yeah i think one of the things that really motivated me with this project all those years ago when i started to spend about fifteen years that i was really writing it was the sense that there is another landscape within the one that we're accustomed to here and my goal really as a historian is to disorient people is to take a place or a person or an event that seems familiar and really come out from kind of left field and and i think seattle is a place where we can really do that by looking at the indigenous landscape and so it was really important for me to just as by being here and acknowledging that we're into amish territory i wanted to make sure that the city was really grounded in thousands of years of indigenous presence and to really try to bring that home and one of the ways that i think that i'm proudest of doing that was the collaboration that i did with niall thomson for the atlas at the back of the book which has just arrived yeah it has one hundred twenty seven place names all of them fleshed out with sort of stories about how the site would have been used and the meaning of the name and so on and that's drawn from anthropologists and ethnologists who worked with elders in the early twentieth century and collected those place names and then they have since been translated by elders and more current anthropologists and then the linguists that i worked with now thompson he and i were able to push it a little just a little bit further and so those hundred twenty community and what's now ballard so there are these lovely sort of the vocative images and we can really think of the landscape here as a cultivated landscape we i think we often have in our heads this kind of primeval old growth forest and that's actually not what was here it was a mix of patchwork of managed the lands that included prairie's and included title flats really a rich varied kind of place and if you're interested in exploring that a little bit more there's a wonderful project that the bourke museum put together called water lines and they produced a map that's really outstanding and it has a kind of recreated satellite view of seattle as it would have looked before the presence of europeans here and it includes many of those place names and you can see the  just really any vocative powerful powerful thing and that's one of the things that i always wanted to make sure we were aware of in the book was that there is this other possibility for the place their southern landscape under behind adjacent to whatever the proposition as to the one that we've become accustomed to you know the city one of the startling things i thought in your book so i grew up here and learned about the denny's in the boron's and in fifth grade history in state history and also going to the museum of history and industry where you see the little diary with the cabin and everything in it was it was a story modeled on the mayflower basically it's the same as the mayflower that they stepped off onto the rocks and  that kind of thing but one of the things that you point out is that they they were stay weren't stepping into a wilderness they were stepping into a place that was settled and  they were also stepping into a place where native americans gathered and began gathering in greater numbers once the whites were here and i was struck two things i was struck i did a conversation here with david birdie who's chief seattle biographies coming out next year and he said that you know chief seattle in some ways effectively was like a a land developer that he actually you know they had a section in olympia where they encamped to lure settlers to come to a and it reminded me of you know a lot of one thousand century property salesman trying to lure settlers but one of the things that struck me in the book was you make the claim that it's the first city that was built here after the denny's came was an indigenous c an you talk about that yeah it was really you know one of the i guess the agendas with the book was to really try to critique and take apart what i call have come to call over the years narrative a strange moment between urban and indigenous histories and so by narrative i mean stories and by a strange man i mean separation and the idea that urban and indigenous histories somehow don't have anything to do with each other when one begins the other necessarily ends and so on and it's been really important to me and my work both on seattle and london to really mess with that and show how those those kinds of those two kinds of history are not mutually exclusive in fact they're mutually constituent of they actually create each other and in seattle particularly in what's often referred to as the village period so up until the eighteen eighties ish native people here particular duwamish people played such a crucial role in the founding of the town in every aspect of the economy even things like one of the women who founded i think the first united methodist church here she talked about how she and her female compatriots building that church were only able to do so because of the indigenous women who were working in their homes as laundresses as child kind minders and so on and so at every level from clearing land to providing food and so on indigenous people make the city possible and you can really see the the ambivalence about that in one of the first city ordinances which outlawed native people from living within the city limits with the exception of of them being employed and put up by white people and so you can see in that ordinance you can see a sense of well we don't really want these people here but we sure do need  them and that's really the case in those early decades that indigenous people again particularly duwamish people played such a crucial role and they made the town possible the town would have been a failed experiment probably without them well you also i think talked about how the population of seattle in those early years during times of presumably in the summer and there were literally thousands of indians here and what how of just a handful of that i mean you basically say seattle was originally an native american city