The Place of Scraps

"The Place of Scraps revolves around Marius Barbeau, an early-twentieth-century 'salvage' anthropologist who studied many of the First Nations cultures in the Pacific Northwest, including the poet's ancestral Nisga'a Nation. Mining the text of Barbeau's canonical two-volume work Totem Poles, Abel explores the complicated relationship between First Nations cultures and ethnography. In erasure poems that simultaneously illuminate Barbeau's intentions and navigate the repercussions of his actions, Abel carves out new understandings of the source texts."--Back cover of book.