Religion and memory on the land
Kiinawin Kawindomowin Story Nations re-mediates the diary of a Toronto missionary-journalist named Frederick H. Du Vernet, who visited the Rainy River Ojibwe of Treaty 3 territory in the summer of 1898. Developed in consultation with people from Rainy River First Nations, the website documents Ojibwe responses to Christianity through multimedia storytelling that includes perspectives from the past and present.
At the dawn of the radio age in the 1920s, a settler-mystic living on northwest coast of British Columbia invented radio mind: Frederick Du Vernet—Anglican archbishop and self-declared scientist—announced a psychic channel by which minds could telepathically communicate across distance. Through retelling Du Vernet’s imaginative experiment,The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land shows how agents of colonialism built metaphysical traditions on land they claimed to have conquered. Following Du Vernet’s journey westward from Toronto to Ojibwe territory and across the young nation of Canada, I examine how contests over the mediation of stories—via photography, maps, printing presses, and radio—lucidly reveal the spiritual work of colonial settlement. A city builder who bargained away Indigenous land to make way for the railroad, Du Vernet knew that he lived on the territory of Ts’msyen, Nisga’a, and Haida nations who had never ceded their land to the onrush of Canadian settlers. He condemned the devastating effects on Indigenous families of the residential schools run by his church while still serving that church. Testifying to the power of radio mind with evidence from the apostle Paul and the philosopher Henri Bergson, Du Vernet found a way to explain the world that he, his church and his country made. Expanding approaches to religion and media studies to ask how sovereignty is made through stories, this book shows how the spiritual invention of colonial nations takes place at the same time that Indigenous peoples—including Indigenous Christians—resist colonial dispossession through stories and spirits of their own.
Responses to The Story of Radio Mind
Panel on The Immanent Frame with essays by David Walker, Miranda Johnson, and myself here and here.
Conversation with Eric Klein for the Radio Survivor podcast: listen here.
Review by Amanda Porterfield on Reading Religion: read here.
Conversation with Hillary Kaell for the New Books Network podcast: listen here.
I visited the University of Tübingen, where I am an ambassador, to give a keynote lecture on ceremony, morality, and ethical practices.
[Read more…] about Ceremonial Morality and Living in a Good Way
The Marty Center Series on Religions in the Americas at the University of Chicago invites leading scholars to focus on critical topics and key debates in the field. [Read more…] about Recognizing Religion and Siting the Secular
None of us, no matter where we live or who we are, can innocently assume that we live on a different planet from the nightmare world of the gunman and his white nationalist story. But ours is a whole earth. We worry that a construction of the humanities that does not teach students to look to cultural differences in terms of their complex, reality-based relations, weakens the prospects of a peace that would include all of us. In this sense it makes our job as religionists and humanists that much harder.
With my colleagues Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, and Steven M. Wasserstrom, I wrote a response to the Christchurch massacre, reflecting on white supremacy and the challenges humanities departments face in light of its rising tide.
Read it here.