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A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
"In her raw, unflinching memoir . . . she tells the impassioned, wrenching story of the mental health crisis within her own family and community . . . A searing cry." — New York Times Book Review
The Mohawk phrase for depression can be roughly translated to "a mind spread out on the ground." In this urgent and visceral work, Alicia Elliott explores how apt a description that is for the ongoing effects of personal, intergenerational, and colonial traumas she and so many Native people have experienced.
Elliott's deeply personal writing details a life spent between Indigenous and white communities, a divide reflected in her own family, and engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, art, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrification, and representation. Throughout, she makes thrilling connections both large and small between the past and present, the personal and political.
A national bestseller in Canada, this updated and expanded American edition helps us better understand legacy, oppression, and racism throughout North America, and offers us a profound new way to decolonize our minds.
The Mohawk phrase for depression can be roughly translated to "a mind spread out on the ground." In this urgent and visceral work, Alicia Elliott explores how apt a description that is for the ongoing effects of personal, intergenerational, and colonial traumas she and so many Native people have experienced.
Elliott's deeply personal writing details a life spent between Indigenous and white communities, a divide reflected in her own family, and engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, art, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrification, and representation. Throughout, she makes thrilling connections both large and small between the past and present, the personal and political.
A national bestseller in Canada, this updated and expanded American edition helps us better understand legacy, oppression, and racism throughout North America, and offers us a profound new way to decolonize our minds.
256 pages, Paperback
First published March 26, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 1,271 reviews
August 6, 2019
A glimpse into the culture of the Native Tribes. Frankly, I've always been fascinated with how different pathways would the history have taken, had all those cultures not been wiped but the European barbarians?
Of course, her info on the Ukrainian 'holodomor' isn't correct. It's a best kept secret that during that period hunger took place in many more regions than just Ukraine. In many Russian regions it was even more prolonged and devastating. It's just not publicized in order to make it seem like the Ukrainian people suffered more from the hands of dreadful Russians. Just like the little-known fact that many (if not most) revolutionaries and early Soviet leaders weren't exactly Russian but rather of other nations: Lenin - Kalmyk/Jewish, Radek - German/Ukrainian, Stalin - Georgian, Dzierżyński - Polish... and so on.
The mother's mental health issues: I'm pretty sure they were largely driven my all the involuntary hospitalizations. Seriously: she was tied to a bed there! The father's antics concerning this show he was quite a piece of work. As a matter of fact, he should have been hospitalized as an alcoholic. Maybe it would have taught him something about decency and treating ill relatives.
Epigenetics discourse was pretty much on spot. As well as points about inferior food, abuse, mental illness, repression, social stigma and racial issues.
Q:
We know our cultures have meaning and worth, that that culture lives and breathes inside our languages. ... I’ve heard people say that when you learn a people’s language, you learn their culture. It tells you how they think of the world, how they experience it. That’s why translation is so difficult—you have to take one way of seeing the world and translate it to another, while still piecing the words together so they make sense. (с) So true!
Q:
Literal demonizing of Indigenous people was a natural extension of early tactics used to move colonization along. In 1452 and 1455 the Catholic Church issued papal bulls calling for non-Christian people to be invaded, robbed and enslaved under the premise that they were “enemies of Christ.” Forty years later, when Christopher Columbus accidentally arrived in the Americas, European monarchs began to expand on the ideas contained in those bulls, issuing policies and practices that have been collectively referred to as the Doctrine of Discovery. These new policies dictated that “devil-worshipping” Indigenous peoples worldwide should not even be thought of as humans, and thus the land they had cared for and inhabited for centuries was terra nullius, or vacant land, and Christian monarchs had the “right” to claim it all. The Doctrine of Discovery was such a tantalizing, seemingly guilt-free justification for genocide, even U.S. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson adopted it as official policy in 1792—and we all know how much Americans wanted to distinguish themselves from Europe at the time.
The Doctrine of Discovery is still cited in court cases today whenever Canada or the U.S. want to shut up Indigenous tribes who complain. In an attempt to stop this lazy, racist rationale, a delegation of Indigenous people went to Rome in 2016 to ask the church to rescind these papal bulls. Kahnawake Mohawk Kenneth Deer said that after hearing their concerns, Pope Francis merely looked him in the eye and said, “I’ll pray for you.” Two years later, after the delegation’s second trip to Rome to discuss these papal bulls, they were told the matter was being sent to another committee. Nothing else has been done, though presumably the Pope is still praying for us. (c)
Q:
“Can you imagine going to a funeral every day, maybe even two funerals, for five to ten years?” the chief asks. ...
“What does that type of mourning, pain and loss do to you?” he asks. We reflect on our own losses, our own mourning, our own pain. We say nothing.
After a moment he answers himself. “It creates numbness.”
