Cecilia Morgan. Travellers through Empire

Travellers through Empire: Indigenous Voyages from Early Canada adds to the small but growing body of scholarship on Indigenous mobility in the context of (but not necessarily defined by) European imperialism and settler colonialism. Mobility looms large in recent imperial, colonial, and transnational history writing. But Indigenous peoples have rarely featured in this work. Cecilia Morgan’s book sits at the forefront of efforts to redress this (distorting) absence in the “mobility turn,” on the one hand, and efforts to centralize Indigenous experiences within histories of imperialism and settler colonialism, on the other. Focusing on the mid-nineteenth century, with some earlier and later examples, Morgan presents cases studies predominantly of Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee travelers from the British colony of Upper Canada and some from the northwestern fur trade country. But the introduction makes it clear that Indigenous communities were highly mobile prior to their encounter with Europeans. Imperialism, while bringing significant changes, was not the “origin” of Indigenous mobility. Moreover, Morgan argues that these traveling figures are far from unique. They should not be viewed or dismissed as “exceptional.” Quite the reverse. Their movements are a register of the dispossession being experienced across innumerable locales. Equally, they demonstrate how movement was imbricated with strategies of resistance and survivance, and represented an increasingly important arena of Indigenous agency in the context of settler colonial encroachment.

Agency (philosophy) · Ancient history · Archaeology · British Empire · Colonialism · Context (archaeology) · Decolonization · Empire · Ethnology · Indigenous · Political science · Politics · Redress · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Indigenous Studies and Ecology · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies