as urban changes transformed what it meant to be Native. On the urban indigenous frontier of the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, Indians were central to town life. Native Americans literally made Seattle possible through their labor and their participation, even as they were made scapegoats for urban disorder. As late as 1880, Seattle was still very much a Native place. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, however, Seattle's urban and Indian histories were transformed as the town turned into a metropolis. Massive changes in the urban environment dramatically affected indigenous people's abilities to survive in traditional places. The movement of Native people and their material culture to Seattle from all across the region inspired new identities both for the migrants and for the city itself. As boosters, historians, and pioneers tried to explain Seattle's historical trajectory, they told stories about Indians: as hostile enemies, as exotic Others, and as noble symbols of a vanished wilderness. But by the beginning of World War II, a new multitribal urban Native community had begun to take shape in Seattle, even as it was overshadowed by the city's appropriation of Indian images to understand and sell itself. After World War II, more changes in the city, combined with the agency of Native people, led to a new visibility and authority for Indians in Seattle. The descendants of Seattle's indigenous peoples capitalized on broader historical revisionism to claim new authority over urban places and narratives. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Native people have returned to the center of civic life, not as contrived symbols of a whitewashed past but on their own terms. In Seattle, the strands of urban and Indian history have always been intertwined. Including an atlas of indigenous Seattle created with linguist Nile Thompson, Native Seattle is a new kind of urban Indian history, a book with implications that reach far beyond the region. Replaced by ISBN 9780295741345
Story summary: A multicultural girl struggles with her identity and is made fun of by her classmates for telling them of her Tlingit, Alaska Native heritage. Her parents send her on a trip to Ketchikan, Alaska to reconnect with her grandfather and learn about her heritage. There she has an adventure that helps her to make sense of her identity and develop confidence from knowing who she is. This story seeks to inspire others to learn about their culture and heritage as well and to be proud of it.
The new world created through Anglophone emigration in the 19th century has been much studied. But there have been few accounts of what this meant for the Indigenous populations. This book shows that Indigenous communities tenaciously held land in the midst of dispossession, whilst becoming interconnected through their struggles to do so.
The first comprehensive history of the Lakota Indians and their profound role in shaping America's history Named One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2019 - Named One of the 10 Best History Books of 2019 by Smithsonian Magazine - Winner of the MPIBA Reading the West Book Award for narrative nonfiction "Turned many of the stories I thought I knew about our nation inside out."--Cornelia Channing, Paris Review, Favorite Books of 2019 "My favorite non-fiction book of this year."--Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opinion "A briliant, bold, gripping history."--Simon Sebag Montefiore, London Evening Standard, Best Books of 2019 "All nations deserve to have their stories told with this degree of attentiveness"--Parul Sehgal, New York Times This first complete account of the Lakota Indians traces their rich and often surprising history from the early sixteenth to the early twenty-first century. Pekka Hämäläinen explores the Lakotas' roots as marginal hunter-gatherers and reveals how they reinvented themselves twice: first as a river people who dominated the Missouri Valley, America's great commercial artery, and then--in what was America's first sweeping westward expansion--as a horse people who ruled supreme on the vast high plains. The Lakotas are imprinted in American historical memory. Red Cloud, Crazy Horse, and Sitting Bull are iconic figures in the American imagination, but in this groundbreaking book they emerge as something different: the architects of Lakota America, an expansive and enduring Indigenous regime that commanded human fates in the North American interior for generations. Hämäläinen's deeply researched and engagingly written history places the Lakotas at the center of American history, and the results are revelatory.