Numbness is often how people describe their experience of depression. (c)
Q:
The blues coming out of the blue. Go figure. (c)
Q:
I’ve heard one person translate a Mohawk phrase for depression to, roughly, “his mind fell to the ground.” I ask my sister about this. She’s been studying Mohawk for the past three years and is practically fluent. She’s raising her daughter to be the same. They’re the first members of our family to speak the language since our paternal grandfather a handful of decades ago.
“Wake’nikonhra’kwenhtará:’on,” she says. “It’s not quite ‘fell to the ground.’ It’s more like, ‘His mind is…’ ” She pauses. She repeats the word in Mohawk. Slows it down. Considers what English words in her arsenal can best approximate the phrase. “ ‘His mind is…’ ” She moves her hands around, palms down, as if doing a large, messy finger painting. “Literally stretched or sprawled out on the ground. It’s all over.” She explains there’s another phrase, too. Wake’nikonhrèn:ton. It means “the mind is suspended.”
Both words indicate an inability to concentrate. That’s one of the signs of depression. (c)
Q:
Is there a language of depression? I’m not sure. Depression often seems to me like the exact opposite of language. It takes your tongue, your thoughts, your self-worth, and leaves an empty vessel.(c)
Q:
In fact, the Mind Over Mood Depression Inventory could double as a checklist for the effects of colonialism on our people. Sad or depressed mood? Check. Feelings of guilt? Check. Irritability? Considering how fast my dad’s side of the family are to yell, check. Finding it harder than usual to do things? Well, Canada tried to eradicate our entire way of being, then forced us to take on their values and wondered why we couldn’t cope. Definite check. Low self-esteem, self-critical thoughts, tiredness or loss of energy, difficulty making decisions, seeing the future as hopeless, recurrent thoughts of death, suicidal thoughts? Check, check, check. (c)
Q:
Our Haudenosaunee condolence ceremony was created by Hiawatha to help a person in mourning after a death. Whoever is conducting the condolence recites the Requickening Address as they offer the grieving person three strands of wampum, one at a time.
One: soft, white deer cloth is used to wipe the tears from their eyes so they can see the beauty of creation again.
Two: a soft feather is used to remove the dust from their ears so they can hear the kind words of those around them.
Three: water, the original medicine, is used to wash away the dust settled in their throats that keeps them from speaking, from breathing, from reconnecting with the world outside their grief. (c)
Q:
I had no clue my father was having problems weaving himself into the tapestry of white suburban bliss. (c)
Q:
... when I first read Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, activist and teacher Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Islands of Decolonial Love. Every sentence felt like a fingertip strumming a neglected chord in my life, creating the most gorgeous music I’d ever heard. (c)
Q:
Reading Simpson’s stories ultimately gave me permission to write my own. (c)
Q:
That is the crucial problem with the push for “diversity” in publishing—something I’ve known my whole life but have only recently been able to articulate. “Diversity” is not about letting those who aren’t white make whatever art matters to them and their communities. (c)
Q:
If you can’t write about us with a love for who we are as a people, what we’ve survived, what we’ve accomplished despite all attempts to keep us from doing so; if you can’t look at us as we are and feel your pupils go wide, rendering all stereotypes a sham, a poor copy, a disgrace—then why are you writing about us at all? (c)
Q:
Run through these streets, my instincts say, run your fingertips over each brick of each building. Feel the roughness, the sturdiness, the strength. Feel the sun and the particular way it cuts through the trees, warming your neck, your arms, your legs before its unblinking attention becomes too much and you go home sunburnt. Hear the night, which is never totally silent—raccoons hissing or late-night, liquored-up strangers laughing or street sweepers rumbling or delivery trucks beeping while backing up. See the night, see how its darkness always has an escape hatch—a streetlight or lit-up store sign to guide you home, even when the city’s radiance blocks out the stars. Place your hand over this neighbourhood’s heart, feel it beat against your palm. Love its perfection. Love its imperfection. Feel home again. (c)
Q:
Instead of attempting to explain any of this to any friends, I learned how to fake intimacy. Turned out that as long as you were funny and fun, people would want to spend time with you; as long as you were willing to listen to their problems, they didn’t notice you weren’t telling them any of your own. I knew so much about my friends. They knew almost nothing about me. This was how I created a double life: no matter how awful things were at home, I could go to school and, from nine to three, pretend that nothing at all was wrong. But once 3:01 hit and I got on the bus home, I could no longer stop myself from wondering what awaited me when I got off.