essentially with with these few settlers and that a strange didn't happen at all levels i mean or maybe it's part of i'd like to get your perspective on this  given given the hostility toward native americans given the the way the treaties were negotiated you know given all that  there was also a lot of a lot of embracing of native american art native american mythology and that kind of thing and i'd like you to talk a little bit about that that i mean when we think about that period we really embraced a lot of the texture of but the reality of it was was sort of very different yeah i think one of the one of the things i wanted to do and the reason it's called history is from the crossing over place rather than history from the crossing over places that i wanted to look at three kinds of history in the city first the history of the local people the amish the history of native migrants to the city from elsewhere so much new channels and others and then the use of indian imagery in the city so things like  the sort of the mythic chief seattle as opposed to see the real person or the use of totem poles as a civic symbol and so there's been this level of kind of cultural appropriation the way that seattle sells itself using indigenous imagery that's often really at odds it's kind of this this sort of liberal multicultural noble savage fantasy piece that's really quite at odds with the actual history of dispossession that's happened in this place and so it's the tension between those two things between the kind of symbolic  you know she's seattle as the patron saint of the city in the first environmentalist contrast and the sort of the doom and the doomed orator right in contrast with this really astute as you say a political leader economic  venture person and so on so there's this real tension between the symbolic and the real in seattle's history and that's that's not an isolated thing vancouver's much the same way it has a really similar kind of history as well  yeah that's that cultural appropriation i think it's really interesting when a whole city is doing it when you have city leaders literally dressed like totem poles marching down the streets of seattle in one nine hundred twelve as part of the golden potlatch so you know that's that's really strange but it's also really evocative and it really speaks to the level at which white people were willing to take on some aspects of what they saw as native culture you know the potlatch  festivals i've seen photographs of you know these chamber of commerce guys looking like hydro warriors i mean that at i mean it's amazing and i actually scenes occasionally those pictures published as if they were in people and and you know and then you have to send in a little e mail saying no those are white guys and gosta but there was and that was a is that blankets as you're describing and and so on those are those are marks of imperial seattle that seattle laying its claim on the far north that's something that emerges in the eight hundred ninety s with the globe gold rush and then in the years after that as the city really becomes a metropolitan place it tells a new kind of story using a new kind of indigenous imagery the first public art in seattle is the totem pole in pioneer square or the original one at least that was paul in a klink it village  human remains were of the woman who it was memorializing they were discarded it was cut down and towed to seattle and put up facing alaska so this is a really very unsubtle claiming right of it's like a roman thing or yeah  yeah it's a claim of empire and then what's interesting is so you have the sort of the big catalysts of the metropolitan city telling a certain kind of urban story using indigenous imagery and then you have the pioneer generations our children i'm writing their own histories of the city and saying you know our seattle has been lost just like the longhouses disappeared now our seattle is lost whereas my home in the last shoot see language so here you have a white  woman complaining about urban growth speak english it seed talking about the long houses that her father's generation burned down so there's this complete entanglement between urban and indigenous history here that i think is really interesting and you have you have two competing urban histories both of them using native imagery i might have written one of those articles myself but you know there's a when you read the the chief seattle speech and of course there's a lot of debate to the extent to which there is words or not but you know i think a lot of people today it's on a different scale obviously it's not about a side but a lot of people today would  would find some of those words resonant about the way things change anything and that that the passing of one just one people or one generation you know a lot of all types seattle ites can't even afford to live here anymore and i think yeah i think there's an interesting transformation and so the challenge with when when we use when we make that parallel between a change in seattle and the imagine destruction of native culture is that we are placing indigenous people in the past by doing that that's that's the challenge of that kind of story and so when the pioneer daughter is telling that story she's kind of ignoring the ongoing presence of native people yet talk about that a little too i mean i think the sense that the city is a place for native peoples is this is still very selective  often portrayed as ghosts as husks as shell's you actually see that kind of language in these kinds of expos days of native poverty in cities for example or homelessness and so on and all is the biggest challenge i would say with with talking about indigenous history not just in seattle but more generally is this narrative of extinction the constantly vanishing indian that we always have to be working against that indigenous people are working against and those of us who want to work in solidarity with them have to work against as well this notion that the real the real indians are all dead right and that's a really powerful powerful trope in american history and we can see that for example the battle