Pamela Klassen

Religion and memory on the land

News

Protest on the Page: Print as an Affordance for Revolutionary Spirits

Considering two early-twentieth century instances of print culture on the northwest coast, this lecture explores the ways the printed page can serve as an affordance for cycles of public and political appeal and remembrance. Juxtaposing the anti-colonial uses of a missionary printing press by Nisga’a printers with the marginalia in an Archbishop’s library of texts on psychic research, I show the changing meanings of the revolutionary spirit in a land of contested sovereignties.

“Protest on the Page: Print as an Affordance for Revolutionary Spirits,” Franklin & Marshall College, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, October 25, 2017.

The Afterlives of the Royal Proclamation of 1763

In the Royal Proclamation of 1763, King George III used his “spiritual jurisdiction” to guarantee that Indigenous peoples owned their lands that they had not ceded by treaty. It continues to be cited by Indigenous peoples as a “foundational document” ensuring their territorial rights. This lecture examines the significance of the Royal Proclamation as a material artifact and a “metaphysical” legal document, to use John Borrows’ term.

“Public Memory and Indigenous Sovereignty: The Afterlives of the Royal Proclamation of 1763” Department of Religious Studies, University of Waterloo, November 2, 2016.

God Keep our Land: The Legal Ritual of the McKenna-McBride Commission, 1913–1916

A discussion of the testimonies of Indigenous peoples of the northwest coast during a governmental commission, in which they clearly spelled out their ongoing resistance to colonial rule, and to the Canadian myth of itself as a “resource-rich” nation in which the Indigenous people just needed to get out of the way.

“God Keep our Land: The Legal Ritual of the McKenna-McBride Commission, 1913–1916,” Religion and the Exercise of Public Authority, edited by Benjamin Berger and Richard Moon, London: Hart Publishing, pp. 79–93, 2016.

Narrating Religion through Museums

This article comes out of my course, Museums and Material Religion, in which we considered the significance of missionary provenance to so much of nineteenth and early-twentieth century museums collection, and how these collections are gaining new audiences in the twenty-first century who seek both to repatriate their “sacred objects” as well as to engage with museum collections in a ceremonial approach.

“Narrating Religion through Museums,” Narrating Religion, ed. Sarah Iles Johnston, MacMillan Interdisciplinary Handbook, pp. 333–352, 2016.