There was a problem with this strategy that I didn’t anticipate. The longer I went without talking to my friends about my problems, the harder it was to talk to them when I actually needed to. If I had slowly unspooled my life for them, as they had for me, they would be prepared when something particularly difficult came up. They would already know the context. Now, if I wanted to talk to them about anything, I would have to explain everything—all the truth I’d tried so hard to keep from everyone. I had no idea how to go about that, so instead I just continued on as I always had: the girl without a family or past, who you could always rely on to keep all your secrets because she kept her own so well. (c)
Q:
In my diaspora class we often talked about the experience of diaspora: remembering your past in your former home and constantly measuring it against your present in your current home, knowing you can never again re-enter the time and space you left, knowing you have lost access to that possible future forever ... (c)
Q:
My body was sharp glass I dutifully held together. (c)
Q:
The reason junk food is so much cheaper than nutritious food is the U.S. government. This is not a conspiracy theory; it’s a fact. The U.S. government subsidizes what are called “cash crops”: wheat, corn and soybeans. They push farmers to overproduce these crops, which farmers then sell at a deep discount to companies that turn them into high-fructose corn syrup, hydrolyzed soy protein, refined carbohydrates—all the primary ingredients in food poor families rely upon, both in Canada and in the U.S. ...
By encouraging farmers to overproduce cash crops, the U.S. government has ultimately helped corporations create a food economy where poor, racialized communities depend upon unhealthy food to survive. And because poor diet has been linked to health problems such as type 2 diabetes, heart problems, cancer and stroke, this would also mean that the U.S. government has been essentially paying for poor, racialized people to become sick through its crop subsidy program. In some ways this is to be expected. Capitalism always prioritizes profit over people. But it raises the question: if these crop subsidies disproportionately affected white people’s health and well-being the way they disproportionately impact racialized people’s health and well-being, would they still be in place? (c)
Q:When I advocate for my right to forget about my sexual assault, I’m advocating for the same right my assaulter has been given. I’m advocating for people to believe me with the same blind faith people believed my assaulter. I’m advocating for the right to move on with my life, the same way my assaulter is allowed to move on with his. I’m advocating for the right to be occasionally happy, the chance to achieve my goals, to be considered more than someone’s victim. Had I taken my assaulter to court, his lawyer would have made the same argument about him: that he has the right to be happy, to achieve his goals, to be considered more than someone’s assaulter. That argument would more than likely get him cleared. Even though only the strongest sexual assault cases even go to trial, only 42 percent come back with a guilty verdict. Sexual assault has one of the smallest conviction rates of violent crime in Canada. (c) And not just in Canada.
Q:
sense of wrongness once one considers how contradictory those parts are. If I were to make a list of descriptors that could define my mother in order of what I consider to be most important to her, it would look like this:
- Mother of eight
- White (ex)wife to Tuscarora man (Race supposedly not important to her, but important nonetheless.)
- Fervent Catholic (Could explain 1.)
- Computer genius (Offered a job by NASA, turned down so my older sister with cerebral palsy could stay at the facility she was in.)
- Kung fu master (Sixth-degree black belt, to be exact.)
I could add other things, like her star athleticism and resultant eating disorder in high school, or her contradictory food bingeing and weight gain in married life, or the history of mental illness in her family (her closest brother committed suicide; her youngest brother struggled with addiction for over twenty years; her mother dealt with dementia; I suspect her father had schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, since he was prescribed Lithium, but there’s no one left who will tell me). I could bring up the isolation she felt being dragged from America to the Six Nations reserve in Canada without any legal protection or permission. All of those are only parts. (c) Wow!
Q:
But then I’d mention things she’d rather forget. The time she tried to rip our thirty-two-inch TV from the wall because it was evil. The time she trashed our house with the destructive artistry of an entitled rock star. The time she thought demons were in our trailer. She threw a knife at the couch right next to me in an attempt to “kill them.” If I bring this up with her, she tells me that she didn’t think there were demons at all; she was just really angry; I’m making it all up. I wonder whether she really believes that or if it’s something she has to believe. ...
She’d talk even if it was two in the morning and the person she was talking at was trying to sleep. It didn’t faze her. After all, she wasn’t having a conversation, not really. She was delivering a sermon. ...
if you were to tell us that the excitement and energy we loved so much were part of Mom’s mania, that her hard work and hustle were at their height when she was manic, that she was at her most hilarious, fun and focused then, we’d probably say her bipolar was awesome, too. It was always awesome until it wasn’t. (c) Wow!
Q:
As a child, and even as a teen, when my father told me the signs that my mother’s mental health was deteriorating, I believed him. I believed that identifying these signs, collecting them like baseball cards, and shoving them before her face to stare at when she was at her most argumentative—or most depressed—was being a good partner. I believed that forcing her into a car, turning on the child locks so she couldn’t jump out and shuttling her over the border, where New York laws would allow her to be involuntarily admitted to the mental hospital, was the only way to support a mentally ill person.
