Talking Circle and Workshop: Medieval Pasts, Indigenous Futures
With Tarren Andrews (Yale University, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes), Gage Karahkwi:io Diabo (Concordia University, Kanien’kehá:ka), Emma Hitchcock (Columbia University), and Stephen Yeager (Concordia University)
Sponsored by CEMS, Department of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, Medieval Studies University Seminar.
This CEMS talking circle and workshop facilitates a broad discussion about the politics, power structures, and potentials of thinking about medieval pasts in concert with Indigenous futures. In the first part of the day, a Talking Circle—hosted by Tarren Andrews (Yale University, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes), Gage Karahkwi:io Diabo (Concordia University, Kanien’kehá:ka), Emma Hitchcock (Columbia University), and Stephen Yeager (Concordia University)—will bring together a core group of participants to discuss The Great Law of Peace and its potential analogues in Biblical and other narrative sources. Such parallels have played a central role in the discussions of the Great Law that have aimed to evaluate its challenges to settler epistemologies of history. Our Circle will ask participants to think critically about the political traps of such comparisons and encourage them to articulate the investments in such approaches by medieval studies methodologies. Following a lunch break, the group will reconvene and invite the audience (both in-person and on zoom) to join the next round of the Talking Circle, focused on how Indigenous studies methodologies and commitments to Indigenous futurity offer ways around the political trap of comparative thinking as it relates to cultural productions. This collaborative space will encourage participants to think through the role(s) that medieval pasts have played in the foreclosing of Indigenous futurity and further ask the group to imagine new research methods and pedagogical strategies to enact anticolonial praxis that both opens up our understanding of the medieval past and supports Indigenous futures.
https://cemedieval.com/northeast/medieval-pasts-indigenous-futures/
