Weaving

• The seemingly fantastical world of the Middle Ages has held western popular culture in fascination since (at least) its nostalgic reimagining by Victorian antiquarians.
• “The medieval” is used to evoke both magical stories for all ages, and mature stories featuring senseless violence.
• With literature professor Elizabeth Edwards, I have examined how medieval studies can gain insight from Indigenous worldviews and perspectives.
• Here, I consider the impact of white supremacy on historical and contemporary scholarly and popular understandings of the Middle Ages, and focus on how scholars are shifting the narrative with critical race and Indigenous approaches.

White nationalism

• Critical race scholars like Dorothy Kim and Eduardo Ramos have highlighted the colonial histories of medieval studies and its associated myths and stereotypes.
• As critical race literature scholar Matthew X. Vernon notes in
  The Black Middle Ages: Race and the Construction of the Middle Ages, white supremacist theorists have seen medieval England as “available for being imaginatively constructed as an era of racial purity and military subjugation on ‘foreign peoples.’” Such “extrapolations of the Middle Ages” have served to “racializ[e] bodies and then fi[x] horizons of expectations for what a race could achieve.”
  Medievalist scholars Mary Rambaran-Olm and Erik Wade note that some American and English writers rebranded “Anglo-Saxon” to include false narratives around white racial superiority.

Indigenizing approaches to the Middle Ages

• The idea of the Middle Ages is arguably tightly interwoven with settler colonial ideology.
• Indigenous and non-Indigenous with a decolonial focus have begun to understand the European medieval period through global historical and Indigenous perspectives.
• How have Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars approached the Middle Ages from a decolonial lens?
• Red Reading
  “Red Reading,” a form of literary analysis that uses Indigenous approaches and methodologies to read non-Indigenous texts, was first coined by Jill Carter (Anishinabek), and simultaneously developed by Scott Andrews (Cherokee).
• Hsy showcases the work of Osage medievalist, Carter Revard, who studied, translated and wrote in the Old English Riddle style.

Shifting the public perception