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Injun, by Nisga'a writer Jordan Abel (Talonbooks 2016), won the 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize for which he received $65,000. This follow-up to Abel's Un/inhabited is comprised of 'found text' from western novels of the pulp fiction genre published between 1840 and 1950. By gathering all sentences with the word "injun" embedded, retrieved using the 'Find' function, Abel seeks to destabilize the colonial concept of the "Indian" as it was allowed to grow in the 'western' world of the so-called western world.
Jordan Abel received the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2014 for his first book, The Place of Scraps, in which he revisits and re-examines the role of ethnographer Marius Barbeau. According to publicity materials: "The Place of Scraps revolves around Marius Barbeau, an early-twentieth-century ethnographer, who studied many of the First Nations cultures in the Pacific Northwest, including Jordan Abel's ancestral Nisga'a Nation.
Barbeau, in keeping with the popular thinking of the time, believed First Nations cultures were about to disappear completely, and that it was up to him to preserve what was left of these dying cultures while he could. Unfortunately, his methods of preserving First Nations cultures included purchasing totem poles and potlatch items from struggling communities in order to sell them to museums. While Barbeau strove to protect First Nations cultures from vanishing, he ended up playing an active role in dismantling the very same cultures he tried to save."
Jordan's second poetry project, Un/inhabited (Co-published by Project Space Press and Talonbooks 2014) investigates public domain to create an analysis of the interconnections between language and land. Abel constructed the book's source text by compiling 91 complete western novels found on the website Project Gutenberg, an online archive of public domain works. Using his word processor's Ctrl-F function, he then searched the document in its totality for words that relate to the political and social aspects of land, territory and ownership. Each search query represents a study in context (How was this word deployed? What surrounded it? What is left over once that word is removed?) that accumulates toward a representation of the public domain as a discoverable and inhabitable body of land. This poetry collection also includes a text by independent curator Kathleen Ritter.
Jordan Abel holds a BA from the University of Alberta and an MFA from the University of British Columbia. He has been an editor for Poetry is Dead magazine and PRISM international. While completing his PhD at Simon Fraser University, his studies focused on "digital humanities" and indigenous poetics. Both of Jordan Abel's grandparents attended the same residential school in Chilliwack. As an inter-generational survivor of residential school, he has written and assembled Nishga (M&S 2020) to present how colonial violence from the Coqualeetza Indian Residential School impacted his grandparents' generation, as well as father's generation, and ultimately his own, although he never himself attended residential school. See a review of Nishga below. It is Abel's first book from a large Ontario publisher. The spelling of Nisga'a as Nishga is not a typo.
BOOKS:
The Place of Scraps (Talonbooks, 2013) $19.95 978-0-88922-788-0
Un/inhabited (Co-published Project Space Press and Talonbooks, 2015)
Injun (Talonbooks, 2016) $16.95 978-0-88922-977-8
Nishga (McClelland & Stewart, 2020) $32.95 978-0-7710-0790-3
[BCBW 2020]
*
REVIEW
NISHGA
(McClelland & Stewart $32.95)
by Jordan Abel
Review by Latash-Maurice Nahanee
Jordan Abel's NISHGA is not a poem, essay or a letter. It is the documentation of one man's life journey and it is the journey of thousands of young Indigenous people.
His story begins with the founding of Canada as a country in 1867 when over 150,000 children were forcibly removed from their homes by RCMP and clergy and placed in institutions called Indian Residential Schools. It set in motion a wave of destruction
The first Canadian prime minister, Sir John A. MacDonald was also at various times the minister of Indian Affairs. Abel provides an early quote from Sir John A. MacDonald:
"It has been strongly pressed on myself as head of the Department, that Indian children be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of white men."
This was the beginning of the Indian Residential school system. Abel points out that these Indian residential schools offered much more than a liberal education. They were run by men and women who sexually abused children, used corporal punishment as a measure to curb children from speaking their Indigenous languages, and allowed medical starvation experimentation on inmates.
Abel's grandparents met at Coqualeetza Residential School in Sardis, British Columbia. They were Nisga'a from the Nass Valley of northwestern B.C. Their formative years were spent without the love of their parents and extended families. Lacking the nurturing of a loving family, his grandparents began a dysfunctional life. The trauma of their life together was passed onto their son Lawrence Wilson, Jordan Abel’s father.
