My paper addresses the meanings, methods, politics, and economics of extraction in the study of religion by focusing on claims about mineral rights and responsibilities in Anishinaabe and settler narratives of gold mining around the Great Lakes. Gold was a preoccupation in Anishinaabe and settler encounters in the nineteenth- and early-twentieth centuries, as settler explorers, geologists, and surveyors increasingly ventured into Anishinaabe territory around the Great Lakes, looking for evidence of mineral deposits. As Treaties were increasingly negotiated on both sides of the colonially imposed border, mineral rights were almost always under discussion. The “solemn promises” about gold and other minerals that were embedded in the Treaties between Anishinaabe Nations and either the US government or the British Crown remain contested today, as settler land hunger intensifies, with the push to extract critical minerals to support electrification.
In my presentation, I examine how Anishinaabe-settler exchanges reveal anew how settler expansion and Indigenous dispossession were activated and legitimized by the extraction of gold, often known of as 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, sought to established mineral rights 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.
In both settler and Anishinaabe sources, Anishinaabe leaders reiterated their concerns about settler obsessions with gold. My title quote is drawn from Mawedopenais, an Anishinaabe leader from Manidoo Ziibi (Rainy River First Nations) who played a key role in the 1870s negotiations that led to Treaty #3, an agreement between the Anishinaabeg and Canadian representatives of the British Crown, in what is now called northwestern Ontario. Manidoo Ziibi is now a riverine border separating what settlers know as northern Minnesota and northwestern Ontario—in what Americans know as the “Boundary Waters” region. Connecting Rainy Lake to the east and Lake of the Woods to the northwest, Manidoo Ziibi was a highway of critical importance to Indigenous peoples, including during the fur trade. By the 1890s, Manidoo Ziibi and its connected lakes had become the site of multiple small- and larger-scale gold rushes.
My paper is based in archival, museum-based, and community-engaged research in Treaty #3 Territory. As a non-Indigenous scholar, I first learned about Mawedopenais in 2011, when I began what has grown into a long-term collaboration with the Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung Historical Centre, run by the Rainy River First Nations and located on the banks of Manidoo Ziibi, near the home of Mawedopenais. Using both settler and Anishinaabe sources, I show that Anishinaabeg knew, even before the miners arrived, that gold called to settlers in ways that would cause harm to their territories and communities. By contrast, these same sources also show that settlers regularly took for granted that gold mining on Indigenous territory was their right and even their responsibility.
I join broader scholarly conversations that connect religious cosmologies, comparative legal theory, and histories of extraction, such as that of John Borrows, Alicia Puglionesi, and Mary-Jane Rubenstein, to show how the public memory of extraction, as embodied in gold mining heritage sites across Canada, the US, New Zealand, and Australia, continues to call to settler imaginations in ways that erase Indigenous sovereignty and relations to land. No matter where gold rushes occurred, there was nothing easy about finding or mining gold. Gold panning by the riverbed was just the first step, quickly giving way to capital-intensive and environmentally devastating hydraulic blasting: water-shooting cannons that literally ripped the earth apart. Any hope of a lucky strike demanded great expense, arduous labour, and hazardous working conditions—handling mercury and cyanide, going deaf with the din of the stamper, and competition with fellow miners that sometimes led to murder. Despite its environmental destruction and human cost, the stubborn ubiquity of the gold rush as a sign of luck, ingenuity, and even providential blessing is a clue to the wishful thinking and historical erasure that characterizes settler colonialism. Gold rush myths and metaphors are material for the transformative alchemy of empire, by which settlers claimed Indigenous territories as their own property, based on Christian legal justifications of discovery imposed on the land.
Iconic gold rush sites of discovery, such as Coloma, California and Dawson City, Yukon, can all be visited today as curated places of gold rush memory, where children and adults can squat on their haunches to pan for gold. None of these places, however, were stable sites of settler colonial sovereignty at the time of their respective gold rushes. Indigenous peoples lived there, knowing those lands as their territories, given to them by the Creator.
Mawedopenais’ challenge to the representatives of the British Crown during treaty negotiations articulated this clearly: “The sound of the rustling of the gold is under my feet where I stand; we have a rich country; it is the Great Spirit who gave us this; where we stand upon is the Indians’ property, and belongs to them" (from A. Morris, The Treaties of Canada with the Indians of Manitoba and the North-West Territories, 1880). Animating gold, Mawedopenais named the worth of the land in the terms of capitalist extraction at the same time that he claimed it by way of spiritual jurisdiction given to the Anishinaabeg by the Creator. Attending to how his words are remembered and interpreted today opens important questions for the study of religion and extraction—and the concept of mineral rights—framed by Anishinaabe understandings of the spiritual interconnection of their people, land, and waters.
My paper focuses on claims about mineral rights and responsibilities in Anishinaabe and settler narratives of gold mining around the Great Lakes in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As Treaties were negotiated on both sides of the colonially imposed border, mineral rights were always under discussion. Gold-seekers, including geologists, surveyors, and even missionaries, sought mineral rights sanctioned by cosmologies of land that valued gold on the terms of capitalist profit and by way of providential claims rooted in Christian theologies. They were challenged by Anishinaabe leaders such as Mawedopenais, quoted in my title, who played a key role in the 1870s negotiations for Treaty #3 in what is now called northwestern Ontario. Examining Anishinaabe-settler exchanges reveals anew how Anishinaabeg claimed spiritual jurisdiction given to them by the Creator when challenging settler-colonial claims to mineral rights and the right to extraction.