Indigenous Futures and Pasts at the Heart of Empire: Notes from Indigenous London

In relation to the broad telos of “civilization,” Indigenous peoples are often framed as though they represent the past, while cities serve as the avatar of the future. As a corollary to this, Indigenous and urban histories are treated as though they are mutually exclusive. This talk, drawn from a new book on the history of Indigenous visitations to London, England, over the past five centuries, argues that urban and Indigenous histories are in fact mutually constitutive. Not only have Indigenous people charted their future through London, but London itself remains imbricated in the ongoing structures of settler colonialism in the twenty-first century.