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In the 1996 British comedy-drama Secrets & Lies, Hortense, a young middle-class black woman in London, having lost both of her adoptive parents, decides to seek out her biological mother - who turns out to be a working-class white woman named Cynthia. Director Mike Leigh is known for collaborating in depth with his actors to create vivid, deeply realized characters and performances. Secrets & Lies is an outstanding specimen of a lost genre: a kitchen-sink drama that relies entirely on its rich humanity to keep us watching. Andrew Petiprin joins Criteria to discuss the movie. Links Spe Salvi Institute https://www.spesalviinstitute.com/ Article about the displacement of Cockneys, "Indigenous London" https://firstthings.com/indigenous-london/ DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters Music is The Duskwhales, "Take It Back", used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com
In this episode, Louise Perry joins Rusty Reno on The Editor's Desk to talk about her recent essay, “Indigenous London,” from the November 2025 issue of the magazine.
In this episode, Louise Perry joins Rusty Reno on The Editor's Desk to talk about her recent essay, “Indigenous London,” from the November 2025 issue of the magazine.
Coll Thrush's new book is an imaginative and beautifully-written history of London framed by the experiences of indigenous travelers since early modernity. Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016) brings together urban and indigenous histories, arguing that indigenous people around the world have actively engaged with and helped create the world we call modern, including its great urban centers. The book is organized around domains of entanglement, with each chapter following a particular set of travelers to explore a particular way that urban and Indigenous histories are linked: knowledge, disorder, reason, ritual, discipline, memory. Interspersed with these chapters are free-verse poetical interludes that weave archival fragments and Thrush's own writerly voice together in stories of particular objects that mark the book's journey: a mirror, a debtors' petition, a pair of statues, a lost museum, a hat factory, a notebook. It is a thoughtful, compelling account that will be of interest to a wide range of readers interested in indigenous studies, urban history, early modern history, and London itself. An appendix on Self-Guided Encounters with Indigenous London helps readers use the book as a kind of travel guide to help activate the history of Indigenous London into shaping explorations of the city today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Coll Thrush’s new book is an imaginative and beautifully-written history of London framed by the experiences of indigenous travelers since early modernity. Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016) brings together urban and indigenous histories, arguing that indigenous people around the world have actively engaged with and helped create the world we call modern, including its great urban centers. The book is organized around domains of entanglement, with each chapter following a particular set of travelers to explore a particular way that urban and Indigenous histories are linked: knowledge, disorder, reason, ritual, discipline, memory. Interspersed with these chapters are free-verse poetical interludes that weave archival fragments and Thrush’s own writerly voice together in stories of particular objects that mark the book’s journey: a mirror, a debtors’ petition, a pair of statues, a lost museum, a hat factory, a notebook. It is a thoughtful, compelling account that will be of interest to a wide range of readers interested in indigenous studies, urban history, early modern history, and London itself. An appendix on Self-Guided Encounters with Indigenous London helps readers use the book as a kind of travel guide to help activate the history of Indigenous London into shaping explorations of the city today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Coll Thrush’s new book is an imaginative and beautifully-written history of London framed by the experiences of indigenous travelers since early modernity. Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016) brings together urban and indigenous histories, arguing that indigenous people around the world have actively engaged with and helped create the world we call modern, including its great urban centers. The book is organized around domains of entanglement, with each chapter following a particular set of travelers to explore a particular way that urban and Indigenous histories are linked: knowledge, disorder, reason, ritual, discipline, memory. Interspersed with these chapters are free-verse poetical interludes that weave archival fragments and Thrush’s own writerly voice together in stories of particular objects that mark the book’s journey: a mirror, a debtors’ petition, a pair of statues, a lost museum, a hat factory, a notebook. It is a thoughtful, compelling account that will be of interest to a wide range of readers interested in indigenous studies, urban history, early modern history, and London itself. An appendix on Self-Guided Encounters with Indigenous London helps readers use the book as a kind of travel guide to help activate the history of Indigenous London into shaping explorations of the city today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Coll Thrush’s new book is an imaginative and beautifully-written history of London framed by the experiences of indigenous travelers since early modernity. Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016) brings together urban and indigenous histories, arguing that indigenous people around the world have actively engaged with and helped create the world we call modern, including its great urban centers. The book is organized around domains of entanglement, with each chapter following a particular set of travelers to explore a particular way that urban and Indigenous histories are linked: knowledge, disorder, reason, ritual, discipline, memory. Interspersed with these chapters are free-verse poetical interludes that weave archival fragments and Thrush’s own writerly voice together in stories of particular objects that mark the book’s journey: a mirror, a debtors’ petition, a pair of statues, a lost museum, a hat factory, a notebook. It is a thoughtful, compelling account that will be of interest to a wide range of readers interested in indigenous studies, urban history, early modern history, and London itself. An appendix on Self-Guided Encounters with Indigenous London helps readers use the book as a kind of travel guide to help activate the history of Indigenous London into shaping explorations of the city today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Coll Thrush’s new book is an imaginative and beautifully-written history of London framed by the experiences of indigenous travelers since early modernity. Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016) brings together urban and indigenous histories, arguing that indigenous people around the world have actively engaged with and helped create the world we call modern, including its great urban centers. The book is organized around domains of entanglement, with each chapter following a particular set of travelers to explore a particular way that urban and Indigenous histories are linked: knowledge, disorder, reason, ritual, discipline, memory. Interspersed with these chapters are free-verse poetical interludes that weave archival fragments and Thrush’s own writerly voice together in stories of particular objects that mark the book’s journey: a mirror, a debtors’ petition, a pair of statues, a lost museum, a hat factory, a notebook. It is a thoughtful, compelling account that will be of interest to a wide range of readers interested in indigenous studies, urban history, early modern history, and London itself. An appendix on Self-Guided Encounters with Indigenous London helps readers use the book as a kind of travel guide to help activate the history of Indigenous London into shaping explorations of the city today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Coll Thrush’s new book is an imaginative and beautifully-written history of London framed by the experiences of indigenous travelers since early modernity. Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016) brings together urban and indigenous histories, arguing that indigenous people around the world have actively engaged with and helped create the world we call modern, including its great urban centers. The book is organized around domains of entanglement, with each chapter following a particular set of travelers to explore a particular way that urban and Indigenous histories are linked: knowledge, disorder, reason, ritual, discipline, memory. Interspersed with these chapters are free-verse poetical interludes that weave archival fragments and Thrush’s own writerly voice together in stories of particular objects that mark the book’s journey: a mirror, a debtors’ petition, a pair of statues, a lost museum, a hat factory, a notebook. It is a thoughtful, compelling account that will be of interest to a wide range of readers interested in indigenous studies, urban history, early modern history, and London itself. An appendix on Self-Guided Encounters with Indigenous London helps readers use the book as a kind of travel guide to help activate the history of Indigenous London into shaping explorations of the city today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Scholars have long treated cities as spaces in which indigenous people have little presence and less significance. This notion that urbanity and indignity stand at odds results from a potent mix of racist essentialism and the historical myth of progress from savagery to civilization. Just as this paradigm excludes native peoples from the City, it excludes them from modernity. Perhaps no city expresses this erasure of Indigenous bodies, minds, and histories so effectively as London, the capital of the British Empire. Yet as Dr. Coll Thrush demonstrates in his new book Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016), beneath this erasure lie centuries of indigenous experience. In his hands London becomes not merely the Heart of Empire but the periphery of a richly textured indigenous diaspora, a Red Atlantic. Dr. Thrush ambitiously recasts five centuries of London’s history through the lived experiences of native visitors from Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. These travelers were royal statesmen and diplomats, missionaries and athletes. They came to further the complex interests of their own Nations. They critiqued the metropolis’s excess, its ecological unsustainability, and its inhumanity towards the poor. In doing so, they participated in creating London’s present. Their impact remains in London’s material culture and its understanding of its own urban and suburban realities. Join us as