Many Nisga'a attended Indian residential schools far from their homeland. And many returned to their extended families where they began to relearn their culture and language. Leaders such as James Gosnell, Frank Calder and Rod Robinson, upon returning to the Nass, became part of a generation who would win the first modern treaty in B.C. They too attended the Coqualeetza institution.
However, Abel's grandparents did not return to the Nisga'a homeland. They moved to Vancouver. This change of trajectory would prove to be a devastating turning point for the family. Abel's parents split apart soon after he was born. This resulted in Abel moving to Toronto where he was raised by his single settler mother and was cut off from his Indigenous roots.
I can imagine what it was like for Jordan Abel being raised so far from his homeland by his mother. Her experience with Indigenous people and Indigenous culture was limited and negative. Abel also had to contend with being in an urban center like Toronto where, if you look different from other children, questions arise about what your ethnicity is! When you don't know, it is difficult to answer. Abel's school years were marred by racism.
At the time of this writing, Abel is completing his doctoral degree. He is in the top intellectual percentile of the Canadian population. He is an anomaly in many senses of the word. He identifies as Nisga'a because his father is Nisga'a. Since the Nisga'a are famous for their landmark treaty victory, he unwittingly becomes a target of many inquiries.
The Nisga'a are among the few celebrity First Nations in Canada. People are curious about the Nisga'a. From the 1980s until the signing of the treaty, they were big news and covered regularly in print and broadcast media. I was a journalist during this time and I wrote about their struggle to get a treaty. Closer to home, I married a Nisga'a; her name is Delgamha. Her father is hereditary chief, Simooegit Hymas. He was one of the main negotiators of the treaty. So, I learned firsthand about the Nisga'a people and their amazing culture.
One troubling aspect of Jordon Abel's NISHGA is the lack of research on available Indigenous sources. In 1993, the landmark volume Nisga'a (Douglas & McIntyre) was published with the assistance of hereditary leaders. It is the compelling story of a people determined to live in a distinct society based on the teachings of their ancestors. There is also the Nisga'a court case known as Calder v. British Columbia (Attorney-General) which is available to the public. And there are dozens of news articles, TV documentaries and news reports. I did a Google search and found many interesting facts about the Nisga'a. In short, there are scores of sources and written documents by and about the Nisga'a. And yet I find none of them referenced in Jordan's book. He does, however, quote Sir John A. MacDonald and anthropologists such as Marius Barbeau (1883-1969). These are not reliable sources.
The pain and suffering of thousands of displaced Canadian Aboriginal people is illuminated in NISHGA. Much has been invested in getting rid of the "Indian problem" in Canada. More funds need to redirected to working collaboratively with Indigenous people to provide the best possible life for everyone. This is not the "Indian problem;" it is everyone's problem. Canada is a land that is rich in resources. There is wealth that can be more equitably distributed for the benefit of all Canadians.
Injustice for one, is injustice for all.
BC BookWorld's Indigenous Editor Latash-Maurice Nahanee is a member of the Squamish Nation. He has a bachelor of arts degree (Simon Fraser University).
*
Jordan Abel received the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 2014 for his first book, The Place of Scraps, in which he revisits and re-examines the role of ethnographer Marius Barbeau. According to publicity materials: "The Place of Scraps revolves around Marius Barbeau, an early-twentieth-century ethnographer, who studied many of the First Nations cultures in the Pacific Northwest, including Jordan Abel's ancestral Nisga'a Nation.
Barbeau, in keeping with the popular thinking of the time, believed First Nations cultures were about to disappear completely, and that it was up to him to preserve what was left of these dying cultures while he could. Unfortunately, his methods of preserving First Nations cultures included purchasing totem poles and potlatch items from struggling communities in order to sell them to museums. While Barbeau strove to protect First Nations cultures from vanishing, he ended up playing an active role in dismantling the very same cultures he tried to save."
