Tag Archives: Canada

Pamela Klassen on her book, The Story of Radio Mind

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Interview by Georgia Ennis

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo28179073.html

Georgia Ennis: At the center of your account are the travels and work of missionary Frederick Du Vernet, with whom you speak across time in numerous ways. How and why did Du Vernet come to be the central personage of this story of settler colonial expansion? You describe your first ‘encounter’ with Du Vernet in the text, but can you tell us more about how you came to travel with him and his many contradictions across what is today known as Canada?

Pamela Klassen: I first encountered him through reading newspaper, church newspaper articles for another book I was writing on Christianity and medicine and healing in the 20th century. And they were very unusual articles that were uncommon for an Anglican newspaper in the 1920s, in which he was basically propounding his theory of telepathic thought transference. He also had a kind of theory of media he was writing about, like the new effects of the cinema, and what this would do to young hearts and minds.  By the mid-1920s, he was writing about his new theory of spiritual radio or radio mind — basically the idea that human beings can transfer their thoughts across this energy field, radio waves that God has provided for us as a means of communication. He’s coming up with this theory at a time when a few people have radios. He is doing what is a very common approach by taking a new technology and spiritualizing it.  This happened with the telegraph and the telephone, with all these kinds of means of communication.

I went to the national church archive in Toronto to see if I could find out more about him. And the archivist, very kindly pointed me to a diary that he had written in 1898 when he was a missionary journalist who was travelling across Canada and visiting different missionaries and missions along the way. This diary records 11 days of his visit to the Rainy River, which was an area fairly newly settled by white settlers.  It was on an Anishinaabe territory or Ojibwe territory.

It was a remarkable diary because the way he writes it, he writes often in the voice of Anishinaabe women and men he encounters. Often older women and men who were quite resistant to his presence, even their words are his perspective. It struck me as a really powerful record of Anishinaabe resistance to Canadian and Christian presence on their land.  I put thae diary aside, finished the other book, and then the diary was really haunting me.  Eventually I said, “You know, I wonder, maybe I should actually figure out if I can go up there and bring the diary back to where it was written.” When I did, I met with some very kind members of Rainy River First Nations, especially Art Hunter and his brother Al Hunter, and since then, I’ve been going up regularly.  We now have a website where I talk about the diary. That’s been one life of my encounter with Du Vernet.

I guess one thing I would say is, it’s rightfully very challenging for a white woman to write about indigenous missionary encounters and, and indigenous sort of state relations in the Canadian context, but I also felt it was my responsibility to write about the Canadian side of that history.  He was allowing me to also challenge my field of the study of religion that often looks especially at North American religion, that will often look at a man like him as someone participating in a new religious movement. But he wasn’t. He was an Anglican through and through, he was an Archbishop. He was a mainstream Christian man, but also the ideas that he came to emerged from his relationships with indigenous people across Turtle Island, across Anishinaabe and other nations. And focusing on him allowed me, as a white woman, to tell a story of white people’s responsibility for the world that we live in today.

Georgia Ennis: Themes of testimony, confession, and reconciliation, as well as the ways these genres have been understood within different linguistic and cultural traditions, are central to the book. What kind of testimony do you envision The Story of Radio Mind providing, and what is its relationship to ongoing processes of reconciliation within Canada and other settler colonial states?

Pamela Klassen: A great question, thank you. I began writing the book before the Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation commissions’ final report came out in 2015, which was a Truth and Reconciliation Commission focused on the church-state nexus of residential schools, schools  that indigenous children were often forcibly taken to, often by the police, the RCMP.  They were largely paid for by the Canadian government, but run by different churches. So, you would have an Anglican or a Methodist or a Catholic school. So, the discourse of reconciliation is very much of the moment in which I wrote the book, and still present was when it came out in 2018. Now we are in 2020. And the discourse of reconciliation is clearly not sufficient. At this moment, June 2020, we’re addressing questions of the ongoing, not just legacies, but reality of colonialism and in Canada and the US and how that connects to anti-black racism and anti-indigenous racism and police brutality. Its important for scholars to have a kind of awareness of the moment in which they’re writing but also a kind of humility knowing that the things they write two years ago will have a different resonance and you can’t know what that’s going to be.

Questions of testimony and confession were really alive in the cultural moment in which I was writing, because a Truth and Reconciliation Commission is profoundly a moment of testimony. There really was not a lot of confession going on, because it was mostly indigenous survivors, telling their stories and giving their testimonies. Still, the very notion of reconciliation, which I discussed a little bit in the book, is from one kind of understanding, a profoundly Christian concept and it’s still a Christian ritual – about forgiveness and becoming, restoring your relationship with God. The fact that a state-based ritual of Reconciliation has these Christian roots I think is worth pondering.