Dr. Thrush invites us into an Indigenous London that is not so much hidden as deliberately silenced, and which courses throughout the fabric of the modern city. Jeremy Wood is a Seattle attorney. Much of his legal and scholarly work has concerned Native American interests. Additionally he serves as a Human Rights Commissioner for the City of Seattle and teaches Jewish literature to middle and high school students in an after school program. You can find out more about his work by visiting https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyfwood. He can be reach at jeremywood10@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Scholars have long treated cities as spaces in which indigenous people have little presence and less significance. This notion that urbanity and indignity stand at odds results from a potent mix of racist essentialism and the historical myth of progress from savagery to civilization. Just as this paradigm excludes native peoples from the City, it excludes them from modernity. Perhaps no city expresses this erasure of Indigenous bodies, minds, and histories so effectively as London, the capital of the British Empire. Yet as Dr. Coll Thrush demonstrates in his new book Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016), beneath this erasure lie centuries of indigenous experience. In his hands London becomes not merely the Heart of Empire but the periphery of a richly textured indigenous diaspora, a Red Atlantic. Dr. Thrush ambitiously recasts five centuries of London’s history through the lived experiences of native visitors from Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. These travelers were royal statesmen and diplomats, missionaries and athletes. They came to further the complex interests of their own Nations. They critiqued the metropolis’s excess, its ecological unsustainability, and its inhumanity towards the poor. In doing so, they participated in creating London’s present. Their impact remains in London’s material culture and its understanding of its own urban and suburban realities. Join us as Dr. Thrush invites us into an Indigenous London that is not so much hidden as deliberately silenced, and which courses throughout the fabric of the modern city. Jeremy Wood is a Seattle attorney. Much of his legal and scholarly work has concerned Native American interests. Additionally he serves as a Human Rights Commissioner for the City of Seattle and teaches Jewish literature to middle and high school students in an after school program. You can find out more about his work by visiting https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyfwood. He can be reach at jeremywood10@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Scholars have long treated cities as spaces in which indigenous people have little presence and less significance. This notion that urbanity and indignity stand at odds results from a potent mix of racist essentialism and the historical myth of progress from savagery to civilization. Just as this paradigm excludes native peoples from the City, it excludes them from modernity. Perhaps no city expresses this erasure of Indigenous bodies, minds, and histories so effectively as London, the capital of the British Empire. Yet as Dr. Coll Thrush demonstrates in his new book Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016), beneath this erasure lie centuries of indigenous experience. In his hands London becomes not merely the Heart of Empire but the periphery of a richly textured indigenous diaspora, a Red Atlantic. Dr. Thrush ambitiously recasts five centuries of London’s history through the lived experiences of native visitors from Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. These travelers were royal statesmen and diplomats, missionaries and athletes. They came to further the complex interests of their own Nations. They critiqued the metropolis’s excess, its ecological unsustainability, and its inhumanity towards the poor. In doing so, they participated in creating London’s present. Their impact remains in London’s material culture and its understanding of its own urban and suburban realities. Join us as Dr. Thrush invites us into an Indigenous London that is not so much hidden as deliberately silenced, and which courses throughout the fabric of the modern city. Jeremy Wood is a Seattle attorney. Much of his legal and scholarly work has concerned Native American interests. Additionally he serves as a Human Rights Commissioner for the City of Seattle and teaches Jewish literature to middle and high school students in an after school program. You can find out more about his work by visiting https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyfwood. He can be reach at jeremywood10@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Scholars have long treated cities as spaces in which indigenous people have little presence and less significance. This notion that urbanity and indignity stand at odds results from a potent mix of racist essentialism and the historical myth of progress from savagery to civilization. Just as this paradigm excludes native peoples from the City, it excludes them from modernity. Perhaps no city expresses this erasure of Indigenous bodies, minds, and histories so effectively as London, the capital of the British Empire. Yet as Dr. Coll Thrush demonstrates in his new book Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016), beneath this erasure lie centuries of indigenous experience. In his hands London becomes not merely the Heart