NISHGA

Jordan Abel's NISHGA is unlike any scholarship I have read before. An Associate Professor of English Literature and Film Studies at the University of Alberta and an acclaimed poet, Abel combines research creation with an autoethnographic approach centered around questions of documentation, academia, and voice. Focusing on Indigenous experience and identity within Canada, Abel explores the notion of legacy and the effects of history on the present. Legacy, for Abel, takes many forms: the legacy of his father, of his culture, of governmental laws that directly or indirectly cause harm. Most interesting to folklorists is how Abel centers a significant portion of his text on the work and legacy of Canadian folklorist Marius Barbeau (1883–1969). Through reconsidering Barbeau, Abel interrogates the effects of colonial practices of early folkloristics and explores the ways in which such scholarship has impacted his sense of culture and Nisga'a identity.Although he is not a folklorist, Abel frequently engages with questions and concerns that are of interest to contemporary folkloristics. Throughout NISHGA, Abel explores his own relationships to his family, his culture, and his sense of self. He self-identifies as a man of Nisga'a heritage, an Indigenous population located in British Columbia, yet he feels a lack of connection, of history, and of knowledge to this group. Through autoethnography, Abel explores the sensation of feeling like an outsider and searching for a place to belong within one's own family history as he seeks to understand Nisga'a culture and his place within it.Largely, Abel questions where knowledge situates within contemporary culture and if there are forms of knowing that colonial practices have erased. Abel specifically refers to Barbeau's Totem Poles (National Museum of Canada, 1950) to explore such questions and the effects of the legacy of knowledge within academia. Without a family history to draw upon to learn about his Nisga'a culture, Abel identifies that he has had to learn of his culture, indeed learn of himself, through scholarly works such as Totem Poles, despite its misrepresentations. As Abel explains, he had “no choice but to learn about [his] own history through the now-debunked work of a dead, white anthropologist” (p. 46). Such issues challenge us to consider and reconsider figures such as Barbeau within folkloristics. How do we think about the impact and intention of scholarship in relation to its lived effects? Do we have any control over the effects of our research? How might we mitigate negative impacts?Throughout NISHGA, Abel highlights the process of grappling with a collective past, especially one of traumatic history. Canada, as well as the United States, has a history of colonialization of its Indigenous peoples and populations. Part of these colonial efforts was the implementation of the residential school system, which forcibly took children from their homes to predominantly Catholic-run boarding schools. Conditions in these schools were neglectfully inhumane to the point of both physical and sexual violence and death. For Abel, such a history cannot ever be ignored: “It is nearly always there—even when it isn't” (p. 137).This collective history haunts Abel, and haunts NISHGA as it explores the generational impacts of violence and trauma. In 2007, the Government of Canada implemented the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada to hear and record the testimonies of victims of the residential school system. This work is very important in order to facilitate reconciliation and healing, and in many ways, this value given to personal narrative is not unlike the work we do as folklorists. However, Abel points to a flaw in this process when he wonders how many testimonies have been forgotten, left behind, or remained unvoiced due to limitations and constraints over non-Indigenous ideologies of what constitutes a testimony. It is not enough for us to question who gets to speak; we need to consider how we let people speak. Who is voiced in our work? Whose voice do we omit because we don't think of it as voice? Abel's perspective on voicing—on the politics of who does and does not get to speak in the cultural record—and on testimony challenges how we think about our folkloristic work and how we reflect upon it.Abel's most outstanding contribution with NISHGA is the way he plays with form to interrogate the valuing of certain knowledges above others. NISHGA is not a work of uniform voice: It consists of interview transcriptions, poetry, visual art, essays, scholarship, and memory. Such form challenges conventional academic authorship and offers a powerful example of creative scholarship that includes the personal and the creative. Through the combination of art and scholarship, Abel shows how the ideas and ways we speak about things matter just as much as what is said, contributing to contemporary discussions in folkloristics over voice, voicing, and silence. Most striking are the visual images that are littered throughout the text, which combine traditional Indigenous art with cut-up scholarly texts. A keen eye will soon realize that these cut-up words are predominantly quotes from Barbeau's Totem Poles. Abel's art is palimpsestic, working to dismantle white folkloristic power over Indigenous knowledge—and in doing so, it reveals the traumas of loss that ethnographic work can and does perpetuate. By tearing up Barbeau's words and scattering them in multimedia artwork throughout the text, and then layering these words under Indigenous images, Abel reverses the statement that Indigenous knowledge and culture lies under academic words.Abel says that “when someone tells us their story, that story becomes a part of us” (p. 185). NISHGA leaves its reader with the question of witnessing: When someone tells us their story, do we become a witness? Are we all witnesses to NISHGA, to Abel, to Barbeau? NISHGA is a work that leaves us with more questions than answers without ever feeling unclear or ambiguous. It is an impressive feat made even more impressive by the fact that this book is Abel's doctoral dissertation. NISHGA is a scholarly work, but it is also highly personal and political, a much-needed fracture in academia that invites further exploration of what knowledge is. Jordan Abel's NISHGA offers alternative modes of knowledge and understanding, perfect for teaching Indigenous folklore and the history of folkloristics, as well as suggesting potential new directions in folkloristic knowledge, learning, and collective understanding.