Nisga'a writer Jordan Abel shocked to win Governor General's Literary Award

Nisga'a writer Jordan Abel's Empty Spaces has won a Governor General's Literary Award, an annual prize that honours Canadian excellence in literature and awards the winners $25,000 to boot. 

Abel's novel reimagines James Fenimore Cooper's 19th-century text The Last of the Mohicans from a modern urban perspective, as he explores what it means to be Indigenous without access to familial territory and complicates popular understandings about Indigenous storytelling.

Seeing the book win a prize from a colonial institution like the governor general was surprising, Abel said. 

"Maybe it signals some of the changes that have happened over the last 10 or 20 years in Canadian literary awards."

Canada's Governor General is Mary Simon, an Inuk woman from Kangiqsualujjuaq in northeastern Quebec and Canada's first Indigenous governor general. When she was appointed to the role, Simon said it was an "important step forward on the long path towards reconciliation."

At the time, the Native Women's Association of Canada congratulated Simon but said she "is being asked to serve the senior role in what is still a colonial system of governance."

Empty Spaces is among the 14 titles, seven in English and seven in French, that were acknowledged by the Governor General's Literary Awards as the best books of the year earlier this month. 

Abel spoke to CBC's Daybreak North host Caroline de Ryk following his big win.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What ran through your mind when you heard your name announced as the Governor General's winner for best fiction?

Shock and surprise. Empty Spaces is a book that I love quite a bit. It's also an extremely difficult book, so I was not expecting anything like this. But it is an incredible surprise to hear that it was the winner.

Why do you both love it but also find it difficult?

It's difficult formally because it's a 70,000-word novel and there are no human characters and there's no dialogue. The formal structure is based on very particular kinds of repetition. So, on the one hand, you know, it feels very familiar on a sentence-by-sentence level because it's mostly writing about the lands. And on the other hand, as a novel, I think it feels very different than most novels feel. 

The love part of it is that this is an allegorical book, and it's a book that's about being Indigenous but being displaced from my traditional territory. It's about being an urban Indigenous person but not being able to connect back in a physical and geographical way to the lands that I'm from. That's the love part of it.

That certainly is a story that a lot of urban Nisga'a people, urban Indigenous people, have to confront and live. Can you tell me a little bit more about how you use this challenging format to explore that and to find that connection?

The way that I approached it was by trying to think about land and how it's represented in text and also land as a geographical space and thinking about how I could try to connect back to land through fiction. 

The earliest points in this book begin with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's book An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States. In that book, she makes this argument about James Fenimore Cooper's book The Last of the Mohicans, where she says that that book as a work of fiction was instrumental in nullifying the guilt related to the genocide of American Indigenous people.

And also that The Last of the Mohicans forms the backbone of U.S. American nationalism. So when I read that, I began to think alongside James Fenimore Cooper's work, which made me think about my own connections to land and also my lack of connections to land. 

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I was born in Vancouver. My grandparents are from the Nass Valley. My whole life has circled around thinking about how I can connect back to that geography that my family is from, how I can connect back to that land, and also all the barriers that come along with that.

You are known for your experimental writing style, which grapples with the often violent history of colonization and yet you just received one of the highest accolades in the country from a colonial structure — the Governor General. How do you grapple with that?

It's a difficult thing to grapple with, for sure. The Governor General's Awards, they've been happening forever. They've been entrenched in a certain kind of Canadian-ness that has previously been anti-Indigenous.

For me to enter into that space, maybe it signals some of the changes that have happened over the last 10 or 20 years in Canadian literary awards. I'm certainly not the first Indigenous author to win a Governor General's Award, but this particular book seems like an unlikely one to me anyway. You know, one that really confronts Canada's colonial legacies and also confronts the root of the problem of colonialism, which is that land was stolen, and it was never returned, and Indigenous people still exist here. 

I do think it's really incredible that this book made it that far and that people are paying attention to it on that level. That's really mind-blowing to me, actually.

Are you working on a new project?

I'm working on a book of poetry. It's called Dad Era. It's about my daughter and it's about Indigenous knowledge transmission and Indigenous parenting. I think it's a very funny book, and I think it's very light-hearted and joyful, and that's something that I think has been missing from some of my writing. My last five books, there's very few laughs, there's very few like moments of levity. I really felt that that was an area that I wanted to work on more. So this is a much more lighthearted book and one that I'm, you know, really quite proud of that. I'm in the midst of working on it, and I'm excited about it.