over the  washington football team's name when the critics of the name say it's racist oftentimes people will respond and say well you're not even really indian anymore right and you're just a modern person the real indians are in the past so there's this constant narrative of extinction that we really have to speak out against and instead really focus on something that the ojibway journalist and scholar gerald business talks about he uses the term survive and which is kind of a combination of survival and resistance it's not just mere survival it's actually creative adaptive resistance and that's where i think we should be talking right as opposed to the  vanishing doom and noble savage as a running me of a conversation you and i had some years ago about the fact that native american culture is is preserved and  displayed in the birth museum which is a natural history museum where is european history is it mohai you know that there's this distinct line that somehow native americans are part of the natural history or even the animal kingdom as opposed to the modern industrial city but you're arguing that that they're very much a part of the modern city and how do you how do you how do you address that do we really were museums yeah i mean i think you are thinking there's this long standing sort of disciplinary tree asure that happens maybe is a way of saying that where you know native peoples are in anthropology and white people have history and so i'm a kind of historian that is trying to bridge those disciplinary boundaries by using different strategies research strategies writing strategies and so  on but yeah i mean it's really common certainly here in seattle to have you know the dinosaurs and the brown people in one museum and then the white people in the other museum and that's something that needs to be talked about and why that is that way now mo has come a long way in terms of their representation of indigenous history their relationship with native tribes and so on they've come really far so i don't want to trash talk them they've they were doing a really good job now but that was a long time coming but what's it from your perspective what's how do we how do we navigate appropriation and honoring i mean do we have to do we have to tear down ever salmon house and change the seahawks logo where these things bad or the other words what's the definition of appropriation now and how can we navigate that or is it just is it just we have to move ahead and talk about it more yeah i mean i guess that would be my my answer is that that conversation about appropriation is in many ways kind of a new conversation a new ish conversation that is really just emerging and i think coming into really sort of the the central place of historical consciousness in places like seattle and so things like that you know the seahawks logo and its relationship to a quick walk you walk mask that it was supposedly based on and so on so trying to surface those actual lived embodied histories and relate those to these these logos and these images and so on but i think in general i mean there are no easy answers around the question of appropriation and where is the line between appropriation and honoring i think in those conversations indigenous people are often not listened to and i think that's a really important thing to be attentive to who gets to decide and it's usually unfortunately it's non native people who are deciding that i was wondering you mentioned or we mentioned earlier that the territory in british columbia where you live now is unseeded territory and that obviously you have but that's their first significant reason i wonder if you could talk about that maybe talk about the differences between the american view or the seattle view and the vancouver yeah vancouver in many ways that the history of vancouver it's follows about a generation after seattle's history in terms of when it's founded and and so on and its history is in many ways very very similar the same decade when there is the kind of final dispossession of indigenous life ways in seattle happens the same with decade as the liquidation of reserves in downtown vancouver of the one nine hundred teens is a really critical critical juncture but there are some really important differences one is that there are still reserves within the urban fabric including one about five blocks from where i live and then the other thing is that most of british columbia is not actually covered by that sits on the traditional ancestral and unseated territory of the most queen coast sailors people and that has become really standard protocol for us at u b c and also really for people in indigenous studies so when i'm speaking so for example i spoke at york university in toronto a couple weeks ago and and i said you know i want to acknowledge the ojibway hoda shaunie and other native peoples of this place and also the people of the place where i live and work and that's become really standard in indigenous studies to do that to have that kind of protocol and really ground ourselves in the place that's that's a really important piece and i would say there's a lot of that going on in vancouver now the city has officially recognized that it is on unseeded territory and now that's a symbolic gesture and it doesn't really mean anything physically yet but it's an it's an open question in a way it's not here that that's interesting in the one of the things that i hear more and more about is that we need to  it comes in different forms me university washington now as a long house has a native american space i know conversations are taking place there almost like you know diplomatic talks between university anthropologists and native american tribal anthropologists and historians trying to find ways of working together you know kind of growing out of the kenne controversy but but also recognizing that places are changing names to see names in different parts both the trails particularly things like that seward park school to the main trail there seward park now so there's more and and i'm curious i mean is how would you describe what is in a in a way that you can understand