Jordan's second poetry project, Un/inhabited (Co-published by Project Space Press and Talonbooks 2014) investigates public domain to create an analysis of the interconnections between language and land. Abel constructed the book's source text by compiling 91 complete western novels found on the website Project Gutenberg, an online archive of public domain works. Using his word processor's Ctrl-F function, he then searched the document in its totality for words that relate to the political and social aspects of land, territory and ownership. Each search query represents a study in context (How was this word deployed? What surrounded it? What is left over once that word is removed?) that accumulates toward a representation of the public domain as a discoverable and inhabitable body of land. This poetry collection also includes a text by independent curator Kathleen Ritter.
Jordan Abel holds a BA from the University of Alberta and an MFA from the University of British Columbia. He has been an editor for Poetry is Dead magazine and PRISM international. While completing his PhD at Simon Fraser University, his studies focused on "digital humanities" and indigenous poetics. Both of Jordan Abel's grandparents attended the same residential school in Chilliwack. As an inter-generational survivor of residential school, he has written and assembled Nishga (M&S 2020) to present how colonial violence from the Coqualeetza Indian Residential School impacted his grandparents' generation, as well as father's generation, and ultimately his own, although he never himself attended residential school. See a review of Nishga below. It is Abel's first book from a large Ontario publisher. The spelling of Nisga'a as Nishga is not a typo.
BOOKS:
The Place of Scraps (Talonbooks, 2013) $19.95 978-0-88922-788-0
Un/inhabited (Co-published Project Space Press and Talonbooks, 2015)
Injun (Talonbooks, 2016) $16.95 978-0-88922-977-8
Nishga (McClelland & Stewart, 2020) $32.95 978-0-7710-0790-3
[BCBW 2020]
*
REVIEW
NISHGA
(McClelland & Stewart $32.95)
by Jordan Abel
Review by Latash-Maurice Nahanee
Jordan Abel's NISHGA is not a poem, essay or a letter. It is the documentation of one man's life journey and it is the journey of thousands of young Indigenous people.
His story begins with the founding of Canada as a country in 1867 when over 150,000 children were forcibly removed from their homes by RCMP and clergy and placed in institutions called Indian Residential Schools. It set in motion a wave of destruction
The first Canadian prime minister, Sir John A. MacDonald was also at various times the minister of Indian Affairs. Abel provides an early quote from Sir John A. MacDonald:
"It has been strongly pressed on myself as head of the Department, that Indian children be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of white men."
This was the beginning of the Indian Residential school system. Abel points out that these Indian residential schools offered much more than a liberal education. They were run by men and women who sexually abused children, used corporal punishment as a measure to curb children from speaking their Indigenous languages, and allowed medical starvation experimentation on inmates.
Abel's grandparents met at Coqualeetza Residential School in Sardis, British Columbia. They were Nisga'a from the Nass Valley of northwestern B.C. Their formative years were spent without the love of their parents and extended families. Lacking the nurturing of a loving family, his grandparents began a dysfunctional life. The trauma of their life together was passed onto their son Lawrence Wilson, Jordan Abel’s father.
Many Nisga'a attended Indian residential schools far from their homeland. And many returned to their extended families where they began to relearn their culture and language. Leaders such as James Gosnell, Frank Calder and Rod Robinson, upon returning to the Nass, became part of a generation who would win the first modern treaty in B.C. They too attended the Coqualeetza institution.
However, Abel's grandparents did not return to the Nisga'a homeland. They moved to Vancouver. This change of trajectory would prove to be a devastating turning point for the family. Abel's parents split apart soon after he was born. This resulted in Abel moving to Toronto where he was raised by his single settler mother and was cut off from his Indigenous roots.
I can imagine what it was like for Jordan Abel being raised so far from his homeland by his mother. Her experience with Indigenous people and Indigenous culture was limited and negative. Abel also had to contend with being in an urban center like Toronto where, if you look different from other children, questions arise about what your ethnicity is! When you don't know, it is difficult to answer. Abel's school years were marred by racism.
At the time of this writing, Abel is completing his doctoral degree. He is in the top intellectual percentile of the Canadian population. He is an anomaly in many senses of the word. He identifies as Nisga'a because his father is Nisga'a. Since the Nisga'a are famous for their landmark treaty victory, he unwittingly becomes a target of many inquiries.
