By Eric Ostrowidzki, PhD
Instructor, Nicola Valley Institute of Technology (NVIT) – Burnaby campus

In his new book The Place of Scraps, Jordan Abel provides us with an Indigenous “cultural appropriation” of the ethnographic work of 20th century anthropologist Marius Barbeau, “who conducted extensive research on the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest, including my ancestral Nisga’a Nation” (Abel). Thus part of Abel’s genius is to intervene in the ethnographic(-ethnocentric) textual production on the knowledge and lives of Aboriginal people by recomposing Barbeau’s own text into a series of often cryptographic, yet just as often illuminating, fragments.

Reading The Place of Scraps, the reader is confronted by a textual space of an intercultural imaginary where Abel as poet, the ethnographic text of Marius Barbeau, and the original voices of the First Nations of the Pacific Northwest come together in a mingling that invites the reader to add her or his own voice to this complex text that refracts cultural oppositions and secret affinities. The attentive reader must come prepared with a critical eye and creative play on Abel‘s artistic feat, because this is a book that comes with no caveats or ready-to-hand interpretations.

In truth, The Place of Scraps is a challenging work because of the author’s intentional elisions performed on the original text. As the title of the text reminds us – the book is indeed a place of scraps. Unlike T.S. Eliot, who wished to “shore up” the “fragmentary remains” of Western culture presumably in decline during Eliot’s lifetime, Jordan Abel has broken up Barbeau’s text to be examined like any other artifact for its clues relating to the workings, interactions and exchanges, and contradictions between settler society and Aboriginal society. Yet the “burden of interpretation” that Abel places on his reader is worth the effort, for there are many moments of insight and beauty shared in his new book:

This clan covered ground
covered time with smoke and shadow

One by one their bodies
split with the kind knife

Summertime in a strange country;
time with the remaining and the remains

(pp. 38–40, The Place of Scraps)