I began to question these assumptions when I grew up, primarily because I became the partner of a person with severe clinical depression. Mike had a rough time with his depression in university and barely finished his classes. He would cry in bed almost every day the last year of school, saying awful, untrue things about himself, often wanting to hurt himself, even kill himself. I had no idea what to do. My experience with my mother hadn’t prepared me for this. I only knew how my father would approach the situation: forced hospitalization and medication. But I also remembered how traumatized my mother was by those hospitalizations; I remembered when she couldn’t recall simple words because her medication interfered with her brain too badly, how she’d eventually erupt in frustrated tears. I didn’t want those things for Mike. I didn’t want them for her, either. Instead of getting cops or doctors involved, I tried to talk Mike through his depression, countering the negative self-talk in his head with all the evidence his depressed brain wouldn’t let him see. You’re not a bad person. You’re not a burden. You are not your depression. I looked up how to talk to suicidal people, learned the crucial difference between passive thoughts of dying, thoughts of suicide and active plans for suicide. Somehow, despite my fumbled attempts to support him, Mike managed to pull himself out of the depression—and somehow I managed to convince myself that his depression was a one-time thing. (c)
Of course, her info on the Ukrainian 'holodomor' isn't correct. It's a best kept secret that during that period hunger took place in many more regions than just Ukraine. In many Russian regions it was even more prolonged and devastating. It's just not publicized in order to make it seem like the Ukrainian people suffered more from the hands of dreadful Russians. Just like the little-known fact that many (if not most) revolutionaries and early Soviet leaders weren't exactly Russian but rather of other nations: Lenin - Kalmyk/Jewish, Radek - German/Ukrainian, Stalin - Georgian, Dzierżyński - Polish... and so on.
The mother's mental health issues: I'm pretty sure they were largely driven my all the involuntary hospitalizations. Seriously: she was tied to a bed there! The father's antics concerning this show he was quite a piece of work. As a matter of fact, he should have been hospitalized as an alcoholic. Maybe it would have taught him something about decency and treating ill relatives.
Epigenetics discourse was pretty much on spot. As well as points about inferior food, abuse, mental illness, repression, social stigma and racial issues.
Q:
We know our cultures have meaning and worth, that that culture lives and breathes inside our languages. ... I’ve heard people say that when you learn a people’s language, you learn their culture. It tells you how they think of the world, how they experience it. That’s why translation is so difficult—you have to take one way of seeing the world and translate it to another, while still piecing the words together so they make sense. (с) So true!
Q:
Literal demonizing of Indigenous people was a natural extension of early tactics used to move colonization along. In 1452 and 1455 the Catholic Church issued papal bulls calling for non-Christian people to be invaded, robbed and enslaved under the premise that they were “enemies of Christ.” Forty years later, when Christopher Columbus accidentally arrived in the Americas, European monarchs began to expand on the ideas contained in those bulls, issuing policies and practices that have been collectively referred to as the Doctrine of Discovery. These new policies dictated that “devil-worshipping” Indigenous peoples worldwide should not even be thought of as humans, and thus the land they had cared for and inhabited for centuries was terra nullius, or vacant land, and Christian monarchs had the “right” to claim it all. The Doctrine of Discovery was such a tantalizing, seemingly guilt-free justification for genocide, even U.S. Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson adopted it as official policy in 1792—and we all know how much Americans wanted to distinguish themselves from Europe at the time.
The Doctrine of Discovery is still cited in court cases today whenever Canada or the U.S. want to shut up Indigenous tribes who complain. In an attempt to stop this lazy, racist rationale, a delegation of Indigenous people went to Rome in 2016 to ask the church to rescind these papal bulls. Kahnawake Mohawk Kenneth Deer said that after hearing their concerns, Pope Francis merely looked him in the eye and said, “I’ll pray for you.” Two years later, after the delegation’s second trip to Rome to discuss these papal bulls, they were told the matter was being sent to another committee. Nothing else has been done, though presumably the Pope is still praying for us. (c)
Q:
“Can you imagine going to a funeral every day, maybe even two funerals, for five to ten years?” the chief asks. ...
“What does that type of mourning, pain and loss do to you?” he asks. We reflect on our own losses, our own mourning, our own pain. We say nothing.
After a moment he answers himself. “It creates numbness.”
Numbness is often how people describe their experience of depression. (c)
Q:
The blues coming out of the blue. Go figure. (c)
Q:
I’ve heard one person translate a Mohawk phrase for depression to, roughly, “his mind fell to the ground.” I ask my sister about this. She’s been studying Mohawk for the past three years and is practically fluent. She’s raising her daughter to be the same. They’re the first members of our family to speak the language since our paternal grandfather a handful of decades ago.
“Wake’nikonhra’kwenhtará:’on,” she says. “It’s not quite ‘fell to the ground.’ It’s more like, ‘His mind is…’ ” She pauses. She repeats the word in Mohawk. Slows it down. Considers what English words in her arsenal can best approximate the phrase. “ ‘His mind is…’ ” She moves her hands around, palms down, as if doing a large, messy finger painting. “Literally stretched or sprawled out on the ground. It’s all over.” She explains there’s another phrase, too. Wake’nikonhrèn:ton. It means “the mind is suspended.”
