Towards an anti-colonial Vínland: Indigenous American and medieval Norse relations in Harold R. Johnson’s Björkan Sagas

Abstract Born in Saskatchewan to a Cree mother and Swedish father, Harold R. Johnson (1954–2022) dedicated his life as a lawyer, activist, and author to repairing Indigenous/settler relations. This mission undergirds his novel The Björkan Sagas (2021), which restages the medieval encounter between Norse and First Nations through the lens of science fiction. In an illuminating case study of ‘Red Reading,’ Johnson rebuts a millennium of texts that assumed necessary hostility between Norse and First Nations. He instead draws on the expansiveness and flexibility of speculative fiction to imagine a utopian alternative in which medieval Norse and Native communities join together to resist colonialism’s impacts of environmental destruction, spiritual alienation, religious bigotry, and racism. Considering The Björkan Sagas alongside its medieval source material disrupts settler assumptions about natural and inevitable divisions, hierarchies, and conflicts between peoples.