Secular Geology, Mineral Rights, and Cosmologies of Land

Guest lecture by Pamela E. Klassen, University of Toronto.

Geology, the “science of earthly things” and their slow transformation, is a knowledge system at the heart of religion, secularity, and colonialism in North America. Geology enabled increasingly sophisticated mineral exploration and extraction, with gold as the magnet for European colonial expansion into the Indigenous territories of the so-called “New World.” The mines and oilfields abetted by geological surveys contributed to claiming the land and rendering it toxic. In this paper, I consider geology as a colonial secular science that was grounded in a Christian cosmology of land that had two key premises. First, God placed minerals on the earth for “the use and great benefit” of human beings, and second, colonial monarchs claimed Indigenous territory through the legal fiction of “Crown Land,” by which the monarch claimed and granted mineral rights to others. Grounded on the fifteenth-century papal Doctrine of Discovery—even in “Protestant” countries--Crown land and mineral rights are present-day legal concepts in Christian history. Turning to the writings of theologians, jurists, geologists, and surveyors, and including a 17th-century Danish source (in English translation), I argue that to understand the continued environmental destruction that mining entails requires understanding the cosmologies of land on which it rests.

Bio

Pamela Klassen is a Professor & Chair in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. Her current research focuses on religion, colonialism, and public memory in North America and Turtle Island. Her most recent books are The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land (U Chicago Press, 2018) and Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State (U Chicago Press, 2018, co-authored), along with the co-edited The Public Work of Christmas: Difference and Belonging in Multicultural Societies (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019). With a team of students and in partnership with the Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung Historical Centre, she has an ongoing collaborative digital storytelling project called “Kiinawin Kawindomowin Story Nations,” found at  www.storynations.utoronto.ca. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and has also published at The Immanent Frame.

 Contact: Birgitte Schepelern Johansen