WINNER OF: Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book from the Caribbean Philosophical Association Canadian Political Science Association’s C.B. MacPherson Prize Studies in Political Economy Book Prize Over the past forty years, recognition has become the dominant mode of negotiation and decolonization between the nation-state and Indigenous nations in North America. The term “recognition” shapes debates over Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, Indigenous rights to land and self-government, and Indigenous peoples’ right to benefit from the development of their lands and resources. In a work of critically engaged political theory, Glen Sean Coulthard challenges recognition as a method of organizing difference and identity in liberal politics, questioning the assumption that contemporary difference and past histories of destructive colonialism between the state and Indigenous peoples can be reconciled through a process of acknowledgment. Beyond this, Coulthard examines an alternative politics—one that seeks to revalue, reconstruct, and redeploy Indigenous cultural practices based on self-recognition rather than on seeking appreciation from the very agents of colonialism. Coulthard demonstrates how a “place-based” modification of Karl Marx’s theory of “primitive accumulation” throws light on Indigenous–state relations in settler-colonial contexts and how Frantz Fanon’s critique of colonial recognition shows that this relationship reproduces itself over time. This framework strengthens his exploration of the ways that the politics of recognition has come to serve the interests of settler-colonial power. In addressing the core tenets of Indigenous resistance movements, like Red Power and Idle No More, Coulthard offers fresh insights into the politics of active decolonization.
This book brings together two of today's leading concerns in development policy - the urgent need to prioritize poverty reduction and the particular circumstances of indigenous peoples in both developing and industrialized countries. The contributors analyse patterns of indigenous disadvantage worldwide, the centrality of the right to self-determination, and indigenous people's own diverse perspectives on development. Several fundamental and difficult questions are explored, including the right balance to be struck between autonomy and participation, and the tension between a new wave of assimilationism in the guise of 'pro-poor' and 'inclusionary' development policies and the fact that such policies may in fact provide new spaces for indigenous peoples to advance their demands. In this regard, one overall conclusion that emerges is that both differences and commonalities must be recognised in any realistic study of indigenous poverty.
A World You Do Not Know explores the wilful ignorance demonstrated by North America's settlers in establishing their societies on lands already occupied by indigenous nations. Using the Innu of Labrador-Quebec as one powerful contemporary example, Colin Samson shows how the processes of displacement and assimilation today resemble those of the 19th century as the state and corporations scramble for Innu lands. While nation building, capitalism and industrialisation are shown to have undermined indigenous peoples' wellbeing, the values that guide societies like the Innu are very much alive. The book ends by showcasing how ideas and land-based activities of indigenous groups in Canada and the US are being maintained and recast as ways to address the attack on cultural diversity and move forward to more positive futures. Reviews This is a powerful, articulate and troubling book about many kinds of poison. It is a journey to the devastation that colonial history has brought to indigenous peoples around the world, from land seizure to transformation of diet, from losses of resources to the loss of self. At its centre are the Innu of Labrador. Colin Samson has a wonderfully detailed knowledge of Innu history and life. But it is the reach from this foundation to the global forces at work, and the urgent need to resist them that makes this a book of immense importance. Hugh Brody, author of Maps and Dreams, Canada Research Professor, University of the Fraser Valley This is a thoughtful and erudite monograph, a book which will change the way we settlers approach indigenous peoples and our own place in society. A key contribution of the author is to problematize the arrogance with which we approach indigenous ways of knowing and being, while also highlighting the continued resistance of indigenous peoples to western colonization. I highly recommend this book. It is a thought-provoking and timely study of the Innu, based on decades of original research and personal insight. Samson ably contrasts the Innu people, and their sophisticated and nuanced ways of knowing the world, with the hypocrisy of what passes for liberal humanism. The book also explores aspects of indigenous peoples' revitalization in the midst of the voracious western appetite for natural resources and the onslaught of destructive western diets and diseases. In doing this, we come to understand how a return to traditional ways offers the best hope, not only for the future prosperity of indigenous peoples, but also offers important lessons for those of us living in the metropolitan world as well. David MacDonald, Professor of Political Science. University of Guelph Based on nearly two decades of ethnographic research with the Innu of Labrador, A World You Do Not Know should be read by everyone interested in Native American societies and their political and economic struggles. In lucid and impassioned prose, Colin Samson describes elegantly the indigenous cultural distinctiveness that arises from a particular history and experience. The author conveys a profound understanding and empathy for the Innu way of life which has been consistently misunderstood from the earliest point of European contact onwards, and the book is a powerful indictment of the continued neo-colonial practices of the Canadian state and society. A World You Do Not Know represents the best in engaged scholarship that seeks to renew a dialogue with indigenous peoples that is a little less unjust and one-sided. Richard A. Wilson, Gladstein Chair of Human Rights, University of Connecticut
