Robbie Richardson
banner
londonmikmaq.bsky.social
Robbie Richardson
@londonmikmaq.bsky.social
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.

Teaches 18th-century lit and Indigenous Studies.
Another good Mi’gmaq language card from Listuguj
November 27, 2025 at 8:28 PM
Excellent Mi’gmaq language flash card.
November 27, 2025 at 1:18 PM
Visiting family and found the tiniest Mi’gmaw basket in my brother’s house, still made of ash and sweetgrass like the big ones.
November 26, 2025 at 4:28 PM
An Iñupiaq cribbage board made and painted by Wilbur Willuk in 1958 out of a whale's tooth.
November 22, 2025 at 7:07 PM
A cribbage board made from walrus ivory by an Inuit artist around c.1900.
November 21, 2025 at 7:53 PM
This brilliant poem by Layli Long Soldier was one of the class favourites from her book.
November 21, 2025 at 12:29 AM
This week’s teaching.
November 17, 2025 at 2:46 PM
This headline ticks all the boxes for me.
November 15, 2025 at 6:08 PM
The so-called “Cup of Montezuma,” made c.1400 and later drawn in London at the Society of Antiquaries in 1763. William Robertson claimed it was the only “unquestionable“ piece of Mexican art in Britain in 1777, but it is actually from a Chimú artist in Peru.
November 14, 2025 at 6:18 PM
I’ve heard of the monster being conflated with its creator but not quite to this level.
November 13, 2025 at 1:47 PM
A tiny Indian primer, or book of religious instruction written in Wampanoag and printed at Harvard College in 1669; the buckskin cover and wooden binding are original, and the now-faint strawberry design is believed to have been done by an Indigenous binder. The book has been in Scotland since 1675.
November 12, 2025 at 8:36 PM
A medieval staircase from Mallorca, purchased by William Randolph Hearst when the original house was torn down and planned for his house in Beverley Hills, but sold en route from a warehouse in the Bronx to European nobles in exile in New Jersey who installed it in their home until the 1950s.
November 9, 2025 at 12:01 AM
It's International Inuit Day! Check out this wonderful print by the late great Inuit artist Kananginak Pootoogook called "The First Tourist."
November 7, 2025 at 7:00 PM
I love Morandi’s still lifes and John Berger’s observation that “One suspects that the bottles only contain a little water for sprinkling on the floor or eau-de-cologne for cooling the forehead—certainly nothing as strong as wine.“
November 7, 2025 at 1:04 AM
A Wari drum from Peru, used between 500-800 CE; old instruments always fascinate me when they are played and brought to life with sound that bridges ancestral time and the present.
November 5, 2025 at 6:39 PM
This is almost as beautiful as one of the poems Anne Carson read
November 5, 2025 at 2:49 AM
Anne Carson. I kept thinking of her line, “Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.”
November 5, 2025 at 2:02 AM
A monumental mosaic by Nick Cave (the American artist) called “Let me kindly introduce myself. They call me MC Prince Brighton” (2025) in the entrance to the new Princeton Art Museum.
November 3, 2025 at 8:27 PM
And then you follow a corridor of trees and there’s uncanny Monet
November 3, 2025 at 1:04 PM
Sometimes you’re walking in a strange park in New Jersey that already feels a bit unsettling and you come across Manet’s 1862 painting Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe in a wooded grove.
November 2, 2025 at 7:21 PM
George Washington at the Battle of Princeton in 1783, painted from life and given by him to the university, beside Mohawk artist Alan Michelson‘s bust “Hanödaga:yas (Town Destroyer): Reflect”; the Haudenosaunee called Washington this for his brutal destruction and looting of 60 of their villages.
November 1, 2025 at 6:31 PM
It’s Halloween in Jersey.
October 31, 2025 at 11:37 AM
Today’s Indigenous lit class: Kyle Whyte and Leslie Marmon Silko.
October 30, 2025 at 1:39 PM
Inuit carver Peter Pitseolak’s Sedna Legend (1968) in green serpentine and walrus ivory. It depicts Sedna, goddess of the sea and marine animals, on top of a tuugaalik or narwhal. When angry, Sedna tangles sea creatures in her hair and the angakkuq must travel to wash and comb it.
October 29, 2025 at 2:08 PM
From painter Benjamin West’s 1797 commission for eccentric William Beckford‘s gothic revival folly Fonthill Abbey. These apocalyptic scenes were for the planned but unrealised “Revelation Chamber”, where Beckford had wished to place his own tomb.
October 28, 2025 at 10:35 AM