Empty Spaces is a book-length project that draws on the repetitive descriptions of landscape from James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, a book that, as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues, played an important role in reinventing the colonial origins of North America. What started as a refusal of Cooper’s representation of land as terra nullius quickly moved past this point to become a project about rewriting land and reaffirming Indigenous presence. Each chapter break is a moment of reversal, a moment where I started writing back and through what I had already written, returning to the same landscapes, the same places, again and again. In the preceding excerpt taken from the fourth chapter, each sentence has been written over, written through, written beyond, at least three previous times. Writing in, around, and over Cooper’s descriptions of land, nature, and territory Empty Spaces rearticulates Indigenous presence. But it also asks what it means to be an urban Indigenous person, to have been severed from the land, or to have limited or no access to traditional territory (and also traditional knowledges). Empty Spaces, then, is also a project about imagining land through fiction — remaining in and reimagining a space that has been closed off and irreversibly altered.