in an urban setting in other words the kind of fabric of that i think we don't know yet i think it's just starting to happen and so you know renaming a park or renaming a trail i think is a really good first step to acknowledging the first language of this place acknowledging indigenous presence and continued presence i think is really important the challenge though that i think comes up is that often these things can be turned into sort of a a touristic kind of commodified experience almost in a way that often actually masks the ongoing issues of settler colonialism for example in a place like seattle and so i think we have to always think it's ok but what's going on on the ground in the united states you know the seward park standing rock what's the connection right is there a connection there i think there is so we need to be talking about that it can't just be this kind of pleasurable interesting name that you take on it has to be something deeper than that i wondered if you had trouble writing the book since you're white purposes and i wonder if you could talk about that that was that it was that a problem did you encounter resistance or pushback yeah there has been some resistance or pushback but i would also say i have a lot of support from  people in the seattle indigenous community or communities really but yeah it's an uncomfortable piece doing this history this history by definition is uncomfortable for everybody that engages it you know i i would not want to give the impression that i am a poor beleaguered white scholar working in indigenous studies that's that's not the experience i have and in fact indigenous studies today is quite expansive and is open to anybody that's doing smart work and it's a difficult field for indigenous scholars as well and there are all kinds of issues that they have to negotiate as well so it's uncomfortable for everybody and that's the nature of colonialism yet could you just give us an example of an uncomfortable thing that had to be muckleshoot reservation and so there were some oral histories in their archives that were pertinent to the seattle landscape and so i use some of those but in getting access to that archive i had to give the right of redaction to the tribe so they got to see whatever i wrote and they got to say yes or no and pull out things that that they thought weren't appropriate that's for a scholar raised in the kind of enlightenment tradition that's a really scary thing to give up that kind of control  ultimately was a really positive experience and there was only one one aspect of the manuscript that they asked to have removed which i was totally fine with but that's that's the nature of this sort of thorny relationship  because at some level i am appropriating this history for my own benefit ultimately even though i'm trying to do it from a position of solidarity with the indigenous community in seattle but it is an uncomfortable negotiation and it always will be and it should be one last question about the native seattle but it's three it really applies more generally is you know i imagine since november you're sitting in challenges you know are going to play out in the years ahead for this country in particular yeah part of me is resentful you even brought that up that we have to talk about this i don't you know the next four years are not going to be easy for indigenous people in in the u s i don't think i think the message is really clear about that having said that i would i want to make sure th american audiences understand that canada you call it a safe perch but canada has its own history of settler colonialism and justin trudeau hot as he is has not made good on the kinds of promises that he made on the campaign trail and is in fact supporting pipelines and so on will and big that big hydroelectric right project yes estate yes and so canada has its own particular history the last residential school which is a system of cultural genocide last residential school in canada closed in one thousand nine hundred six so that's really recent you know i have survivors either first person survivors or the children of survivors in my classes every year so this is present in the classroom this is present with us and in way that i think a lot of americans aren't aware of and canadians can be very smug they look at american history and they say yeah you guys have all the gatling guns you know wounded knee and sand creek and all that so we're sort of a kinder gentler colonialism but it's in some ways more grim in canada than it is here so i was that's a message i always want to carry from canada even though certainly as a progressive queer man i'm very happy to live in the country i live in now as opposed to here yeah well i was i was i was thinking that as a journalist you know i found myself somewhat renewed by being declared an enemy of the people i've got a spring in my step now and maybe the same can be true for indigenous study people the i wanted to get to indigenous london your book which is really fascinating and i hope if you guys haven't had a chance to take a look at it i think you find it really really fascinating and it combines i mean it combines native indigenous history with you know the heart of empire and what happened when these things came together in the ways that they did so how did you get from native seattle to indigenous london it came down to a conversation with my then husband who was a londoner when native seattle came out he sort of half jokingly said well why don't you write a book like that about london and we'll go there on your grant money and i i sort of laughed it off but within about ten minutes i thought oh my god what a great idea for a book nobody has tried to write an indigenous entered history of the center of empire what would that actually look like and it became very clear just doing a little bit of digging through some of the secondary literature that there was a huge tradition of travel again some willingly some otherwise to london on the part of indigenous peoples from all over the world and the book focuses on the count of canada the us new zealand and australia  but that this goes back