On one hand, territoriality–and thus settler access to land–is the central component of settler colonialism (see Wolfe 2006). Thus, the ways in which sexuality, gender, race, Indigeneity, and coloniality are constructed under settler colonialism are inextricably tied to territoriality and land politics. On the other hand, land is the core for North American Indigenous cultures (where we are is who we are), and any critical engagement with Indigenous studies, as this panel puts forward, necessarily needs to be both grounded in place and have special attention to how land is constructed in the past-present.

We have selected four papers of no more than fifteen minutes each to ensure there is at least fifteen minutes for discussion following the presentations. While this panel includes diverse voices–graduate students, senior faculty, queer voices, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars–all participants are medievalists committed to advancing Indigenous futures inside and outside academic spaces. Basil Price, as presider, will both ensure that each presenter stays within the allotted time limits and ensure that the discussion runs smoothly, fielding and posing questions as necessary. We will begin with Sarah-Nelle Jackson who will discuss the ways in which medieval English historical writers after the Norman Conquest, as they helped develop what would become settler colonialism’s “white possessive” logics (Moreton-Robinson 2015), frame land relation as queer. In construing proto-colonial territoriality as one possibility among many, Jackson will discuss how these historians cast reciprocal, accountable relation to the more-than-human world as a mode from which proto-colonial thinkers had, with no great ease, to extract themselves. Our second presentation by Emma Hitchcock will argue how the lyric subjectivity critics have attributed to“The Seafarer,” one of a group of Old English poems known as the Exeter “elegies” is foundational of an English colonial body politic, in that it obfuscates the ability of the land to possess us. That the land has the ability “to possess us” is an articulation that geographer Mishuana Goeman (Seneca) makes to theorize Indigenous mnemonic attachments to land. Hitchcock will discuss how early English ecclesiastic authorities formulated an ethics of self-possession by pathologizing practices of invoking the land’s mnemonic power. The third contribution by Sarah LaVoy-Brunette (Ojibwe) will discuss the ways in which settler logics that constructed Indigenous lands in North America as wastelands, as justification for both racial superiority and conquest, are deeply ingrained logics present as far back as the medieval period. LaVoy-Brunette puts forth a reading of the “weste-” (waste-) lands in Old English poem Guthlac A that both demonstrates how both land and humans are racialized in the medieval-modern borderlands and shows how land-centric readings of medieval texts can contribute to Indigenous rematriation movements. The last presentation by Suzanne Conklin Akbari suggests how Marbod of Rennes’ eleventh-century Latin poem De lapidibus (“On stones”) can be read as from a particular place. In doing so, this place-based paper reads Marbod’s lapidary from the vantage point of the long-closed Trotter Dump, a composite landscape made up of grassy hillsides and valleys built with the stones unearthed from the zinc mines of Franklin, NJ.

As a whole, this panel will suggest new ways in which we can not only imagine the future of the “Indigenous turn” within medieval studies, but more importantly, ask how medievalists can work towards meaningfully contributing towards various Indigenous solidarity movements.