Injun

Publisher's Description (Talonbooks): 
Award-winning Nisga’a poet Jordan Abel’s third collection, Injun, is a long poem about racism and the representation of indigenous peoples. Composed of text found in western novels published between 1840 and 1950 – the heyday of pulp publishing and a period of unfettered colonialism in North America – Injun then uses erasure, pastiche, and a focused poetics to create a visually striking response to the western genre.

After compiling the online text of 91 of these now public-domain novels into one gargantuan document, Abel used his word processor’s “Find” function to search for the word “injun.” The 509 results were used as a study in context: How was this word deployed? What surrounded it? What was left over once that word was removed? Abel then cut up the sentences into clusters of three to five words and rearranged them into the long poem that is Injun. The book contains the poem as well as peripheral material that will help the reader to replicate, intuitively, some of the conceptual processes that went into composing the poem.

Though it has been phased out of use in our “post-racial” society, the word “injun” is peppered throughout pulp western novels. Injun retraces, defaces, and effaces the use of this word as a colonial and racial marker. While the subject matter of the source text is clearly problematic, the textual explorations in Injun help to destabilize the colonial image of the “Indian” in the source novels, the western genre as a whole, and the Western canon.

Author Biography (Talonbooks): 
Jordan Abel is a Nisga'a writer from Vancouver. Currently pursuing his PhD at Simon Fraser University, where his research concetrates on the intersection between digital humanities and indigenous literary studies. Abel's creative work has recently been anthologized in the Best Canadian Poetry in English series (Tightrope), The Land We Are: Artists and Writers Unsettle the Politics of Reconcilliation (Arbeiter Ring), and The New Concrete: Visual Poetry in the 21st Century (Hayward). Abel is the author of Un/inhabited and The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award).

Resource format: Book (Fiction/Poetry)

Age recommendation: Grades 4-6, 7-9, 10-12, Post Secondary

Keywords: Reservation, reserve, rez, image, faith, business, representation, colonialism, colonial, colonize, erasure, pastiche, Western, beasts, English, violence, stereotype, destabilize, image, silence, space, possession, half-breed, racism

Year of publication: 2016

Publisher information: Talonbooks