I also like to think about what can become appropriate anthropological stories about these places, and how anthropologists were similar to missionaries in that both anthropologists and missionaries sought stories out of the indigenous people that they encountered. The anthropologist turned them into ethnography, the missionaries turned them into stories that they could package in church newspapers and missionary newspapers so that they could get more funding for their missions. The anthropologists also wanted funding from the Smithsonian, or other sources. So the whole question of “stories for cash” was something I wanted to think about. And which, of course, I’m implicated in as well.

Georgia Ennis: You close the book by reflecting on another kind of medium, the body. Yet, you consider throughout ways in which various media technologies interact with, shape, and otherwise mediate bodies or embodied relationships, from photographs and accounts that “firsted” and “lasted” Indigenous peoples out of existence, to spiritual frequencies said to have connected minds across great distances. How do you envision the interrelationship among the various forms of mediation you examine—embodied, spiritual, and technological? What effects do they have on each other? And, relatedly, do you have any thoughts on the role of digital or supposedly “new” forms of mediation, and the future of the stories you examine here?

Pamela Klassen: Sure. Yeah. I mean, I should say, I guess, that I think about – since we started our informal part of the conversation talking about midwifery, my earlier work was on midwifery and women’s experiences of childbirth, and how, in the North American context, a lot of women turn to midwifery for very different reasons. Sometimes they do it through legal means, illegal means, grey area, law, that kind of thing. And so, when I worked on that project, it was the 1990s. So, it’s a different sort of midwifery landscape than there is now. But I always really thought of myself as someone who thinks a lot about the body, gender, racialization, and these kinds of things. And then I found myself writing a book that was all kind of channeled through the body of this man who was a white Christian missionary, and sometimes I worried that I wasn’t paying enough attention to the body. Yet one of the things that I really want to want people to take away from the book is realizing that whiteness was a very active category at this time and it was a lived reality. So, when Du Vernet gets to Northern British Columbia in 1904, he was doing what the missionaries call Indian work. He was working with indigenous people who are there. But he arrives there at the same time that the railway is getting going, because they want to build a railway for all kinds of complex reasons, to this point, in Prince Rupert, because it’s got a very deep harbor and they see Prince Rupert as being the gateway to Asia, also the gateway to the north, and also a competitor to Vancouver and Victorian San Francisco. It’s the crawl of the railway, the spinal cord of colonialism.  By the time he’s at the end of his life, he is doing what everybody calls “white work”, which is working with the settlers. He is aware, he talks a lot about the differences, the challenges of doing both Indian work and White work. Whiteness is a very active animating category for settler colonialism. I think people often don’t realize how freely people spoke with these racialized terms across North America in different ways, and with different differences.

One of the things I also wanted to point out is that all of these communication tools depend on matters that is drawn from the earth, the minerals in our cellphones, in our computers, stuff that makes our cellphones, and our computers.  The cloud is not a cloud, its actually made out of servers that require cooling and heating, demanding vast resources to actually keep our communication systems alive. I wanted to frame and draw attention to the fact that all forms of mediation and communication have consequences for the earth and for the world, and therefore for us, and all the creatures on the earth.

Then, just to end briefly with a website I would love for people to go and look at: https://storynations.utoronto.ca/.   On this site, we take the diary that I was talking about earlier, and we annotate it. We try to put it in the larger historical context of Treaty 3, in relationship between missionaries and Ojibwe in that context.  We visit the community quite often to talk to them about ideas and about where to go next.  So soon we’ll be trying to build curriculum resources, so people can use it on their online teaching that they have to do in the near future, both in high schools and in universities.  We are doing a pilot study with indigenous youth students to get feedback from them about how this website tells the story of colonialism of indigenous presence and continuity on the land and what we learn from it. We welcome anybody  to visit and learn from the website. And it was actually very interesting to write about this story in two different forms — in the book and the website. The book is done, not clear if the website will ever be done.

 

 

 

 

 

Sonia Das on her new book, Linguistic Rivalries

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https://global.oup.com/academic/product/linguistic-rivalries-9780190461782?cc=us&lang=en&

Interview by Lia Siewert

Lia Siewert: Your ethnography looks at how Québec’s Franco-Anglo conflicts, or linguistic rivalries, are reproduced in the language practices of Sri Lankan and Indian Tamil-speaking communities in Montréal. How would you describe your book to someone who is not familiar with the politics of language choice in Québec?