to fifteen zero two in terms of indigenous presence ten years after columbus there are you know it people in london in westminster palace and so bringing those two kinds of history together for me was really satisfying  each chapter of the book has a playlist on my i tunes catalogue and and it's each playlist will be a mix of music from britain from or england from the time in question for that particular chapter and then music from the cultures that are the focus of that chapter and then i just hit shuffle and so you'll go from thomas tallis to an abbot akki war song and it's just these really abrupt transitions but it kind of moves together into a texture that i think really captures what the book's about is taking these two histories that seem like they should be completely divorced from each other and in fact they're bound up right together they're so intimate with each other so what if you could give us maybe thumbnail sketches of some of the groups that you write about some of the individuals because as you say some were there willingly some unwillingly some we know a lot about some but i would if you could kind of gives a little bit of panorama who some of these people were well the most famous one in the the only one that's kind of recognized in london today is pocahontas who actually dies and she's buried in graves and just east of london and she was there four hundred years ago right now she died and in march of sixteen seventeen in in england and she was there as part of a delegation of power and people who were there trying to figure out who are these new people who are coming to our lands and so they went to london sixteen sixteen to engage with the city and she was a hugely popular figure in her day and really changed people's attitudes about the colonization process and the virginia company was not doing well but then it's sort of it's it's the situation got much better after her presence there she was quite a successful p move for the virginia company in many ways but she also was her own diplomat she was her own investigator she did not survive the trip but the others did and returned home and brought home information about about about london and about the english so you've got that in sixteen seventeen you've got an a or a man named ben along from what's now sydney who comes to london in seven hundred ninety three again is kind of he's often portrayed as a captive but he's there kind of trying to find out who are these new people who are coming to my territory and settling here and what what's coming and so there's an example from seven thousand nine hundred three all the way up to bookends in two thousand and thirteen with an indigenous tell town performance artist and academic named peter moren who does what he calls cultural graffiti in london where he goes around the city to sites of power and he sings tell town songs into the earth at the diana memorial or at the gates of buckingham palace which makes the security there very nervous as you might imagine and so he did a he and i did an intervention a joint intervention to commemorate and you know it baby who had been captured and brought to london in fifteen seventy seven and put on display in a tavern and he died and was buried at a church very near the tower of london and so i told peter this story and he wanted to do some sort of commemoration ritual at the site for the boy but he was told by the verge or of the church you will not drum you will not dance you're not saying you will not do that thing with the smoke that you people do you will do this silently because quote you're in england now and so that that was a for peter that was a really strong resonance with a longer history of colonialism so we did do something there we did do a ritual of sorts of that i want to scribe and we did leave some things behind that i imagine the vergers found later and it was a chance for peter and for me and for the others who participated to really commemorate this child and engage with this deeper history you know those hundreds of years of separation and so the you know the stories in digits london range from poets and performers down to  captives to diplomats missionaries christian missionaries who happen to be indigenous who are going to london to raise money so it's a really diverse bunch of people that are coming for all kinds of reasons i wonder if you can tell us a little bit what primitive is one way you know savages is is quite interesting tell us about yeah the there across the board and one of the challenges of this this book was trying to get a sense of what indigenous people especially in these earlier periods actually thought of the city because it's only in the seven hundred sixty s that you start to get a first person narrative so and after that you don't always get the first person narratives but when you do you have a sense from the sources of what indigenous travellers thought of the city there are two really common path points that come up one is that people are really horrified at the disparity of wealth in the city that there are poor people in the streets you know desperately poor people in the streets  and then as want to travel around the eight hundred forty s describes it houses with that are so big that there's no one at the windows and that there's this kind of extreme wealth and extreme poverty and that this is quite shocking and then the other piece is the is a critique of the ecology of the city the filth how do these people feed themselves none of them can hunt you know how to and that's actually really salient issue for much of london's history how is the city going to feed itself so it's quite cold observers of the city  and then to get to the savagery piece there's a lot of discussion of needing to keep indigenous diplomats away from the masses away from what literally get called the savages of england to keep them away from the poor to keep them out of the amusement fairs to keep them away from prostitutes and sex workers and so on to sort of put the best foot forward on the part of the english for these these delegates and visitors well and they you  tell the story and some of these folks were