Both words indicate an inability to concentrate. That’s one of the signs of depression. (c)
Q:
Is there a language of depression? I’m not sure. Depression often seems to me like the exact opposite of language. It takes your tongue, your thoughts, your self-worth, and leaves an empty vessel.(c)
Q:
In fact, the Mind Over Mood Depression Inventory could double as a checklist for the effects of colonialism on our people. Sad or depressed mood? Check. Feelings of guilt? Check. Irritability? Considering how fast my dad’s side of the family are to yell, check. Finding it harder than usual to do things? Well, Canada tried to eradicate our entire way of being, then forced us to take on their values and wondered why we couldn’t cope. Definite check. Low self-esteem, self-critical thoughts, tiredness or loss of energy, difficulty making decisions, seeing the future as hopeless, recurrent thoughts of death, suicidal thoughts? Check, check, check. (c)
Q:
Our Haudenosaunee condolence ceremony was created by Hiawatha to help a person in mourning after a death. Whoever is conducting the condolence recites the Requickening Address as they offer the grieving person three strands of wampum, one at a time.
One: soft, white deer cloth is used to wipe the tears from their eyes so they can see the beauty of creation again.
Two: a soft feather is used to remove the dust from their ears so they can hear the kind words of those around them.
Three: water, the original medicine, is used to wash away the dust settled in their throats that keeps them from speaking, from breathing, from reconnecting with the world outside their grief. (c)
Q:
I had no clue my father was having problems weaving himself into the tapestry of white suburban bliss. (c)
Q:
... when I first read Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, activist and teacher Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Islands of Decolonial Love. Every sentence felt like a fingertip strumming a neglected chord in my life, creating the most gorgeous music I’d ever heard. (c)
Q:
Reading Simpson’s stories ultimately gave me permission to write my own. (c)
Q:
That is the crucial problem with the push for “diversity” in publishing—something I’ve known my whole life but have only recently been able to articulate. “Diversity” is not about letting those who aren’t white make whatever art matters to them and their communities. (c)
Q:
If you can’t write about us with a love for who we are as a people, what we’ve survived, what we’ve accomplished despite all attempts to keep us from doing so; if you can’t look at us as we are and feel your pupils go wide, rendering all stereotypes a sham, a poor copy, a disgrace—then why are you writing about us at all? (c)
Q:
Run through these streets, my instincts say, run your fingertips over each brick of each building. Feel the roughness, the sturdiness, the strength. Feel the sun and the particular way it cuts through the trees, warming your neck, your arms, your legs before its unblinking attention becomes too much and you go home sunburnt. Hear the night, which is never totally silent—raccoons hissing or late-night, liquored-up strangers laughing or street sweepers rumbling or delivery trucks beeping while backing up. See the night, see how its darkness always has an escape hatch—a streetlight or lit-up store sign to guide you home, even when the city’s radiance blocks out the stars. Place your hand over this neighbourhood’s heart, feel it beat against your palm. Love its perfection. Love its imperfection. Feel home again. (c)
Q:
Instead of attempting to explain any of this to any friends, I learned how to fake intimacy. Turned out that as long as you were funny and fun, people would want to spend time with you; as long as you were willing to listen to their problems, they didn’t notice you weren’t telling them any of your own. I knew so much about my friends. They knew almost nothing about me. This was how I created a double life: no matter how awful things were at home, I could go to school and, from nine to three, pretend that nothing at all was wrong. But once 3:01 hit and I got on the bus home, I could no longer stop myself from wondering what awaited me when I got off.
There was a problem with this strategy that I didn’t anticipate. The longer I went without talking to my friends about my problems, the harder it was to talk to them when I actually needed to. If I had slowly unspooled my life for them, as they had for me, they would be prepared when something particularly difficult came up. They would already know the context. Now, if I wanted to talk to them about anything, I would have to explain everything—all the truth I’d tried so hard to keep from everyone. I had no idea how to go about that, so instead I just continued on as I always had: the girl without a family or past, who you could always rely on to keep all your secrets because she kept her own so well. (c)
Q:
In my diaspora class we often talked about the experience of diaspora: remembering your past in your former home and constantly measuring it against your present in your current home, knowing you can never again re-enter the time and space you left, knowing you have lost access to that possible future forever ... (c)
Q:
My body was sharp glass I dutifully held together. (c)
Q:
The reason junk food is so much cheaper than nutritious food is the U.S. government. This is not a conspiracy theory; it’s a fact. The U.S. government subsidizes what are called “cash crops”: wheat, corn and soybeans. They push farmers to overproduce these crops, which farmers then sell at a deep discount to companies that turn them into high-fructose corn syrup, hydrolyzed soy protein, refined carbohydrates—all the primary ingredients in food poor families rely upon, both in Canada and in the U.S. ...
