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Nisga’a writer Jordan Abel Empty spaces has won a Governor General’s Literary Award, an annual prize that honors Canadian excellence in literature and also awards the winners $25,000.

Abel’s novel reinterprets James Fenimore Cooper’s 19th-century text The Last of the Mohicans from a modern urban perspective, while exploring what it means to be Indigenous without access to familial territory and complicating popular understandings of Indigenous storytelling.

It was surprising that the book won an award from a colonial institution like the Governor General, Abel said.

“Perhaps it points to some of the changes that have taken place in the field of Canadian literary awards over the last ten to twenty years.”

Canada’s governor general is Mary Simon, an Inuk woman from Kangiqsualujjuaq in northeastern Quebec and Canada’s first indigenous governor general. When she was appointed to the roleSimon said it was an “important step forward on the long path to reconciliation.”

The Native Women’s Association of Canada congratulated Simon at the time, but said she “is being asked to take a leadership role in what remains a colonial system of governance.”

Empty spaces is among fourteen titles, seven in English and seven in French, that were recognized as the best books of the year by the Governor General’s Literary Awards earlier this month.

Abel spoke to CBCs Dawn North host Caroline de Ryk after his big victory.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What was going through your mind when you heard your name was announced as the Governor General’s winner for best fiction?

Shock and surprise. Empty spaces is a book that I love very much. It’s also an incredibly difficult book, so I didn’t expect anything like that. But it’s an incredible surprise to hear that it was the winner.

Why do you both enjoy it but also find it difficult?

Formally it’s difficult because it’s a 70,000 word novel and there are no human characters and no dialogue. The formal structure is based on very special forms of repetition. So on the one hand it feels very familiar sentence by sentence, because it is mainly about the countries. And on the other hand, I think as a novel it feels very different from most novels.

The love part of it is that this is an allegorical book, and it’s a book about being indigenous but being displaced from my traditional territory. It’s about being an urban Indigenous person but not being able to reconnect in a physical and geographical way with the lands I come from. That’s the love part of it.

That is certainly a story that many urban Nisga’a people, urban indigenous peoples, have to deal with and live with. Can you tell me a little more about how you use this challenging format to explore that and find that connection?

The way I approached it was by trying to think about land and how it is represented in text, and also land as a geographical space, and thinking about how I could try to reconnect with land through fiction.

The earliest points in this book begin with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. In that book she makes this argument about James Fenimore Cooper’s book The Last of the Mohicanswhere she says that as a work of fiction, that book played an important role in erasing the guilt associated with the genocide of America’s indigenous people.

And that too The Last of the Mohicans forms the backbone of U.S. American nationalism. So when I read that, I started thinking alongside the work of James Fenimore Cooper, which made me think about my own connections to the land and also my lack of connections to the land.

I was born in Vancouver. My grandparents are from the Nass Valley. My whole life has been about thinking about how to reconnect with the region my family comes from, how to reconnect with that country, and also all the barriers that come with that.

You are known for your experimental writing style, which grapples with the often violent history of colonization, and yet you have just received one of the country’s highest honors from a colonial structure: the Governor General. How do you struggle with that?

It’s certainly a difficult thing to grapple with. The Governor General’s Awards have been going on forever. They are entrenched in a certain kind of Canadianness that was previously anti-Indigenous.

If I enter that space, it may indicate some of the changes that have taken place in the field of Canadian literary awards over the last ten to twenty years. I’m certainly not the first Indigenous author to win a Governor General’s Award, but this particular book seems unlikely to me anyway. You know, one that really confronts Canada’s colonial legacy and also confronts the root of the problem of colonialism, which is that land was stolen and never returned, and that Indigenous people still exist.

I think it’s really incredible that this book has made it this far and that people are paying attention to it at that level. I actually find that astonishing.

Are you working on a new project?

I’m working on a poetry collection. It’s called Dad era. It’s about my daughter and about Indigenous knowledge transfer and Indigenous parenting. I think it’s a very funny book, and I think it’s very light-hearted and cheerful, and that’s something that I think is lacking in some of my writing. In my last five books there are very few laughs, very few moments of levity. I really felt like this was an area I wanted to work on more. So this is a much lighter book and I’m, you know, quite proud of that. I’m in the middle of it and I’m looking forward to it.