almost torn apart by the crowds people were so fascinated to see them and i'm curious what what londoners reactions were and i know i know there's a diverse number of people you're talking about but some you know some were thrown in debtor's prison you know they experienced all that thing but what did what did londoners think of these different contingents that came through they were absolutely fascinated by these people who were coming and then and so throngs as you say just complete you know massive crowds you know literally beating down doors to get in and stare at people and so on especially in the eighteenth  century but the other thing that's really interesting about how londoners viewed these travellers was that they use the travellers to talk about themselves they use them to talk about their own gender relations for example so an body and then here is this paragon of womanly virtue from out in the colonies and so there's this constant narrative of comparison and it's really fascinating and so the indigenous travellers in some ways become a mirror for english to look at themselves i was fascinated about some of the research that you did because where some of the attitudes of the observations of the british began to show up is in literature  poem and how did you tell us about digging those out and finding those things and how you would then a fide some of those because there's no index in the library right you can go to and say indigenous visitors references yeah one of the things that i'm really grateful for is is that the way history works is that you build on previous scholarship and so a lot of the people that i wrote about in the book ha had things written about them in the past so simple sort of narrative descriptions of their voyages and luckily those narrative descriptions usually have footnotes so i could take those descriptions and go to the archive and actually go back to the original sources at the huntington library at the british library or wherever but one of the things i wanted to do differently was there are two things i wanted to do differently one was to try to where i could understand those voyages on indigenous  terms and then also make it as much about the city as it was about the travelers and so i want this book to be understood as something that will tell us something new about london and not just be a history of every native traveller who came but that it actually makes the city look different as well and that's something that no one had done before but i'm really grateful there was a man for example a melton fon who was a shakespearean este and he spent his entire career just keeping a file when he found native people in the archive he published this book in two thousand and seven and i just mind the footnotes from that and in some ways i should have dedicated the book to him and then i took it in some other directions which is how it's supposed to work so how do you look at london differently is it does it look different to you when you walk around yeah one of their one of the interesting things about london you know i've spent a lot of time here in seattle trying to imagine that you know greenish yellow spine and that indigenous landscape the that i was describing and it's very hard to do that here you almost have to put yourself in kind of a trance state to see that because the transformations have been so dramatic but what's interesting about london's indigenous history is that it's you know it's st james palace st paul's cathedral it's westminster abbey it's all the sites of power that indigenous people went to and were brought to so the book includes three self guided tours of london two on foot and one on a thames ferry where you can go and actually engage with the london landscape and you can be interesting and go oh that building house why in history in it or that building has mohawk history in it and so that's that disorientation piece and i would say for me i see london differently because when i went into this project i thought i would be uncovering a hidden history and there's a long history of hidden histories in london going back to the early one nine hundred centuries people writing about the opium world in london and we can also think about harry potter and mary poppins and all these kind of hidden landscapes within london and i love that stuff and that's why i thought i would be uncovering but i very quickly figured out that these people were not hidden at all they were hugely visible they've just been forgotten and that forgetting is an active act it's the forgetting of empire which is a real problem in press people seem to really be like it just came out in january in late january so we're still sort of getting word of how people are responding to it my experience with talking to british audiences when i was there on sabbatical a couple of years ago i did a lot of public talks and  walking tours and so on and i found that people either really got it or they really didn't get it because it's so far out of left field that british audiences don't necessarily have a framework for thinking about this and so it's also new and that actually was a an issue for me as a scholar going and giving talks as i was working on the book i often didn't get a lot of very critical feedback because it was just so out of left field that people didn't know they couldn't get any purchase on it so that that was a bit challenging as a scholar but yeah it's been received really well you know it was listed as a book to check out in the guardian which is kind of a dream come true for me to be mentioned in the guardian yeah so i think it'll do well there will see great wondering how london was changed by these visitors whether the reflection that you talked about occurred was there anything fundamental it came out of it or did it just immediately go down the memory hole i'm i think in the twentieth century it went down the memory hole in many ways just as the empire did as the empire kind of collapses in terms  of the change in london i don't want to overstate that because these people were not large in numbers there were not you know hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of