By encouraging farmers to overproduce cash crops, the U.S. government has ultimately helped corporations create a food economy where poor, racialized communities depend upon unhealthy food to survive. And because poor diet has been linked to health problems such as type 2 diabetes, heart problems, cancer and stroke, this would also mean that the U.S. government has been essentially paying for poor, racialized people to become sick through its crop subsidy program. In some ways this is to be expected. Capitalism always prioritizes profit over people. But it raises the question: if these crop subsidies disproportionately affected white people’s health and well-being the way they disproportionately impact racialized people’s health and well-being, would they still be in place? (c)
Q:When I advocate for my right to forget about my sexual assault, I’m advocating for the same right my assaulter has been given. I’m advocating for people to believe me with the same blind faith people believed my assaulter. I’m advocating for the right to move on with my life, the same way my assaulter is allowed to move on with his. I’m advocating for the right to be occasionally happy, the chance to achieve my goals, to be considered more than someone’s victim. Had I taken my assaulter to court, his lawyer would have made the same argument about him: that he has the right to be happy, to achieve his goals, to be considered more than someone’s assaulter. That argument would more than likely get him cleared. Even though only the strongest sexual assault cases even go to trial, only 42 percent come back with a guilty verdict. Sexual assault has one of the smallest conviction rates of violent crime in Canada. (c) And not just in Canada.
Q:
sense of wrongness once one considers how contradictory those parts are. If I were to make a list of descriptors that could define my mother in order of what I consider to be most important to her, it would look like this:
- Mother of eight
- White (ex)wife to Tuscarora man (Race supposedly not important to her, but important nonetheless.)
- Fervent Catholic (Could explain 1.)
- Computer genius (Offered a job by NASA, turned down so my older sister with cerebral palsy could stay at the facility she was in.)
- Kung fu master (Sixth-degree black belt, to be exact.)
I could add other things, like her star athleticism and resultant eating disorder in high school, or her contradictory food bingeing and weight gain in married life, or the history of mental illness in her family (her closest brother committed suicide; her youngest brother struggled with addiction for over twenty years; her mother dealt with dementia; I suspect her father had schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, since he was prescribed Lithium, but there’s no one left who will tell me). I could bring up the isolation she felt being dragged from America to the Six Nations reserve in Canada without any legal protection or permission. All of those are only parts. (c) Wow!
Q:
But then I’d mention things she’d rather forget. The time she tried to rip our thirty-two-inch TV from the wall because it was evil. The time she trashed our house with the destructive artistry of an entitled rock star. The time she thought demons were in our trailer. She threw a knife at the couch right next to me in an attempt to “kill them.” If I bring this up with her, she tells me that she didn’t think there were demons at all; she was just really angry; I’m making it all up. I wonder whether she really believes that or if it’s something she has to believe. ...
She’d talk even if it was two in the morning and the person she was talking at was trying to sleep. It didn’t faze her. After all, she wasn’t having a conversation, not really. She was delivering a sermon. ...
if you were to tell us that the excitement and energy we loved so much were part of Mom’s mania, that her hard work and hustle were at their height when she was manic, that she was at her most hilarious, fun and focused then, we’d probably say her bipolar was awesome, too. It was always awesome until it wasn’t. (c) Wow!
Q:
As a child, and even as a teen, when my father told me the signs that my mother’s mental health was deteriorating, I believed him. I believed that identifying these signs, collecting them like baseball cards, and shoving them before her face to stare at when she was at her most argumentative—or most depressed—was being a good partner. I believed that forcing her into a car, turning on the child locks so she couldn’t jump out and shuttling her over the border, where New York laws would allow her to be involuntarily admitted to the mental hospital, was the only way to support a mentally ill person.
I began to question these assumptions when I grew up, primarily because I became the partner of a person with severe clinical depression. Mike had a rough time with his depression in university and barely finished his classes. He would cry in bed almost every day the last year of school, saying awful, untrue things about himself, often wanting to hurt himself, even kill himself. I had no idea what to do. My experience with my mother hadn’t prepared me for this. I only knew how my father would approach the situation: forced hospitalization and medication. But I also remembered how traumatized my mother was by those hospitalizations; I remembered when she couldn’t recall simple words because her medication interfered with her brain too badly, how she’d eventually erupt in frustrated tears. I didn’t want those things for Mike. I didn’t want them for her, either. Instead of getting cops or doctors involved, I tried to talk Mike through his depression, countering the negative self-talk in his head with all the evidence his depressed brain wouldn’t let him see. You’re not a bad person. You’re not a burden. You are not your depression. I looked up how to talk to suicidal people, learned the crucial difference between passive thoughts of dying, thoughts of suicide and active plans for suicide. Somehow, despite my fumbled attempts to support him, Mike managed to pull himself out of the depression—and somehow I managed to convince myself that his depression was a one-time thing. (c)
February 28, 2024
Haudenosaunee writer Alicia Elliott has opened my eyes to a few subject matters with her powerful, thoughtful, honest and moving collection of essays.