The Nisga'a are among the few celebrity First Nations in Canada. People are curious about the Nisga'a. From the 1980s until the signing of the treaty, they were big news and covered regularly in print and broadcast media. I was a journalist during this time and I wrote about their struggle to get a treaty. Closer to home, I married a Nisga'a; her name is Delgamha. Her father is hereditary chief, Simooegit Hymas. He was one of the main negotiators of the treaty. So, I learned firsthand about the Nisga'a people and their amazing culture.
One troubling aspect of Jordon Abel's NISHGA is the lack of research on available Indigenous sources. In 1993, the landmark volume Nisga'a (Douglas & McIntyre) was published with the assistance of hereditary leaders. It is the compelling story of a people determined to live in a distinct society based on the teachings of their ancestors. There is also the Nisga'a court case known as Calder v. British Columbia (Attorney-General) which is available to the public. And there are dozens of news articles, TV documentaries and news reports. I did a Google search and found many interesting facts about the Nisga'a. In short, there are scores of sources and written documents by and about the Nisga'a. And yet I find none of them referenced in Jordan's book. He does, however, quote Sir John A. MacDonald and anthropologists such as Marius Barbeau (1883-1969). These are not reliable sources.
The pain and suffering of thousands of displaced Canadian Aboriginal people is illuminated in NISHGA. Much has been invested in getting rid of the "Indian problem" in Canada. More funds need to redirected to working collaboratively with Indigenous people to provide the best possible life for everyone. This is not the "Indian problem;" it is everyone's problem. Canada is a land that is rich in resources. There is wealth that can be more equitably distributed for the benefit of all Canadians.
Injustice for one, is injustice for all.
BC BookWorld's Indigenous Editor Latash-Maurice Nahanee is a member of the Squamish Nation. He has a bachelor of arts degree (Simon Fraser University).
*
Articles: 1 Article for this author
Abel wins Griffin
The prize money for the Griffin Poetry Prize, founded in 2000, is up to 65 grand per category. This year Alice Oswald of Devon, England, won the international category for Falling Awake.
But the big news on this side of the Rockies is that 320 guests watched Jordan Abel of Vancouver, a Ph.D candidate at SFU, win the Canadian Griffin Prize on June 7 for Injun (Talonbooks).
There were 617 submissions overall from 39 countries (international and Canadian categories). Runners-up in the Canadian category were Hoa Nguyen's Violet Energy Ingots, published by Wave Books, and Sandra Ridley's Silvija, published by BookThug.
The Toronto presentation was hosted by Scott Griffin, founder of the prize, and trustees Mark Doty, Carolyn Forché, Marek Kazmierski, Michael Ondaatje, Jo Shapcott, Karen Solie and David Young. Guests heard readings Griffin Trust For Excellence In Poetry's 2017 Lifetime Recognition Award recipient, Frank Bidart, and a recitation of Don McKay's "Sometimes a Voice" by David White.
Jordan Abel, the son of a 'settler' mother, is a Nisga'a conceptual writer who focuses on "digital humanities and indigenous poetics."; A former editor for PRISM international and Geist, he is an editor for Poetry is Dead magazine. His first book, The Place of Scraps, won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and was followed by Un/inhabited in 2014. CBC Books named Abel one of 12 Young Writers to Watch in 2015.
It has been suggested that Abel's books are meant to be analysed as much as, or more than, enjoyed. About Un/inhabited, he told the podcast Can't Lit, "It is an unreadable book, for sure... I don't think that it demands you read all of it,"; he said, on "... I'm always surprised that people try to read it from front to back."
According to publicity materials: Jordan Abel's third book of poetry, a long poem about race and racism, "destabilizes the colonial image of the Indian, both in the public domain and the western genre as a whole. By narrowing the search to the word "Injun"; as it appears in the 10,000-page source text of pulp westerns, and by re-appropriating the "erasure"; imposed by settler colonialism, Abel reclaims erasure, and pastiche to chisel a path through privileged, colonial histories. Injun testifies to the need for intervention by calling attention to contested issues of land ownership, territory, and the silencing of Indigenous peoples. A natural follow-up to Un/inhabited, Abel's visual poetics bring urgency to the materiality of text by restructuring history on the site of the page."
