“Excavated from His Own Memories"

Excavation, Erasure, and Extraction as Generative Refusal in Jordan Abel’s The Place of Scraps

Abstract

This article argues that Nisga’a poet Jordan Abel’s The Place of Scraps not only manipulates the English language in general but strategically acts upon the language of white settler ethnographer Marius Barbeau’s Totem Poles in a manner that addresses settler colonial acts of violence that mirror the very poetic techniques Abel uses to construct his poetry: extraction, excavation, and erasure. Abel’s poetry resists Barbeau’s efforts via salvage ethnography to confine Indigenous people and cultures to the past while simultaneously refusing to allow the political effects of Barbeau’s work to be imagined only as relevant to the past; Abel turns poetic techniques of extraction into artwork that highlights continuance by demanding that readers reckon more rigorously with the relationship between our present and our past, in efforts, ultimately, toward a more just future.