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is my first experience reading a collection of essays from an author, and I had no idea how much I would find essays as interesting, insightful and enjoyable as I did theses. Alicia Elliott covers a bit of ground here with the subject matter she explores. I usually would find that a bit overwhelming, but I enjoyed the format with a single subject matter per essay. I took my time reading and stopped to think about each essay and take notes along the way. I thought Alicia Elliott gave her personal opinion and argument well with thoughtful insight, depth, wit and heart. Her brilliant use of metaphors adds some understanding and depth to her thoughts on the subject matters. She draws on her own experiences as she explores colonialism, racism, mental health, abuse, sexual assault, poverty, malnutrition, capitalism parenthood and writing. There is a recurring theme of colonialism throughout it that is brilliantly weaved in through them. The essays flowed smoothly and connected well into each one.
Alicia Elliott's voice is gentle, informative and understanding with her frustration and anger. Her words are deeply moving, and it was easy to pick up on the mood of each essay and her attitude towards each subject matter. She is boldly honest with her truths and her insight about each subject and she gave me a bit to think about with each essay. She shares a part of herself with us while sharing her thoughts on each subject matter. Her writing is inviting to form our own thoughts, and she invites us to challenge our assumptions. At times I did want to argue with her in my head with some of my assumptions; however, I reminded myself these are her experiences, her opinions, thoughts and arguments, not mine. So I silenced that noise in my head and listened to what she had to say. I am so glad I did. I highly recommend it.
I received a copy from the publisher on NetGalley!
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is my first experience reading a collection of essays from an author, and I had no idea how much I would find essays as interesting, insightful and enjoyable as I did theses. Alicia Elliott covers a bit of ground here with the subject matter she explores. I usually would find that a bit overwhelming, but I enjoyed the format with a single subject matter per essay. I took my time reading and stopped to think about each essay and take notes along the way. I thought Alicia Elliott gave her personal opinion and argument well with thoughtful insight, depth, wit and heart. Her brilliant use of metaphors adds some understanding and depth to her thoughts on the subject matters. She draws on her own experiences as she explores colonialism, racism, mental health, abuse, sexual assault, poverty, malnutrition, capitalism parenthood and writing. There is a recurring theme of colonialism throughout it that is brilliantly weaved in through them. The essays flowed smoothly and connected well into each one.
Alicia Elliott's voice is gentle, informative and understanding with her frustration and anger. Her words are deeply moving, and it was easy to pick up on the mood of each essay and her attitude towards each subject matter. She is boldly honest with her truths and her insight about each subject and she gave me a bit to think about with each essay. She shares a part of herself with us while sharing her thoughts on each subject matter. Her writing is inviting to form our own thoughts, and she invites us to challenge our assumptions. At times I did want to argue with her in my head with some of my assumptions; however, I reminded myself these are her experiences, her opinions, thoughts and arguments, not mine. So I silenced that noise in my head and listened to what she had to say. I am so glad I did. I highly recommend it.
I received a copy from the publisher on NetGalley!
September 4, 2020
In the style of memoir essay, award winning and bestselling Canadian author Alicia Elliott shares her riveting debut collection: “A Mind Spread Out On The Ground” (2020). Ms. Elliott has received acclaim for her voice in North American and Indigenous Literature, her articles and short stories have been featured in several notable publications including the Washington Post, she lives in Brantford, Ontario.
The Haudenosaunee indigenous Confederacy extends from a Syracuse N.Y. region into Aboriginal Ontario Canada. Ms. Elliott was raised in a large family by her Haudenosaunee father, often on the Six Nations Reservation. Elliott’s white devout Catholic mother, considered it as an advantage if her children passed for white. The family was impoverished and moved frequently, her mother’s mental illness didn’t help. When Elliott’s mother was well, she lavished her children with attention; meals were cooked, the laundry and household chores were completed. Elliot’s father didn’t hesitate to have her mother hospitalized when she became irrational, delusional, and paranoid. Her family lived in constant fear of coming under scrutiny of Social Services, which targeted indigenous people. It was unfortunate that her entire family was banned from their grandparent’s home, due to untreated head lice, which further traumatized her childhood.
Food insecurity is a known fact for poor and indigenous families. American farmers receive government subsidies to grow wheat, corn, and soybeans that also contribute to vast corporate profiteering in the manufacture of high fructose corn syrup, hydrolyzed soy protein and refined carbohydrates. Cheap inexpensive foods flood the market that feed the poor throughout the U.S. and Canada found in the unethical fast-food and grocery industry. “Food Inc.” (2008) a documentary highlighted diet related conditions of obesity, diabetes and heart disease: Elliott recalled peanut butter and food bank cereal that sustained her family and how poor families self-medicate with sugar and junk food the way other people do with alcohol and drugs.
