Pamela Klassen

Religion and memory on the land

News

Review for The Story of Radio Mind

Amanda Porterfield writes for Reading Religion: “Klassen understands Du Vernet and his situation better than he did. Working a century later, she has heard more indigenous voices and been able to draw upon postcolonial scholarship and activism. Invoking the spirit of the 2015 report by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, she overlooks no opportunity to expose the role that Christianity played in justifying colonization and rationalizing the seizure of indigenous lands. But she also pays close attention to the ways indigenous people worked with the material culture and ideas associated with Christianity to assert their own sovereign rights, preserve their societies, and contribute to the meaning of religion and spirituality in Canada, and indeed to the meaning of Canada itself.”

Read her review here.

Spiritual Jurisdictions in a “Secular” Age

The question of whether “we” live in a secular age depends greatly on who is asking and where they stand. In this class, we considered the weight of the secular in Commonwealth (or stolen-wealth?) settler-colonial nations through the prism of the concept of “spiritual jurisdictions,” working with Hussein Agrama’s contention that the secular is a concept that depends on the persistent adjudication of a wavering line between the religious and the political.

“Spiritual Jurisdictions in a Secular Age”, Master Class at Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland, May 16, 2018.

The Value of Stories in an Age of Reconciliation

The work of humanities scholars is to tell stories about people in their dizzying diversity across times and places, at the same time that we clarify the grounds on which such stories are told. Put another way, we tell stories while also reflecting on the stakes of which stories are told and valued, and who does the telling. In this presentation, I reflected on the value of stories at a time when settler-colonial nations, including Australia and Canada, have undertaken processes of apology, truth, and reconciliation for colonial violence and dispossession of Indigenous peoples.

“The Value of Stories in an Age of Reconciliation” Culture & Values Lecture Series, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland, May 10, 2019.

The Medium is the Medicine

At a time when some governments have undertaken processes of apology, truth, and reconciliation for colonial violence and dispossession of Indigenous peoples, how can scholars in the humanities contribute to these imperfect gestures of repair?  To hazard an answer to this question, I reflected on my process of narrating the story of an early-twentieth-century Anglican missionary in the Pacific Northwest who, after years of doing the work of Christian colonial settlement on Indigenous land, came to think that telepathy was the solution to everything from class warfare to religious divisions.

“The Medium is the Medicine: Stories and the Work of Reconciliation in Canada”, Public Lecture, Queen’s College, University of Melbourne, May 3, 2018.