Sonia Das: I would start off by saying that in some parts of the world, people are willing to die for their language.  In Montréal this sentiment is very much alive among the folks with whom I conducted my research. Many have participated in movements of linguistic nationalism and fought for their language rights to be recognized and protected in their home societies, in addition to Québec. I would then emphasize how especially contentious language choices are in Québec. In fact, it wouldn’t be much of an exaggeration to state that people there always notice which language you choose to speak (or write) at any given time and with any given interlocutor.  Some people get very upset – and will tell you or show you so – if you make what they believe to be the wrong choices. At the same time, some people in Québec want nothing to do with Anglo-Franco conflicts. They would prefer to think of language as a neutral tool in the classic liberal sense and opt out of these debates altogether by speaking English exclusively, yet the law still obliges them to learn and use French for education, business, and government. There are also just as many people who are mindful of the evolving stakes of linguistic rivalries and seek to strategically display their loyalty to both their host and home societies. Upwardly mobile Indian Tamil immigrants generally fall into the first category, Sri Lankan Tamil refugees into the second, and their children span the spectrum of political allegiances. No one in Québec truly escapes the interpellating effects of a language ideology that conflates language and ethnonational identity. My book thus explores how the politics of language choice are part and parcel of belonging to a globalizing society that imagines language as the essence of cultural heritage and civic identity.

Lia Siewert: You specifically mention the “voices” you had to exclude from the book’s discussion. Which voices are you referring to? And what kinds of “future retellings and revisions” are you hoping emerge from these omissions?

Sonia Das: This is not only a book about the politics of language choice. This is also a book about the politics of doing ethnography on language choice within the context of a pro-nationalist society that nonetheless seeks to be welcoming of immigrants and refugees fleeing politically turbulent situations and worrying about having their social mobility restricted through the integration process.  As I mentioned in my first response, almost every citizen and immigrant feels strongly about language issues in Montréal, even if it is to simply assert that language occupies too much attention in public discourse.  Some people, however, cannot openly state their opinions for fear of losing their jobs, their residency, or their lives.  I am mindful of the precarious position of many of my informants who have trusted me with their stories and I exclude the voices of the most vulnerable, including undocumented immigrants, children, and Tamil-Canadians who speak critically of the government or the LTTE. I did not want this book to be about war or political conflict in order to avoid feeding into negative stereotypes about Tamil “terrorists” in Canada and also because there are already several books exploring the experiences and memories of war among refugees in Toronto that have come out at about the same time.

Also, even though I received permission from the English school board to work with children attending Tamil PELO classes, I chose to only analyze the talk of children whose parents gave me permission to include them in the transcripts. Outside of schools, I regret not being able to follow up with the Muslim and Protestant contacts that I had made, and so the book depicts a polarized division between Hindus and Catholics that is not fully representative of the diversity of the diaspora. Lastly, this book is the product of an unfortunate decision made by the Commission Scolaire de Montréal (French school board) to reject my application to conduct research at French public schools, citing the “political content” of my research as the reason for their refusal. This rejection came after almost six months of jumping through bureaucratic hoops and corresponding with teachers, principals, and government officials, and I was devastated, to say the least. One of my dissertation committee members sympathetically advised me that even this rejection counts as data, and so I started to think more reflexively about how my positionality as a biracial Indian American woman with roots in Québec and with an easily recognizable lower-class Québécois accent meant that certain doors would open for me and others would close.  The revisions that I imagine would involve someone of a different set of interests and occupying a different positionality paying attention to the diversity of these Tamil communities in ways that I could not, and the future retellings would capitalize on recent political changes in Québécois and Tamil societies to explore whether and how language choice and multilingualism are still contentious today.

Lia Siewert: Your archival research is expansive and the conclusions you draw from it are compelling; specifically, it is fascinating that Québec’s Tamil diaspora has produced ideologies and practices particular to Montréal, but drawn from texts in Sri Lanka and India. Could you elaborate on the significance of investigating Tamil use in India and Sri Lanka and the growing ideological separation of forms of Tamil in Montréal?

Sonia Das: When I shared my conclusion with my Professor of Tamil at the University of Michigan that second-generation Indian-Canadians identify as speaking Spoken Tamil and Sri Lankan-Canadians identify as speaking Written Tamil, he immediately corrected me and explained that these diglossic “registers” are the same “language.” Though I clarified my observations as language ideologies, he remained convinced that either my reasoning or my informants’ reasoning was faulty. Having studied “Written Tamil” first at the University of Michigan and “Spoken Tamil” second at the American Institute for Indian Studies in Madurai, it would have been natural for me to have confused the issues, and so I did a lot of cross-checking to make sure that this language ideology was indeed backed up by explicit metapragmatic statements as well as cultural practices institutionalized across different social domains. Also, when I presented my research in Toronto and looked into the heritage language scene there, I understood this to be truly a Montréal phenomenon. There is no recorded evidence of any other Tamil diaspora – whether situated in Europe, Australia, South Asia, Africa, or elsewhere in North America – making similar claims about their languages.  And yet, the idea that Spoken Tamil and Written Tamil are grammatically and stylistically distinct linguistic codes became widely accepted in the 19th century, precisely at a time when British, French, and other Europeans were competing to produce the most authoritative lexicographies and perfected copies of ancient Tamil texts in South Asia. This historical perspective led me to explore in the archives how Indian and Sri Lankan Tamil ideologies of language diverged through a series of ideological mediations and in relation to imperialist Anglo-Franco conflicts which, in all their idiosyncratic forms, have driven much of modern political history.

