Jordan Abel

Reimagining James Fenimore Coopers nineteenth-century textThe Last of the Mohicansfrom the contemporary perspective of an urban Nisgaa person whose relationship to land and traditional knowledge was severed by colonialviolence, Jordan Abel explores what it means to be Indigenous without access to familial territory and complicates popularunderstandingsabout Indigenous storytelling. Engaging the land through fiction andmetaphor, the successive chapters ofEmpty Spacesmove toward an eerie, looping, and atmospheric rendering of place that evolves despite the violent and reckless histories of North America.The result is a bold and profound new vision of history that decenters human perception and forgoes Westernized ways of seeing.

Jordan Abelsextraordinary debut work of fiction grows out of his groundbreaking visualcompositionsinNISHGA, which integrated descriptions of the landscape from Coopers settler classicinto his father’s traditional Nisga’a artwork. InEmpty Spaces, Abel reinscribes those words on the page itself, subjecting them to bold rewritings and inviting us to come to a crucial understanding: that the land knows everything that can and will happen, even as our world lurches toward uncertainty.