Empty Spaces

Empty Spaces is a literary and atmospheric work about land, legacy, and being an intergenerational Indigenous survivor of Residential Schools. Jordan Abel reimagines James Fenimore Cooper's 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans from the perspective of a contemporary urban Nisga'a person whose relationship to land, traditional knowledge, and spiritual traditions was severed by colonial violence. By reinscribing and rewriting settler-colonial language through fiction, metaphor, and a decentering treatment of “place,” the book treats land as a knowing presence rather than a backdrop for human characters, offering a new vision of history shaped by dispossession, survival, and uncertainty.