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Engaging centuries of settler-invader attempts to dispossess and destroy Indigenous communities, Nisga'a poet Jordan Abel makes appropriation and erasure his central thematic and formal preoccupations in The Place of Scraps (2013). The text itself consists of a series of erasure poems and collages that take much of their source material from Québécois anthropologist and salvage ethnographer Marius Barbeau's canonical Totem Poles (1950). Barbeau, both in Totem Poles and throughout his career, studied a number of Pacific Northwest "tribes," including the Nisga'a. Abel's appropriation of Totem Poles constitutes a pointed entrance into and reconfiguration of settler-colonial discourses that fabricated the myth of the perpetually vanishing Indigenous body, a myth that was instrumental to the construction of a robust nationalism in the interwar period. By demanding that readers look again and again at multiple representations of language from Totem Poles, Abel's poems enact the endurance and embody the presence of the Indigenous subject under erasure. Following Roy Miki's call for "an aesthetics that both acknowledges the colonialism embedded in Canadian cultural nationalism and draws attention to a 'present-tense' relationship to the lands that were appropriated" (163-64), I read Abel's poetry as both a discursive repatriation of ancestral artifacts, cultures, and histories, as well as a tactical disruption of colonial epistemologies that depend on the erasure of Indigenous presence. As this double reading suggests, Abel's return to textual and physical sites of colonial erasure and appropriation is not simple gamesmanship; it is a powerful poetic act that reverberates in the contemporary moment, a moment understood by scholars such as Taiaiake Alfred, Leanne Simpson, and Glen Coulthard as one of Indigenous resurgence.
Before venturing into the theory and criticism that ground my thinking about Abel's text, I feel impelled to address my own positionality. As a non-Indigenous scholar, I am aware of the necessity to tread lightly in approaching and analyzing texts by Indigenous writers. This tension is compounded by the fact that the text I am reading has received very limited scholarly attention. In one sense, the lack of criticism addressing Abel's poetry is fortunate; it forces me to foreground the context surrounding both the text's production and the events and histories that the poems explore. Jo-Ann Episkenew suggests that a lack of historical and cultural context is...