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Paper short abstract

This paper analyses how gold rush heritage sites in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States narrate settler discoveries of gold as a kind of “elemental religion,” enabling and participating in the alchemy of empire: shape-shifting Indigenous land into settler colonies.

Paper long abstract

Settler discoveries of gold are celebrated, narrated, and materialized at heritage sites in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States, all former British colonies. In this paper, I consider how these narratives of gold embed an “elemental religion” into the landscape that enables the alchemy of empire: the process of shape-shifting Indigenous land into settler colonies through violence, law, science, and stories.

This paper asks why nineteenth-century gold mines and their toxic remainders—mercury poisoning, deforestation, colonial violence—are persistently transfigured into state-supported sites of nationalist public memory in countries such as Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. I center the concept of “elemental religion,” or the ways that cosmologies shape human relations with minerals, lands, and waters, building on Elizabeth Povinelli's concept of “geontologies.” Alchemy, as a spiritual/scientific quest to transmute baser metals into gold, is also an apt metaphor for how gold mining has helped to transform Indigenous territories into settler colonies. Attending to narratives of miners, surveyors, missionaries, and Indigenous people, this paper pays attention to gold rush memory as elemental religion to illuminate how Christian-inflected cosmologies of land sanctified colonial jurisdiction and Indigenous land theft by way of a providential God. My focus on elemental religion also reveals how geology is a “secular science” with its own cosmologies of land--a geological sublime--that imagined and visualized the earth’s vast ages against biblical time, exposing ancient rocks to resource extraction. This paper is in conversation with Monique Scheer's "Megaflora and the Geological Sublime: Elemental Narratives of Primordial Trees."