Lia Siewert: It seems like the Ministry of Education’s attention to minority language education attributes value to these languages only in the service of boosting anti-Anglo attitudes—therefore, while languages such as Tamil or Tagalog are given lip service, ultimately their success is meaningless to Québec as long as English is decentered and French is increasingly the language of social and economic mobility. How would you argue for or against this reading?

Sonia Das: Actually, it was not my intention to target Québec’s Ministry of Education as paying mere lip service to Canadian multicultural values.  The fact that you read my book in this way, however, suggests perhaps the leaking influence of two over-determined and partially overlapping interpretations of heritage language education in Québec today. The first of these is a belief that reflects the increasingly neoliberal practices of many governments (and not exclusive to Québec) that values heritage language education insofar as it creates economic and political value for the host society and enables socioeconomic mobility for citizens.  The second reading is more cynical. It claims that heritage language programs were only created in Montréal in 1978 to appease ethnic minority voters who were upset when they first learned that they would have to send their children to French and not the preferred English-medium public schools after the passage of Bill 101. Even if the Ministry had originally intended the PELO as a form of appeasement to ethnic minority voters, I would not conclude that teaching heritage languages boosted anti-Anglo attitudes, for three reasons. First, heritage language classes have been offered in English-medium schools in Montréal since the early 1980s.  Second, the accepted practice of English code-mixing with heritage languages such as Tamil increases the presence of English in French-medium schools and reinforces the status of English as a cosmopolitan language.  Third, even though the greatest number of PELO classes is in Montréal’s French-medium school system, there are neighborhoods where the only school that teaches a specific heritage language is an English-medium one. Additionally, if you were to compare Canadian heritage language programs with bilingual education programs in American and European contexts, for example, the Canadian pedagogy is arguably more expansive and robust. I live in New York City where there are a lot of bilingual schools and bilingual services but where there is no public school that could teach my children Bengali, their heritage language. So, to return to your question, although it is true that one of the Ministry of Education’s primary tasks is to promote the teaching of French and encourage the identification of children in Québec with this civic language, as opposed to English, the fact that significant government resources are being funneled to heritage language schools in an array of languages would argue against a too reductionist reading of this language policy.

Lia Siewert: What is your next project?

Sonia Das: I have two new ongoing projects.  The first, which is an extension of my first book project on Indian and Sri Lankan relations in the context of the Canadian Tamil diaspora, focuses instead on the ways in which language politics influence maritime exchanges and sociopolitical relations between post-colonial Sri Lanka and South India. I use ethnographic, archival, and linguistic methods to investigate how maritime language policies and infrastructural projects of port building and sea dredging have transformed the lived spaces and social identities in and around the Gulf of Mannar, which is a narrow body of water separating the Tamil Nadu port of Thoothukudi and Sri Lankan port of Colombo. I focus on infrastructural projects and maritime policies enacted in the aftermath of the civil war in Sri Lanka (1983-2009) and during the geopolitical race between India and China to control international shipping lanes in the Indian Ocean (2009-present). I also inquire into how language activism articulates with movements for religious, environmental, and labor rights and politicizes both sides of the coast by destabilizing trade and transport and rechanneling the flow of labor migration. Included in this research is a pilot project on the language practices and infrastructural conditions of sociability among Asian seafarers working for the global shipping industry at ports Newark and Montréal.

 

My second project is in collaboration with Dr. Sherina Feliciano-Santos at the University of South Carolina, and it focuses on our shared interests in language and racial inequality. Together, we analyze issues of free speech within police-suspect interactions by investigating the contexts in which a Driving Under the Influence (DUI) suspect’s communicative behavior, which with few exceptions is considered protected speech under the First Amendment, is construed as disorderly conduct or necessitating escalated force. Combining ethnographic fieldwork with over 900 hours of dashcam and bodycam video and audio data and case files of DUI arrests in South Carolina, we seek to identify the linguistic and contextual factors that impact how suspects’ communicative practices are interpreted and enacted upon by police officers. At a time when violence in police-suspect encounters has become a matter of great public concern, we believe that there is an urgent need for data-driven public policy that draws on the strengths of linguistic anthropology to elucidate the relationship between language, race, and criminal justice. It also seems like an opportune time for linguistic anthropologists to contribute to discussions of big data, especially in light of the normalization of surveillance in everyday social life.