‘The Sound Of The Rustling Of The Gold Is Under My Feet Where I Stand’: Recounting Gold Rush Narratives With Anishinaabe And Settler Perspectives

NATIVE CULTURES OF THE AMERICAS

SPEAKER: PAMELA KLASSEN, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

Gold was a preoccupation in Anishinaabe and settler encounters in the nineteenth- and early- twentieth centuries. Anishinaabe leaders reiterated their concerns about settler obsessions with gold in their conversations with both Treaty negotiators and geological surveyors. My title quote is drawn from Mawedopenais, an Anishinaabe leader from Manidoo Ziibi (Rainy River) who played a key role in the 1870s negotiations with Canadian representatives of the British Crown that led to Treaty #3. His words, along with those of many others, show that Indigenous people knew well that gold called to settlers in ways that would cause harm to their territories and communities. By contrast, settlers regularly took for granted that gold mining on Indigenous territory was their right and even their responsibility. In this paper, I examine how Anishinaabe-settler exchanges about gold reveal anew how settler expansion and Indigenous dispossession were activated and legitimized by the “noble metal.” Settler lust for gold, a metal considered at once divine and malleable, is a thread that runs throughout Spanish, French, British, American, and Canadian colonialism on Turtle Island and continues today. Gold-seekers, including geologists, prospectors, and even missionaries, were sanctioned by cosmologies of land that valued gold mining not only on the terms of capitalist profit but also by way of providential claims rooted in Christian theologies. This paper is part of a larger project on the public memory of gold rushes, in which I draw comparatively from gold mining heritage sites in Canada, the US, New Zealand, and Australia to ask why gold rushes continue to call to settler imaginations in ways that erase Indigenous perspectives and sovereignty. For this presentation, I draw from a range of sources including treaty records, surveyor memoirs, and my visits to Indigenous- and settler-run museums, including the Kay- Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung Historical Centre, the homeland of Mawedopenais.

Pamela Klassen is the 2022-23 William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor with the Canada Program at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, hosted by the Department of English and the Committee on the Study of Religion. She is also Professor & Chair in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Her current research focuses on religion, colonialism, treaties, and public memory in North America and Turtle Island. As part of a long-term collaboration with the Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung Historical Centre, run by Rainy River First Nations, she is convening a project on the public memory and mediation of ancient mounds and earthworks, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Foundation of Canada. This work also includes a collaborative digital storytelling project called Kiinawin Kawindomowin Story Nations found at www.storynations.utoronto.ca. She is the author or editor of nine books, including The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land (U Chicago Press, 2018) and Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State, co- authored with Paul Christopher Johnson and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan (U Chicago Press, 2018). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, from 2015-2020 she held the Anneliese Mayer Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation for a collaborative project entitled “Religion and Public Memory in Multicultural Societies,” based at the University of Tübingen. She is always happy to hear from prospective graduate students, and you can find out more about her work at: https://pamelaklassen.artsci.utoronto.ca/