The Griffin judges wrote: "Jordan Abel's collection Injun evacuates the subtexts of possession, territory, and erasure. Lyric, yes: 'that part of sparkling / kn ife love that // hates the trouble of rope / and the letters / of towns.' Testimony of another kind, too: 'all misdeeds at the milk house / all heap shoots by the sagebrush // all the grub is somewhere / down in the hungry bellies [...]'. The fog of tedious over-dramatization clears and the open skies of discourse can be discerned. What does it mean to arrange hate to look like verse? What becomes of the ugly and meaningless? Words are restored to their constituent elements as counter-movements in Abel's hands, just as they are divested of their capacity for productive violence. The golden unity of language and its silvered overcoding erode, bringing to bear the 'heard snatches of comment / going up from the river bank.' To pixelize is to mobilize, not to disappear."
Mainly Jordan Abel writes about issues for indigenous peoples, both contemporary and historical. He is fully aware his books are not easily accessible.
From Injun
he heard snatches of comment
going up from the river bank
all them injuns is people first
and besides for this buckskin
why we even shoot at them
and seems like a sign of warm
dead as a horse friendship
and time to pedal their eyes
to lean out and say the truth3
all you injuns is just white keys
From Injun by Jordan Abel
Copyright © 2016 Jordan Abel
Nisga'a writer Jordan Abel holds a BA from the University of Alberta and an MFA from the University of British Columbia. He has been an editor for Poetry is Dead magazine and PRISM international. While completing his Ph.D at Simon Fraser University, his studies foccussed "digital humanities" and indigenous poetics.
For The Place of Scraps, Jordan Abel revisited and re-examined the role of early-twentieth century ethnographer Marius Barbeau whose Pacific Northwest studies included Abel's ancestral Nisga'a Nation. Publicity materials state: "Barbeau, in keeping with the popular thinking of the time, believed First Nations cultures were about to disappear completely, and that it was up to him to preserve what was left of these dying cultures while he could. Unfortunately, his methods of preserving First Nations cultures included purchasing totem poles and potlatch items from struggling communities in order to sell them to museums. While Barbeau strove to protect First Nations cultures from vanishing, he ended up playing an active role in dismantling the very same cultures he tried to save."
Jordan's second poetry project, Un/inhabited (Co-published Project Space Press and Talonbooks 2014) investigates public domain to create an analysis of the interconnections between language and land. Abel constructed the book's source text by compiling 91 complete western novels found on the website Project Gutenberg, an online archive of public domain works. Using his word processor's Ctrl-F function, he then searched the document in its totality for words that relate to the political and social aspects of land, territory and ownership. Each search query represents a study in context (How was this word deployed? What surrounded it? What is left over once that word is removed?) that accumulates toward a representation of the public domain as a discoverable and inhabitable body of land. This poetry collection also includes a text by independent curator Kathleen Ritter--the first piece of scholarship on Abel's work.
More about Jordan Abel
"In parsing sentences of the colonial habitus that drives Old Westerns, Jordan Abel's Injun turns tables of (dis)contents to redress the page, the book, and the naturality of reading. The poems build an alphabet and a numeracy, unfurl lexical ribbons of mourning that explode sentences forward and back, and then insist we recognize a vitally inhabited void. With his caress of phrases cruel with racisms, Abel deftly shows that where the social psychosis of West was founded, it also flounders, and on one word: injun with its echoes of injunction, injustice, injury, inject. This is brilliant work." - Erin Moure
"Through word patterning and word breakdown, Jordan Abel shuffles up the English language in his probing of the use of the word 'injun' in public domain western novels. At once, his work creates a poetics of anti-colonial space and consciousness-a space where a new and vibrant Indigenous poetic consciousness can emerge. He is one of the most exciting and innovative Indigenous poets of our time." - Neal McLeod
"I'm drawn to the fugitive nature of Injun. I imagine Abel poring over source texts, deconstructing code, forging meaning from scraps and breaking through colonial constructions with fever, and I can't help but think he's re-created my experience of being Indigenous in Canada. Well done." - Leanne Simpson
"Built from a core sample of our culture's colonialist project in language, Jordan Abel has opened a space of disruption, lament, resistance, and inquiry-a terrible, inverted singing that can undermine assumption, exposing 'soft' ideology. Injun isn't a record of past wrongs, but a present tense intervention. A necessary, confrontational beauty. The country needs Injun right up in its face." - Ken Babstock