of Empire but the periphery of a richly textured indigenous diaspora, a Red Atlantic. Dr. Thrush ambitiously recasts five centuries of London’s history through the lived experiences of native visitors from Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. These travelers were royal statesmen and diplomats, missionaries and athletes. They came to further the complex interests of their own Nations. They critiqued the metropolis’s excess, its ecological unsustainability, and its inhumanity towards the poor. In doing so, they participated in creating London’s present. Their impact remains in London’s material culture and its understanding of its own urban and suburban realities. Join us as Dr. Thrush invites us into an Indigenous London that is not so much hidden as deliberately silenced, and which courses throughout the fabric of the modern city. Jeremy Wood is a Seattle attorney. Much of his legal and scholarly work has concerned Native American interests. Additionally he serves as a Human Rights Commissioner for the City of Seattle and teaches Jewish literature to middle and high school students in an after school program. You can find out more about his work by visiting https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyfwood. He can be reach at jeremywood10@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Scholars have long treated cities as spaces in which indigenous people have little presence and less significance. This notion that urbanity and indignity stand at odds results from a potent mix of racist essentialism and the historical myth of progress from savagery to civilization. Just as this paradigm excludes native peoples from the City, it excludes them from modernity. Perhaps no city expresses this erasure of Indigenous bodies, minds, and histories so effectively as London, the capital of the British Empire. Yet as Dr. Coll Thrush demonstrates in his new book Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016), beneath this erasure lie centuries of indigenous experience. In his hands London becomes not merely the Heart of Empire but the periphery of a richly textured indigenous diaspora, a Red Atlantic. Dr. Thrush ambitiously recasts five centuries of London’s history through the lived experiences of native visitors from Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. These travelers were royal statesmen and diplomats, missionaries and athletes. They came to further the complex interests of their own Nations. They critiqued the metropolis’s excess, its ecological unsustainability, and its inhumanity towards the poor. In doing so, they participated in creating London’s present. Their impact remains in London’s material culture and its understanding of its own urban and suburban realities. Join us as Dr. Thrush invites us into an Indigenous London that is not so much hidden as deliberately silenced, and which courses throughout the fabric of the modern city. Jeremy Wood is a Seattle attorney. Much of his legal and scholarly work has concerned Native American interests. Additionally he serves as a Human Rights Commissioner for the City of Seattle and teaches Jewish literature to middle and high school students in an after school program. You can find out more about his work by visiting https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyfwood. He can be reach at jeremywood10@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Scholars have long treated cities as spaces in which indigenous people have little presence and less significance. This notion that urbanity and indignity stand at odds results from a potent mix of racist essentialism and the historical myth of progress from savagery to civilization. Just as this paradigm excludes native peoples from the City, it excludes them from modernity. Perhaps no city expresses this erasure of Indigenous bodies, minds, and histories so effectively as London, the capital of the British Empire. Yet as Dr. Coll Thrush demonstrates in his new book Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire (Yale University Press, 2016), beneath this erasure lie centuries of indigenous experience. In his hands London becomes not merely the Heart of Empire but the periphery of a richly textured indigenous diaspora, a Red Atlantic. Dr. Thrush ambitiously recasts five centuries of London’s history through the lived experiences of native visitors from Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. These travelers were royal statesmen and diplomats, missionaries and athletes. They came to further the complex interests of their own Nations. They critiqued the metropolis’s excess, its ecological unsustainability, and its inhumanity towards the poor. In doing so, they participated in creating London’s present. Their impact remains in London’s material culture and its understanding of its own urban and suburban realities. Join us as Dr. Thrush invites us into an Indigenous London that is not so much hidden as deliberately silenced, and which courses throughout the fabric of the modern city. Jeremy Wood is a Seattle attorney. Much of his legal and scholarly work has concerned Native American interests. Additionally he serves as a Human Rights Commissioner for the City of Seattle and teaches Jewish literature to middle and high school students in an after school program. You can find out more about his work by visiting https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyfwood. He can be reach at jeremywood10@gmail.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices