Empty Spaces is a novel by Jordan Abel. (Sweetmoon Photography, McClelland & Stewart)
The Next Chapter13:22Jordan Abel’s debut novel Empty Spaces is a trippy, genre-bending subversion of The Last of the Mohicans.
The acclaimed Edmonton-based writer dissects and disassembles the classic story and reframes it into a powerful Indigenous account of location, identity and agency.
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?
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