indigenous travelers coming you know it was you know a couple hundred  really but their cultural weight or their cultural import was way out of proportion to their numbers and it's that kind of self referential stuff that i was talking about where londoners are using these visits to reflect on themselves and that's that's kind of how empire worked more generally so i don't want to overstate that they transformed london but they help london learn how to become global that's interesting and my next question is really on that on that point  so there's an interesting thing you do structurally in the book which is not typical of academic books which is you have this wonderful history but the chapters are interspersed with these kind of poetical imaginative and co historical work but they add this other kind of really rich dimension and i think i'm biased maybe a little bit because you happen to focus on a character that i'm fascinated with the fact we both we both would like to date this guy one of my favorite figures in history john di and people here know who john di was so john d was queen elizabeth's many roles diplomatic roles he was an advisor and i became fascinated by john d in his connection with with the pacific northwest because it was john d who advised queen elizabeth on pursuing something that he coined the term the british empire and he also laid out a plan as to how the british could make claims in north america that were just that they could justify one of which was that the northern parts of north america the british had some prior claim because king arthur had led expeditions into the arctic and i think he used mallory i can't remember who he used as sources of this material and the idea was that well the spanish don't own all this stuff we have prior claim there and he advised queen elizabeth on drakes around the world trip and of course great was the brit who came to the pacific northwest and claimed it for england no new albion so i love that history and it's something most northwesterners don't know much about well you talk about it in your book but also you have this really fascinating other element which is john d and a particular object and i wonder if you can tell us about that object and how it relates to indigenous work and the influence it may or may not have had  john john di as you say was the first person to use the phrase the british empire in print in the fifteenth seventies and he is a fascinating figure my students call him my historical boyfriend and he he  of you know england was a little bit of a late comer to colonialism compared certainly to spain and so he was part of this process in the late sixteenth century of england imagining itself as an imperial entity and i became quite interested  in him because of that but i also became interested in him because of something he owned and so these six interludes in the book are each there are free verse poetry built out of archival fragments and some of my own language and each one is about an object so there's a hat factory there's a statue there's a last museum there's a debtor's petition there's a notebook and then the very first one is a mirror and it's a mirror that belonged to john d so john d was he employed mediums to scribe so to look into reflective surfaces and have visions of angels and so on and that was part of how he did his natural philosophy and one of those mirrors that his medium scriabin was an aztec obsidian mirror  that had somehow gotten into his collection in the in the sort of middle to late part of the sixteenth century and so i would would have loved to be able to prove that the british empire was first seen in an aztec mirror and i couldn't i couldn't quite get there i couldn't quite prove that but i try to set those things against each other and say you know from the very beginning of this idea of the british empire it's already untangled with indigenous history it's already there and that mirror still exists it's on display in the british museum you can actually go and see it this this last year and we may talk more about this this last summer i took a group of students to london for a course called in search of indigenous london and one of the things we didn't think of yeah and one of the things we did was we went and saw the mirror and john yeah yeah i don't know that i would have actually liked him in person but but in you know in the course of the class we were there for two weeks and we did things like go behind the scenes of the british library and look at documents that some of the indigenous travelers had actually signed using their  and clan symbols for example we went behind the scenes of the british museum and we made a day trip to oxford we went to graves and pocahontas is burial place and so on and for the students most of whom were indigenous themselves and some of them their first time out of canada this is a really powerful story so for example at the british museum in the great court there are these height of totem poles and one of my students owen was height is haida and he was looking at the polls and looking at the little plaque and he realised that the poles had belonged to his great grandfather and so for him this was an incredibly complicated experience the pride the connection to being a the grief about why is this here why is this not in front of the house my dad grew up in and so on and so those are the kinds of work that we were doing in addition to the kind of scholarly work that we were doing but we spent a lot of time walking around the city it was really a lot of fun really powerful i mean to do it again in the of where scholarship what are the areas of scholarship in your field that are hot right now where where where is it trending and yeah just what does that landscape of that look like yeah yeah that's an interesting question yeah it's it's a very very hot field right now indigenous studies it's we're actually u b c is hosting the native american and indigenous studies assessed nation conference this june which will have about a thousand scholars from all over the world come and talk about their work about seventy five percent