Photo attribution, left to right: Daniel Peluso, Katherine Mitchell Photography, Paul H. Joseph (UBC Photographer)
Medieval Studies has recently begun to grapple with its colonial past, re-thinking how it is taught and understood in settler-colonial nations, such as (so-called) Canada and the United States of America. One avenue for re-understanding and re-defining Medieval Studies is reconciliation with Indigenous Studies, by engaging in Indigenous-facing scholarship that understands the Medieval through Indigenous ways of knowing, methods, and approaches.
This month, I was eager to ask three exciting scholars, who are spearheading the resurgence and reconciliation movements in Medieval Studies, how they approach Indigenous-facing scholarship, the medieval literature that they are excited to reconsider or understand through Indigenous approaches, and a taste of their current work. I interviewed Dr. Tarren Andrews (Bitterroot Salish), Assistant Professor at Yale University in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, who is a leading scholar on Indigenous approaches to Medieval Studies. With numerous publications, her work has been instrumental in shaping the field’s understanding of how to incorporate Indigenous approaches and methods to understand the history of settler-colonialism. Sarah-Nelle Jackson, PhD Candidate and Public Scholar at University of British Columbia in English Language and Literature, a settler scholar whose work highlights the possibilities of right-relationship in academia. And, Sarah LaVoy-Brunette (White Earth Nation of Ojibwe, Bear Clan), PhD Candidate at Cornell University in Medieval Studies, whose work radically develops our understanding of Indigenous-facing Medieval Studies and challenges us to shift our approach from “decolonizing medieval studies to Medieval Studies as a decolonizing tool.”
Duperron: I am so grateful for your work, and I am excited to hear your thoughts on bridging Indigenous and Medieval Studies. To begin, how do you engage Indigenous-facing scholarship in your own work? Can you give an example?
Andrews: As an Indigenous scholar I think all of the scholarship I engage with is Indigenous facing insofar as I, as an Indigenous person, engage with it. Some disciplines, especially medieval studies, just haven’t imagined Indigenous peoples as part of their readership and I’m very encouraged that this presumption is changing slowly but surely. I suppose, though, to answer the question in a more direct way, I focus mostly on Indigenous methodologies, by which I mean, I am particularly shaped by work that foregrounds questions most germane to Indigenous studies and Indigenous peoples, like “What does sovereignty look like in a given context?” “How can engagement with a particularly literary genre influence and further the project of Indigenous self-determination?” “How can reading the pre-colonial past help us better understanding the colonial present?” I am also very interested in scholarship that model transnational and transtemporal theories of settler colonialism and Indigenous resurgence. Jodi Byrd’s Transit of Empire is probably one of the texts that has most influenced my own thinking and methodological approaches.
Jackson: Val Napoleon’s “Delgamuukw: A Legal Straightjacket for Oral Histories?” and John Borrows’ “Sovereignty’s Alchemy: An Analysis of Delgamuukw v. British Columbia” inspired my dissertation project. Now, Delgamuukw is a 1990s legal case wherein the Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en nations sued in Canadian courts for recognition of their rights over their traditional lands in northwestern BC, while my dissertation focuses on high and late medieval English literature. But bear with me:
Two things about the case turned my attention to England’s proto-colonial past. First, Canada has a remarkably flimsy claim to sovereignty — even on its own terms. Second, the colonial model of sovereignty as exclusive territorial control is both violent — genocidally so, as we have seen from Canada to Palestine — and arbitrary. Underpinning both these things is (among other attitudes) an objectifying and utilitarian view of land as territory, as exploitable resource, as property. My initial question was broad: How did we get here?
That “we” reflects my positionality as an Anglo-Canadian settler on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples, so Indigenous-facing scholarship on legal traditions and land relation guides my approach. Taking present-day Canadian sovereignty as a symptom and product of an atrophied relationship to land, I look to medieval English literature for histories of this land relation. I read works that try to ignore or dispense with more-than-human relationality, despite themselves conveying to a need to grapple with those relations. I also read works that imagine alternative modes of land relation. I hope my research will help expand upon what cases like Delgamuukw show: for all their global influence, colonial ideas of sovereignty and land-claim are highly contingent, holding little water in their own terms and their own histories.
That’s really fascinating! In particular, the way your approaches highlight issues of sovereignty and land relationships in pre-colonial texts. Is there a particular medieval text that you are most excited about reading with an Indigenous-facing approach? Why?
