NISHGA
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5,0 • 2 valoracions
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Descripció de l’editorial
WINNER of the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize at the 2022 BC and Yukon Book Prizes
From Griffin Poetry Prize winner Jordan Abel comes a groundbreaking, deeply personal, and devastating autobiographical meditation that attempts to address the complicated legacies of Canada's residential school system and contemporary Indigenous existence.
As a Nisga'a writer, Jordan Abel often finds himself in a position where he is asked to explain his relationship to Nisga'a language, Nisga'a community, and Nisga'a cultural knowledge. However, as an intergenerational survivor of residential school--both of his grandparents attended the same residential school--his relationship to his own Indigenous identity is complicated to say the least.
NISHGA explores those complications and is invested in understanding how the colonial violence originating at the Coqualeetza Indian Residential School impacted his grandparents' generation, then his father's generation, and ultimately his own. The project is rooted in a desire to illuminate the realities of intergenerational survivors of residential school, but sheds light on Indigenous experiences that may not seem to be immediately (or inherently) Indigenous.
Drawing on autobiography and a series of interconnected documents (including pieces of memoir, transcriptions of talks, and photography), NISHGA is a book about confronting difficult truths and it is about how both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples engage with a history of colonial violence that is quite often rendered invisible.
RESSENYA DE L’APPLE BOOKS
Reading Jordan Abel’s powerful memoir is like walking through a museum exhibit of a life. With Nishga, the award-winning poet, a member of the Nisga’a people, stitches together poetry, photography, autobiographical stories, excerpts from his talks, and even copies of essential documents like letters and his grandparents’ residential-school report cards. The book’s nonlinear structure gives us an especially visceral impression of Abel’s life, mirroring the fractured sense of family history that he and so many other indigenous people have experienced as a result of intergenerational trauma. Whether he’s pondering his parents’ divorce shortly after his birth or crafting fearless descriptions of colonial genocide, Abel makes it clear that this memoir wasn’t easy to write, but was very, very necessary. We felt the exact same way about reading it!
