Parliament Square/Westminster Abbey

Westminster Abbey was a common destination for many Indigenous travellers, who each had their own distinct responses to the imposing space full of the dead. Liholiho and Kamamalu chose not to enter it, for example, since the dead there were strangers. Bill Mai'oho, curator of the Royal Mausoleum of Hawaii, has noted that Liholiho would have considered it a desecration of the burial place of Kings to whom he had no blood connection, had he entered the Abbey. For S7aplekand his Salish counterparts in 1906, the abbey was of great interest—in particular the Stone of Scone and the shrine of Edward the Confessor. S7aplek, a Squamish leader, was one of a group of four Salish people who arrived in London in 1906. They met and befriended Tekahionwake, or E. Pauline Johnson, a Mohawk poet, who greeted them in the Chinook jargon. The group included Ispaymilt (CowichanNation), Basil David (Secwepmc), and Simon Pierre (Stó:lō). Wearing regalia that denoted his right to speak for the Indigenous people of British Columbia (a bright sash from the upper Fraser, buckskin and fox fur from the northern interior, and his own mountain-goat wool blanket), S7aplek led the delegation to meet with the Crown, thus circumventing provincial and federal authorities. Their petition—highlighting the fact that Indigenous title to most of BC had never been extinguished—was greatly embarrassing to the colonial authorities. While the King received them warmly, Canadian officials intent on undermining their trip limited the visit to only fifteen minutes; nevertheless, the men left feeling hopeful. Returning to the Abbey, for people for whom stones could be ancestors and sources of spiritual and political authority, the stone beneath the Coronation Chair would have made immediate sense and, since ancestral names could carry power across generations, the distance between Edward the Confessor and Edward VII would have seemed short indeed. Elsewhere in the Abbey, you can find the Townshend monument, its two atlantes modelled on the Odawa boy brought back to Craven Street in 1761.