Robbie Richardson
@londonmikmaq
Oinpegitjoig Mi'gmaw. Wrote The Savage and Modern Self: North American Indians in 18th-Century British Literature and Culture. Next book on Indigenous material culture in the 18thc.
Tropical view of Brodick Castle on the Isle of Arran, which often hosted Napoleon III during his exile in the 1840s while plotting his ascent to power; Marx later described him as a “grotesque mediocrity” and inspired his famous dictum that historical figures appear first as tragedy, then as farce.
Views from a Scottish ferry of Holy Isle on the right, home to the 6th-century hermit Saint Molaise, and on the left Ailsa Craig, whose distant outline inspired Keats to write about the “craggy ocean pyramid” and eternity.
This is amazing-- a page of Mi'kmaq hieroglyphs or gomgwejui'gasit, with their meanings in Mi'kmaq and some in English; these were written by a Naskapi-Innu man named Gabriel in the 1790s.
Sometimes walking home down Glasgow alleys has a Pompeii vibe about it.
A portrait of a ringless Brant in London in 1776 on this same trip; his gorget and tomahawk are both still around.
A gold ring purchased in England in 1775-6 by Mohawk leader Joseph Brant; there he had his Mohawk name Thayendanegea engraved on it so that, according to some sources, he could be identified if he died in battle.
Some of the serrated mountains that are the namesake of the ancient monastery and pre-Christian site of Montserrat.
The article partly discusses the Townshend monument in westminster abbey, which depicts two Indigenous men modelled on a young Odawa boy kidnapped and brought to London as a gift for a British general.
A picture from Geneva in 1923, when Deskaheh Levi General (Cayuga) visited the League of Nations in an attempt to gain international recognition of Haudenosaunee sovereignty.
This seagull was really vibing with his reflection on a tenement stoop today.
Spotting this sign makes me want to make more pilgrimages to sites where people sold out their political and/or aesthetic ideals.
Dusk in a small Lake District village. In 1802 Dorothy Wordsworth wrote in her journal that this is a village she “dearly loved to think of”; around this very spot she washed her feet in the clear and shallow river after getting refreshments with William in the pub still a few metres downstream.
A 17th-century Seneca comb with a horse effigy, made from moose antler.
A comb carved from a moose antler by a Haudenosaunee (likely Seneca) artist in the 17th century. One of the figures is in European dress, perhaps depicting diplomacy. Sky Woman, who fell to the earth in the creation story, was born after her mother straightened her father's hair with a comb.
A former Luxembourg civil servant has just sent me postage with a new stamp that commemorates the first printed book of Mi’kmaq hieroglyphic writing (printed by a Luxembourger catholic missionary 160 years ago). No doubt the first stamp ever to include this script!
A ladybird on a wild strawberry plant in the west end of Glasgow.
The McMillan Reading room around the time of its opening in the 1930s
I love the art deco vibe of this round reading room in Glasgow, completed in 1939 and modelled on the Pantheon.
A copy of Odawa historian Andrew Blackbird's 1887 book History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan with birchbark binding and porcupine quillwork decoration by his sister Margaret Boyd.
A painting from the first half of the 19th century of four Haudenosaunee women in traditional dress, painted in the Iroquois Realist style by Native artist Thomas Jacobs (Seneca or Tuscarora).
A scan of a short history of my reserve, written by a cherished late chief and elder from the community in 1982 and archived at INAC. It’s still so rare to find such perspectives in histories of Indigenous people.
A postage box in a village on a small Scottish island that has been yarn bombed with a knitted PS Waverley, the last ocean-going paddle steamer still running (named after the Walter Scott novel.)
Seneca farmer, leader, translator, and orator Nicholson Parker (Gye-wah-go-wa) in 1851. He gave powerful public lectures to white audiences about Haudenosaunee culture and history in New York throughout the 1850s.