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In 1999, a whaling crew from the Makah Indian Nation hunted and killed a gray whale off the coast of the Pacific Northwest. The hunt marked the return of a centuries-old tradition and, predictably, set off a fierce political and environmental debate. This book examines the Makah whaling conflict, its implications for Makah identity and sovereignty, the spiritual discourse of whalers, and the motives and strategies of antiwhaling activists. The two sides’ competing interpretations of whales and whaling culminate in attempts by both to translate their agendas into the authorized, bureaucratic language of federal fisheries management. One of the main arguments of this book is that we cannot understand the Makah whaling conflict—and, especially, these efforts at translation—without attending to its moral dimension, or the differing ideas about how humans ought to treat whales. Despite shifting public sentiments toward whales and dolphins in the US over the last fifty years, the US federal government continues to manage whales as if they were large fish. The conception of gray whales as countable, harvestable “stocks” enables Makah officials to claim affinities with the authorized discourse of the state. In order to have a seat at the table, anti-whaling activists must do the same, thus tacitly affirming that it is morally acceptable to kill whales. These findings call into question anthropological expectations regarding who benefits from the exercise of state power in environmental conflicts, especially where indigenous groups are involved.

Harlem is one of the most famous neighborhoods in the world—a historic symbol of both black cultural achievement and of the rigid boundaries separating the rich from the poor. But as this book shows us, it is far more culturally and economically diverse than its caricature suggests: through extensive fieldwork and interviews, the author reveals a variety of social networks and class stratifications, and explores how African Americans interpret and perform different class identities in their everyday behavior.

Following the journey of an Anglican missionary across Indigenous land, this book examines how contests over the mediation of stories—via photography, maps, printing presses, and radio—lucidly reveal the spiritual politics of colonial settlement. A city builder who bargained away Indigenous land to make way for the railroad, Archbishop Frederick Du Vernet (1860-1924) knew that he lived on the territory of Ts’msyen, Nisga’a, and Haida nations who had never ceded their land to the onrush of Canadian settlers. He condemned the devastating effects on Indigenous families of the residential schools run by his church while still serving that church in part through attending to settlers through “White Work.” At the same time, Du Vernet came to a “late style” embrace of psychic research—with a special focus on telepathy—as the path to understand the soul and to bring about social and political harmony. Testifying to the power of what he called radio mind, with evidence from the apostle Paul and the philosopher Henri Bergson, Du Vernet found a way to explain the world that he, his church, and his country made. Through Du Vernet’s imaginative experiment, we see how agents of colonialism built metaphysical traditions on land they claimed to have conquered. Expanding approaches to religion and media studies to ask how sovereignty is made through stories, this book shows how the spiritual invention of colonial nations takes place at the same time that Indigenous peoples—including Indigenous Christians—resist colonial dispossession through stories and spirits of their own.