of the scholars are themselves indigenous so that's there's a real transformation happening in academia right now in terms of the simple demographics of who's doing the work which is really really exciting  i would say the probably the hottest areas right now have to do with intersectionality to have to do have to do with the intersections between indigenous experience and say black experience or indigenous experience and queer experience and to spirit experience and so on that it's where those places come together that there's a lot of interesting scholarship happening right now and there's also a lot of genre crossing going on so a lot of intersections between traditional academic writing and  prose and poetry songwriting art and so on and there's some really really amazing work happening one one person that you might want to look into if you're interested in this sort of thing as the writer liane simpson writer from canada and she's i don't know if she'd like me to say from canada that actually doesn't seem appropriate given her work but it's really fantastic fantastic work billy ray belcourt who is a rhodes scholar in oxford right now and his creed and doing amazing to spirit work as well so it's just an exploding field right now it's really exciting it's hard to keep track of what is to spirit to spirit is a term for  indigenous people who do not identify as heterosexual that's that's one way of saying it many indigenous cultures around the world have three and four genders and so these two spirit is a term that kind of encapsul course i know it has to do with the auburn area you're from auburn and when i when i heard slaughter town i mediately the green river killer i know that's not where the name comes from but you're kind of probing into some dark stuff there and i wonder if you can tell us about yeah this this is my my next book but it's also the book i've been working on for probably about twenty five years in a lot of ways and often academics when they get to their third book that's the book they really wanted to write the whole time and so slaughter town is is it's going to be basically a meditation on historical trauma and landscape and place and it's set in auburn and it focuses on four terrible things that happen hundred one of the three rivers in town was essentially eradicated in one thousand nine hundred two a significant percentage of the town's population was sent to internment camps because they were japanese and japanese american and then in the one nine hundred eighty s as  you suggested it became the center of the u s as large a serial killer case that gary ridgway case the green river killer and so i'm interested in how those stories are silenced but still active and how they leave marks in the landscape  how they represent larger violence is at the heart of american history so it's not a light project at all so for example one of the sources that i have to work with that i've just dipped into a little bit are the depositions that gary ridgway gave to avoid the death penalty and it's you know it's several binders about that thick and that's really heavy heavy stuff it is and i don't want to center him that's not the point of this but i do need to you  yeah so it's going to be really an interesting project and i'm in no rush to write a song you know it'll take as long as it takes a deadline yeah we have tenure so i think this this issue of trauma in the landscape is fascinating to me because i think that in a certainly connects to work that i've been doing in the last year and a half of reporting on some dark aspects of our past in the northwest and place naming and that kind of thing i this this issue you talk about in london of forgetting i mean i think most people here have no idea of the trauma and savagery by design that took place to make the peaceful farms and in the you know world's most livable city and that kind of thing i think and i'm wondering how are you as i want to ask you you know how do those traumas scapes is it simply telling the stories about what happened there that helps surface things and how do you get past people's resistance to hearing those stories because forgetting is is not often a passive thing it's an active thing wow that's a that's a really big  question i think it is about surfacing thing that the pain of the past and i you know in recent years i've really come to to have a different relationship with the work i do as a historian that i don't approach it as or mining of data that instead what i do for a living as i translate for the debt and that i try to have a really huge humble relationship to the people i'm writing about and so partially it's about surfacing those stories but it's also really being able to write in a way that understands how those stories are ongoing these are not things that are just in the past these are things that people still live with today that people carry forward you know i'm i've muckleshoot you know and who has helped collect the stories of the first treaty war you know in those stories are still active from eight hundred fifty five and fifty six the stories are still active in the community today  and so these these things aren't gone and we can see them connected to events that are happening today and i think that's really important to say the that this is still with us and there's a new science that's developing right now of epigenetics that's looking at how  historical traumas get passed on an almost never genetic fashion from generation to generation and of course science is now catching up with what most communities already know is that you know we carry these things in our in our bodies right and so what i'm interested in is how do the land how does the land hold that you know is there an epigenetics of landscape and so i think that's what slaughter towns about it's also going to be partially a memoir of growing up in that place and my own family's history of westward migration to that place which involves a lot of inner generational violence and so we'll see it's going to be some genre crossing again you know it's really really interesting thank you so much for this been a great great to talk to