Whitemud Walking Launch with Matthew James Weigel and Jordan Abel

Join us for the virtual launch of Whitemud Walking by Matthew James Weigel! Matthew will be joined by Jordan Abel for an evening of insightful conversation. A Q&A with the audience will follow.

Whitemud Walking is about the land Matthew James Weigel was born on and the institutions that occupy that land. It is about the interrelatedness of his own story with that of the colonial history of Canada, which considers the numbered treaties of the North-West to be historical and completed events. But they are eternal agreements that entail complex reciprocity and obligations. The state and archival institutions work together to sequester documents and knowledge in ways that resonate violently in people’s lives, including the dispossession and extinguishment of Indigenous title to land.

Using photos, documents, and recordings that are about or involve his ancestors, but are kept in archives, Weigel examines the consequences of this erasure and sequestration. Memories cling to documents and sometimes this palimpsest can be read, other times the margins must be centered to gain a fuller picture. Whitemud Walking is a genre-bending work of visual and lyric poetry, non-fiction prose, photography, and digital art and design.

Matthew James Weigel is a Dene and Métis poet and artist. He is the designer for Moon Jelly House press and his words and art have been published in Arc, The Polyglot, and The Mamawi Project. Matthew is a National Magazine Award finalist, a Cécile E. Mactaggart Award winner, and winner of the 2020 Vallum Chapbook Award. His chapbook It Was Treaty / It Was Me is available now. Whitemud Walking is his debut collection.

Jordan Abel is a queer Nisga’a writer from Vancouver. He is the author of The Place of Scraps (winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize), Un/inhabited, and Injun (winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize). Abel’s latest book NISHGA (McClelland & Stewart) is a deeply personal and autobiographical book that attempts to address the complications of contemporary Indigenous existence and the often invisible intergenerational impact of Residential Schools. NISHGA was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction, the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction, the Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize, the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize, and the winner of the inaugural VMI Betsy Warland Between Genres award. Abel’s next project, a work of fiction called Empty Spaces forthcoming from McClelland & Stewart in 2023, is a book that attempts to understand land through fiction, and is a novel about colonization with no characters. Abel’s work has been published in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies—including Canadian Literature, The Capilano Review, and The Malahat Review—and his visual poetry has been included in exhibitions at the Polygon Gallery, UNITT/PITT Gallery, and the Oslo Pilot Project Room in Oslo, Norway. Abel completed a Ph.D. at Simon Fraser University in 2019, and was recently promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta where he teaches Indigenous Literatures, Research-Creation, and Creative Writing. For Abel’s work in the classroom, he was recently the winner of a 2022 Faculty of Arts Undergraduate Teaching Award.

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