Jordan Abel's debut novel Empty Spaces reframes The Last of the Mohicans through an Indigenous lens
The Nisga'a poet and author spoke to The Next Chapter's Ryan B. Patrick about his debut novel Empty Spaces
On Sept. 30, Canada will mark its third National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, as well as Orange Shirt Day, a time to commemorate children who died while being forced to attend residential schools, those who survived and made it home, their families and communities still affected by the lasting trauma.
In his newest book, Jordan Abel experiments and reimagines a known 19th century story from an Indigenous lens. Throughout Empty Spaces, he examines settler colonial ideas of land and how Indigenous peoples resist them through their story and their existence.
Empty Spaces is a reimagining of James Fenimore Cooper's book The Last of the Mohicans from a modern urban perspective. Abel explores what it means to be Indigenous without access to familial territory and complicates popular understandings about Indigenous storytelling.
Abel is a Nisga'a writer from British Columbia. He is also the author of the poetry collections The Place of Scraps, Un/inhabited and Injun. In 2017, he won the Griffin Poetry Prize for Injun.
Abel spoke about his writing and inspiration with Ryan B. Patrick on The Next Chapter.
Empty Spaces is an experimental novel. It remixes and reframes the novel The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimoore Cooper. Let's start there, what got you interested in this book?
I read this book by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz called An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States and in that book she makes this really profound argument about the power of fiction and specifically she points to The Last of the Mohicans and argues that this book was instrumental in nullifying the guilt related to Indigenous genocide in America.
I thought that was such a powerful statement to make about a literary work which really got me interested in The Last of the Mohicans as a text that I wanted to remix, work through and think about artistically.
The Last of the Mohicans is a classic text in some circles. Obviously most people know it from that famous movie. What was your first impression or reaction?
The Daniel Day Lewis movie is forever lodged in my childhood memories. That movie is problematic, but the book is really problematic and also canonical. It's firmly rooted in the literary canons of North America. It's problematic because it's got all of these really frustrating and difficult settler fantasies. One of the things that that book is predicated on is the myth of "the vanishing Indian", as it's known, where the noble Indian is dying out and gifting this land to the settlers, which of course is not true.
That's the foundation, the kernel of what that book does.
In reframing or recasting that book, in this book Empty Spaces, you explore Indigeneity without access to an ancestral land. When you think about Empty Spaces, the title is so powerful and empty spaces are typically anything but. When did this title come to you?
It came to me somewhere in the process of writing the first 4,000 words or so. I knew I wanted to write about James Fenimore Cooper's descriptions of land and territory that have the settler fantasy of terra nullius, or vacant land. So I was thinking about all of these descriptions of landscape that Cooper describes as pristine and beautiful and it struck me that of course these spaces are full of life, both human and non-humans – they're the opposite of empty.
It struck me that of course these spaces are full of life, both human and non-humans – they're the opposite of empty.- Jordan Abel
Set the stage and tell us what Empty Spaces is all about.
It's an experimental book, but it's also a deeply trippy novel. It's a work about rewriting and returning and revisiting. The way the novel is constructed is initially through endless descriptions of land. I imagine it to be a very hypnotic kind of work that asks a lot of the reader, in some ways to read differently and to listen differently. I think about the reading experience here like ambient reading. If you're familiar with ambient music where you listen, but not in the same ways as you listen to other kinds of music.
You grew up in Ontario, so you've often explored that feeling of being disconnected from traditional land. How does your own personal experience and thoughts of location and identity inform this work?
My grandparents went to the Coqualeetza Indian Residential School and that's in what is known as Chilliwack, B.C. and my entire family is from B.C. Essentially, by way of intergenerational trauma, I ended up not growing up there. I grew up in Ontario and I have no geographical physical connection to Nisga'a territory. That's something that is really deeply troubling for me. I want to have grown up there and I want to have existed there.
A big part of what this work is about is thinking about what our relationships are to the land that we exist on and for me in particular, it's about having no choice but to engage with land through fiction and to have a metaphorical connection to land alongside or instead of a physical geographical connection.
Still thinking about the ideas of resistance, resilience and conciliation, how does Empty Spaces connect to all that and amplify these concepts?
The first thing I'll say here is that all Indigenous literature is in some ways in resistance, in part because Indigenous peoples weren't meant to survive. So our writing, our livelihoods, our works are in resistance to colonial nation states already. This particular work fulfils that spot but it also invites a space of kinship to the land that is deeply in tune with those three R's that you mentioned. In particular, I think Indigenous resurgence is so much about finding our relationships to the lands and finding out how to be in relation to the lands.
I think Indigenous resurgence is so much about finding our relationships to the lands and finding out how to be in relation to the lands.- Jordan Abel
What's your emotional response when thinking about how far we've come and how much further to go? What comes to mind emotionally when you think about that?
One of the epigraphs this book starts out with is by two famous scholars, Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, which is, "decolonization is not a metaphor." I've always felt so challenged by that quotation and I think it's an important one to keep in mind. In my mind, one of the things this means is that land is the root issue of colonization and that no matter how far we've come, land is still the thing that's the most contested issue for Indigenous peoples and getting that land back is a goal. I really feel like there's still a long way to go and so it's vitally important in this particular moment of climate crisis to really attend to how we exist in relation to land.
What that means for humans as a species — but also what it means as Canadians.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
