Volume 1 - Rooted - Issue 2
Excerpting Empty Spaces Jordan Abel Jordan Abel is a Nisga’a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Un/inhabited, and Injun (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize). Abel’s latest project, NISHGA (forthcoming from McClelland & Stewart in 2021), is a deeply personal and autobiographical book that attempts to address the complications of contemporary Indigenous existence and the often invisible intergenerational impact of residential schools. Abel recently completed a PhD at Simon Fraser University, and is currently working as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, where he teaches Indigenous Literatures and Creative Writing. In this article, he discusses the conceptual framework for his upcoming piece, Empty Spaces, and provides an excerpt of his work.
What does it mean to be Indigenous if your connection to your home community and nation have been severed? What does it mean to be Indigenous if your relationship to the land has been disrupted? How do we (and here I mostly mean urban Indigenous peoples and intergenerational survivors of residential schools) build a relationship with the land when we no longer have access to that land? Empty Spaces begins as a project that draws conceptually from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. I initially became interested in Cooper’s novel after I read Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Dunbar-Ortiz argues that The Last of the Mohicans played an important role in reinventing the colonial origins of the United States and created a narrative that was “instrumental in nullifying guilt related to genocide.”1 My initial attempts to engage with The Last of Mohicans were unsuccessful. However, as I began to think through the project more thoroughly, I ended up on Goodreads to see how the book was circulating today and who was reading it. To my surprise, the reviews revealed that many people were still reading The Last of the Mohicans and most of them appeared to be American high school students.2 The reviews also revealed that they really hate this book, but for entirely different reasons than I assumed. They seem to dislike the book because they feel that Cooper’s writing is boring, and they cannot stand his seemingly endless
descriptions of nature. Naturally, I began this project by extracting many of Cooper’s descriptions of land, nature, and territory, and I started writing over them, writing through them, writing around them, writing between them, and writing with them. Empty Spaces, at least as it starts out, is thus an impurely conceptual project that both animates and reanimates Cooper’s representation of land as terra nullius. In a sense, this project refuses the projection of colonial emptiness in Cooper’s writing, and likewise it also affirms and rearticulates Indigenous presence. Empty Spaces, then, is primarily a project about imagining land through fiction. As a Nisga’a person who is both an intergenerational survivor of residential schools and an urban Indigenous person, I would suggest that this project is about what it means to be an urban Indigenous person but to have limited or no access to traditional territory or traditional Indigenous knowledges. As Tuck and Yang famously wrote, “decolonization is not a metaphor.”3 Land is at the root of the problem of
“As Tuck and Yang famously wrote, “decolonization is not a metaphor.”1 Land is at the root of the problem of colonization.”
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