Pamela Klassen's study revolves around Frederick Du Vernet (1860–1924), an Anglican missionary bishop in northern British Columbia when the Indigenous peoples of the land were being colonized and displaced by settlers. She discovered his writings while she was writing an earlier book on Protestantism and health; she was struck by his interest in “radio mind,” the idea that minds radiate spiritual energy. His experiments in this area, late in his life, included trying to communicate mentally with his daughter across hundreds of miles. He developed the view that “mind-energy” was a manifestation of the Spirit that linked the world's people and could be a “spiritual tool for … personal healing” (34). Du Vernet was inspired in his thinking primarily by such Western writers as Henri Bergson and William James, but from a few clues Klassen speculates that he may also have been influenced by some local Indigenous spiritualities and stories.
Although Du Vernet's theory of radio mind initially attracted Klassen and inspired the title of her book, she is more broadly interested in his life's journey. From a youthful, conventional Anglicanism, she argues, he moved to some “bizarre” (184, 225) freethinking in his last years. It is possible that his journey also took him from a reflexive colonialism and racism to some measure of sympathy for Indigenous wisdom, and from collaboration with exploitive settler entrepreneurs to more socialistic sensibilities. Thus, in Klassen's telling, Du Vernet's end-of-life interest in radio mind was more than a foray into psychic research; its premise that a common energy connects all minds represented his “late style” questioning of theological orthodoxy, extreme imperialism, and individualistic capitalism.
Klassen describes herself as an anthropologist with a “knack for making connections across time and space” (232). Readers who are “splitters” are thus advised that the author tends to be a “lumper.” She frequently pauses her story of Du Vernet to consider apposite broad cultural themes, global parallels, and theoretical perspectives. Some of these discussions are brief, while others almost fill chapters. Thus, early on she writes of the ways in which our stories shape our identity and can be used repressively to replace other people's stories. Because DuVernet spent eleven days in 1898 in northwestern Ontario with a camera, Klassen explores the ways that photographs are used to imagine new realities and create relationships. Since Du Vernet used maps, Klassen devotes a chapter to colonial mapmaking and its violent reorganization of Indigenous space. Du Vernet published, so Klassen considers how the printing press reinforced the “textual cosmologies” of the Christian and colonial powers. These reflections are enriching and thought-provoking, but the missionary's voice is sometimes muffled under anthropological erudition.
Klassen has made fruitful use of Du Vernet's many denominational, missionary, and popular publications, his personal letters and diaries, and, at one point, his marginal annotations in his books, which are kept in the archives of his diocese of Caledonia. She has also researched writings by some of his missionary colleagues. She reports on the trips she has taken to sites connected with Du Vernet, and her conversations there with archivists, museum directors, and Indigenous leaders. In addition, Klassen brings an impressive wealth of reading in anthropology and related research and theory. The book is illustrated with a number of well selected photographs and maps.
Klassen writes as an outsider to theological studies in general and to the Anglican Church in particular, and her understanding of Anglican history, thought, and practice is sometimes confused. For instance, several errors of detail mar her discussion of the Church of England in Victorian Ontario, which she misrepresents as its established church. She assumes, against probability, that Du Vernet, a liberal evangelical, would have embraced such High-Church views as the real presence of Christ in the Eucharistic elements, the apostolic succession of the episcopacy, and priestly absolution. She takes the uncommon view that the Anglican Church is a confessional body, with its Thirty-Nine Articles functioning like, say, the Westminster Confession for Presbyterians (44). She writes of the decennial conferences of Anglican bishops at Lambeth Palace in London as if they had the authority to define doctrine. She seems unfamiliar with the Anglican and ecumenical theological ferment of the years around World War I, when Du Vernet was in his fifties. As a result, her efforts to prove her theological thesis—that Du Vernet violated Anglican orthodoxy at the end of his career, unchecked by his contemporaries—are unpersuasive. It seems more likely that Du Vernet followed the liberal evangelical path of reading faith, science, and culture together.
Klassen's default template for understanding the role of the Church in Indigenous-settler encounter might be described as pre-post-colonial. Her main sources, after all, are the writings of a prominent missionary. This is not to say that she heroizes Du Vernet, or is even sympathetic to him, but she treats him as the uniquely authoritative Christian leader on Indigenous land. A contrasting approach is taken by Susan Neylan in The Heavens Are Changing: Nineteenth-Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity (McGill–Queen's, 2003), a masterful study of Indigenous–settler Christian encounter in British Columbia just before Du Vernet became bishop. Neylan recognizes that Christianity preceded the European missionaries there, gives prominence to the writings of Indigenous evangelists, and emphasizes Indigenous agency in negotiating Christian teaching and settler policies. Where Klassen generalizes about the phenomenon of conversion and the apparently comfortable linkage between colonialism, capitalism, and Christianization, Neylan problematizes them.
The modest purpose of The Story of Radio Mind is to show that Du Vernet's “vision is worth remembering for both its failings and its hope” (236). This hope was the spiritual connectedness of the world's people; its failings included its Eurocentrism and its failure of respect for what Indigenous peoples held sacred. Klassen's engaging and well documented study achieves its goal.
