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The Iceberg and the Cathedral: Encounter, Entanglement, and Isuma in Inuit London

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2014

Coll Thrush
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Abstract

In 1772, entrepreneur George Cartwright brought five Inuit people to England from Nunatsiavut (Labrador). Most of their time was spent in London, where they encountered many of the city's sights and experienced its social divisions and environmental conditions. This article explores their voyage, challenging the notion that “primitives” such as the Inuit visitors were necessarily awed into submission by the urban landscape. Rather, they understood it according to their own cultural logics and even articulated critiques of the city. Illustrating the entanglement of urban and Inuit spaces and places across the Atlantic, and ending by telling the story of the death of four of the five visitors from smallpox in 1773, the article argues for a new kind of scholarship that shows connections between Indigenous and urban histories at the transoceanic and imperial levels.

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Articles
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 59 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2014 

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References

1 Following the lead of noted Kanaka Maoli scholar Silva's, Noenoe K. arguments in her award-winning Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, I have chosen not to italicize Inuit words in this essay in order to normalize them and place them on equal ground with English concepts and terms.

2 These spellings and the English translations of their names used throughout this article are drawn from Dorais, Louis Jacques, The Inuit Language in Southern Labrador, 1694–1785 (Ottawa, 1980)Google Scholar, 12, 13, 18, 19, 22, 26. Despite its vast geographic range and important dialect differences, Inuktitut, the Inuit language, is remarkably consistent across the arctic. Where possible, I have tried to use the dialect of Labrador in this essay (e.g., the visitors' personal names); however, many of the Inuktitut terms I employ come from better-attested dialects, in particular those of Nunavut.

3 Cartwright, George, A Journal of Transactions and Events During a Residence of Nearly Sixteen Years on the Coast of Labrador (London, 1792)Google Scholar, I:266–67.

4 The meaning of this place name, as well as its correct spelling in present-day Inuktitut orthography, is unclear. See Lisa Rankin et al., “Toponymic and Cartographic Research Conducted for the Labrador Métis Nation,” September 2008, available at http://www.mun.ca/labmetis/pdf/toponymy%20final%20report.pdf (accessed 13 September 2012). Drawing from early explorers' accounts, this report also suggests that the more specific name for the people to whom Atajuq and the others belonged, as opposed to the generalized “Inuit,” was Netcetumiut, a name that appears to mean “sealing-place people.”

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14 While there is a fairly healthy scholarship on the social history and sociology of urban Indigenous communities, relatively few scholars have examined urban colonialism or the relationship between urbanity and Indigeneity more generally. Examples include Thrush, Coll, Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (Seattle, 2007)Google Scholar; Victoria Freeman, “‘Toronto Has No History!’: Indigeneity, Settler Colonialism, and Historical Memory in Canada's Largest City” (PhD dissertation, Toronto, 2010); Edmonds, Penelope, Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous People and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities (Vancouver, 2010)Google Scholar; Barman, Jean, “Erasing Indigenous Indigeneity in Vancouver,” BC Studies 155 (2007): 3–30Google Scholar; Stanger-Ross, Jordan, “Municipal Colonialism in Vancouver: City Planning and the Conflict over Indian Reserves, 1928–1950s,” Canadian Historical Review 89, no. 4 (December 2008): 541–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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23 Cartwright mentioned Mikkuq in a July 1770 entry in his journal as part of a description of a counterpart named Mr. Lucas, who “had great expectations, in consequence of the interest he had with Mycock, the woman whom he took to England about a year and a half ago, and from whom he had learned their language.” Cartwright, A Journal, I:B2.

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73 Ibid., 11–12, 17.

74 For recent and contemporary issues in Labrador/Nunatsiavut, see Our Footsteps Are Everywhere; Settlement, Subsistence, and Change Among the Labrador Inuit: The Nunatsiavummiut Experience, ed. Natcher, David C., Felt, Lawrence, and Procter, Andrea (Winnipeg, 2012)Google Scholar; and the Nunatsiavut government's official website, www.nunatsiavat.com.

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