LaVoy-Brunette: At the center of my work is the Land and the relationships that flow from it. As an Ojibwe-Anishinaabe scholar on Haudenosaunee lands, I am accountable to treaty responsibilities, including the Gdoo-naaganinaa (known in English as “a dish with one spoon”) treaty established between my Anishinaabeg relatives and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy prior to colonization, and the Guswenta (Two Row Wampum Treaty), which, as a scholar conducting research at a colonial institution, informs my relationships with and responsibilities to Indigenous communities. As such, my work employs a place-based, Land-centric methodology, reflecting the Indigenous understanding that all knowledge is inherently place-based, to illuminate the ways in which the Land is a complex agent that shapes history, relationships, nations, identifies, cultural practices, and so on.
I do this in my dissertation research through comparative case studies of what Tarren Andrews has called “cognate colonial processes” (2021, 338) to examine the transcolonial logics of Indigenous erasure in sources from early medieval England and nineteenth-century Euro-American settler documentations of Haudenosaunee homelands in territorial New York State.
To provide a brief example, in one of my chapters I examine the ways in which borderlands and frontier zones in both medieval and New York State contexts are paradoxically and simultaneously rendered as wastelands and pristine; a wasteland justifies the dispossession of the “uncivilized” Indigenous or prior occupants while a pristine landscape, often positioned as a “New Eden,” establishes the superiority of the emerging English nation. I am really excited about pairing nineteenth-century landscape paintings with medieval texts such as the Old English poem Guthlac A and Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum to show the ways in which colonial ideologies about nature, nation, race, and religion show up across various media such as painting, poetry, and prose.
Jackson: In my dissertation, The Troublesome Erthe, I trace the Middle English word erthe across texts, genres, and centuries. Ancestor of modern English “earth,” but with a more complex network of definitions and connotations, erthe appears in texts that narrate crises of governance and sovereignty. Because Middle English is a contact language, I also look for erthe-like words in medieval England’s multilingual environment.
One exciting text, in that regard, is the thirteenth-century manuscript known today as British Library Cotton Vespasian E.iv. This contains the sole surviving full-length text of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Vita Merlini, which narrates the late life of the seer Merlin. The Vita is surrounded by a quite conventional manuscript environment, meaning lots of legendary and chronicle histories that narrate-slash-justify land acquisition in a recognizably Eurowestern key. But the Vita, unusual in the manuscript for the relatively frequent appearance in it of the Latin word terre (earth), troubles just these kinds of narratives. As in many of the Middle English texts I read, challenges to presumptuous sovereignty claims arise from the earth itself: dirt, leaves, and similar matter. (In another text, “similar matter” arguably includes zombies — but the Vita has its own share of weird stuff, rest assured.)
Read for terre, the Vita Merlini becomes an interloper of sorts, an interruption in a physical manuscript that demands place-based relation both diegetically (in the story) and contextually (in England) amid a generic sequence of texts that convey a more generalized imperial rationale. It may contest — despite compiler and author — the abstraction and homogenization of land and place.
Andrews: I have previously tried to steer clear of really overtly religious texts, like Saint’s Lives, because I have a hard time not being overwhelmed by my own family’s experiences with Christian missionaries and boarding schools, but I recently read Mary Kate Hurley’s new book Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England, and it has made me feel a bit bolder and more excited to engage in those sorts of texts. Her discussion of the translation of St. Oswald’s story, in particular, has helped me think about the integral role Christian literary traditions played in the shaping of toxic nationhood in the early medieval North Atlantic.
Your work is always inspiring to me, and I love learning from each of you. My own work focuses heavily on orality and storytelling in later medieval mystical texts, so I am happy to see Dr. Andrews shifting a bit to my neck of the woods. One final question: can you tell us about a project that you are working on right now?
Andrews: I am currently working on my first monograph, based on my dissertation. The book, tentatively titled The Formations of Settler Colonialism digs into genre theory to explore how Old English genres helped shape a particular Anglophone tradition of settler colonialism. I’m looking at legal, literary, and material genres to try and understand how these genres rhetorically construct themselves and, in turn, provide the ideological framework for the ever-evolving structures of settler colonialism.
LaVoy-Brunette: Right now, I am co-writing an article on the development of Medieval Studies as it relates to Land Grant/Grab Universities and Indigenous dispossession in the United States.
Jackson: The final chapter of my dissertation takes inspiration from scholar-makers like Elizabeth LaPensée, who designs Indigenous videogames and tabletop games. As she and others have shown, Eurowestern attitudes permeate not only law, but also media. I am working on a concept for a videogame that draws together Indigenous scholarship on more-than-human relation and my own readings of Middle English texts to propose a game whose environments challenge and depart from conventional design approaches by way of medievalism. (So departing from, say, game environments as levels to be “cleared.”) With luck, this part of my dissertation will turn into a larger post-dissertation project.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and approaches to Indigenizing Medieval Studies! I look forward to seeing how the field shifts and develops as these changes gain momentum.
