On Monday, Sept. 23rd, the vlog History Department welcomed special guest Coll Thrush (Professor of History, The University of British Columbia) for the annual Douglas K. Reading Lecture. The Persson Hall Auditorium was packed for the event. The subject of Thrush’s lecture, “Indigenous London: Native Travellers at the Heart of Empire,” examined the relationship between British empire and different indigenous groups, located in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand, from the 16th Century to the 20th Century. His talk was based on his book of the same title, which was published in 2016 by the Oxford University Press.
Thrush started his lecture by introducing to the audience a passage he found in the British archive, which described a 1502 incident in which three indigenous people from “new found island” were presented at the British Royal Court in the Westminster Hall. This incident was intriguing and amusing, as it left many questions on the lives and experiences of those three 4indigenous people unanswered. Drawing from this anecdote, Thrush then dug deeper into the archives to examine the relationship between Great Britain, specifically London, and the indigenous visitors to London. He next presented his central argument, that the historical account of interactions between the indigenous visitors to London and the British empire illustrated the narrative that indigenous people were in a stark contrast with the British.
Thrush stated that a challenge in his research was the dominant historiography of framing urban history and indigenous history as divided contrasts; rather, he argues that by examining the experience of indigenous visitors in London, urban history and indigenous history are in fact mutually constitutive. Thrush then presented the voices of indigenous London visitors through their memoirs. He demonstrated that those indigenous visitors conveyed rich description of London’s urban landscape, ecology and London’s growing urban inequality at that time. He then wove his narrative to reveal how the British employed indigenous people’s knowledge to forge the British empire (though the indigenous people were not supporting the British expansion), how British narrative of masculinity and urban history revolved in distinguishing themselves from the Indigenous people. Through those cases Thrush pinpointed the mutual constitutive-ness. Lastly, Thrush emphasized that although British people may forget indigenous people’s activities in London, the indigenous communities are always mindful of those interactions in their oral histories and collective memory. He then concluded his lecture by calling us to search for the traces of Indigenous London.
In addition to the Reading Lecture, Thrush also spoke to Professor Ryan Hall’s American Indian History class, and led a History Conversation the day following his lecture. During the History Conversation event he discussed his current, though somewhat abandoned, research on the history of the Green River Killer. He explained that instead of an academic monograph, he now considers writing this as archivally grounded fiction. He also discussed his next book project, Wrecked: Ecologies of Failure in the Graveyard of the Pacific, a history of shipwrecks and settler colonialism in the Pacific Northwest.
Article by Zhelun Zhou ’20.