Elliott raised awareness of racial injustice against indigenous people, including an incident involving her own rape. All charges that she reported of violent criminal felony acts were dismissed. A Canadian indigenous mother of three, Cindy Gladue, was viciously murdered (2015). At the court trial she was further victimized and her family traumatized. The murderer was acquitted of all charges. Due to public outcry over so much racial injustice against people of color, leading to mass protests and social unrest across the U.S. and Canada, there remains a hope for change. ~ **With appreciation to Melville House Publishing via NetGalley for the DDC for the purpose of review.
The Haudenosaunee indigenous Confederacy extends from a Syracuse N.Y. region into Aboriginal Ontario Canada. Ms. Elliott was raised in a large family by her Haudenosaunee father, often on the Six Nations Reservation. Elliott’s white devout Catholic mother, considered it as an advantage if her children passed for white. The family was impoverished and moved frequently, her mother’s mental illness didn’t help. When Elliott’s mother was well, she lavished her children with attention; meals were cooked, the laundry and household chores were completed. Elliot’s father didn’t hesitate to have her mother hospitalized when she became irrational, delusional, and paranoid. Her family lived in constant fear of coming under scrutiny of Social Services, which targeted indigenous people. It was unfortunate that her entire family was banned from their grandparent’s home, due to untreated head lice, which further traumatized her childhood.
Food insecurity is a known fact for poor and indigenous families. American farmers receive government subsidies to grow wheat, corn, and soybeans that also contribute to vast corporate profiteering in the manufacture of high fructose corn syrup, hydrolyzed soy protein and refined carbohydrates. Cheap inexpensive foods flood the market that feed the poor throughout the U.S. and Canada found in the unethical fast-food and grocery industry. “Food Inc.” (2008) a documentary highlighted diet related conditions of obesity, diabetes and heart disease: Elliott recalled peanut butter and food bank cereal that sustained her family and how poor families self-medicate with sugar and junk food the way other people do with alcohol and drugs.
Elliott raised awareness of racial injustice against indigenous people, including an incident involving her own rape. All charges that she reported of violent criminal felony acts were dismissed. A Canadian indigenous mother of three, Cindy Gladue, was viciously murdered (2015). At the court trial she was further victimized and her family traumatized. The murderer was acquitted of all charges. Due to public outcry over so much racial injustice against people of color, leading to mass protests and social unrest across the U.S. and Canada, there remains a hope for change. ~ **With appreciation to Melville House Publishing via NetGalley for the DDC for the purpose of review.
December 16, 2020
***Shortlisted for the 2020 First Nations Communities Read Indigenous Literature Award***
Non-fiction/A biography....
“Can a metaphor or simile capture depression? It was definitely heavy, but could I compare it to a weight? Weight in and of itself is not devastating; depression is”.
When what was left of Alicia’s family— they moved to the Six Nations of Grand River reserve in Ontario, Canada. They lived in a two bedroom trailer. She and her sister in one small room, and her three younger brothers in the master bedroom. Her parents had no bedroom, no bed. They slept in a living room on the couch and recliner.
Alicia’s mother had been diagnosed and re-diagnosed many times. Postpartum depression, manic depression, schizophrenia, or post traumatic stress disorder, depending on which doctor you talked to.
For she and her siblings —those diagnosed words meant that their mother‘s health was on a timer. They never knew when the timer would go off, but when it did, they’re happy, playful, hilarious mother would disappear behind a curtain and another word emerge: alternatively angry and mournful, wired and lethargic.
Their mother often was very still and quiet during those times — hard to know where their mother floated off to.
Alicia‘s childhood was chaotic, and heartbreaking.
Not only did her mother suffer with mental illness, but her father was abusive. Add a tribe kids—all crammed into a small trailer, and my god.... there is a lot of seething and suffering going on.
But this book —is beautifully and powerfully written.
Alicia examined her own life—as adults do—( especially if they came from dysfunctional families) by putting pieces of the puzzle together... as a way to gain a greater understanding and compassion for herself and others.
Alicia’s chapters were not only written as autobiography...
“They’re meant as lenses through which the author and reader can can view what would otherwise be too vast to take in at once: the ongoing cultural catastrophe Indigenous people have experienced under colonialism”.
Alicia weaves together the development & devastation of her own broken family with that of a broken nation—the genocide perpetrated by the United States government on Indigenous people.
“Can you imagine going to a funeral every day, maybe even two funerals, for 5 to 10 years? the chief Haudenosaunee chief asks.
He’s giving a decolonization presentation, talking about the way colonization has affected our people since contact. Smallpox, tuberculosis, even the common cold yet our communities particularly hard. Then, on top of that, we had wars to contend with—some against the French, son against the British, some against either or neither or both. Back then death was all you could see, smell, hear or taste. Death was all you could feel”.
“What does that type of mourning, pain and loss due to you? he asks. We reflect on our own losses, our own mourning , our own pain. We say nothing”.
“After a moment he answers himself. It creates numbness”.
“Numbness is often help people describe their experience of depression”.
This book may sound depressing but my goodness I could not put it down —it’s educational and eye-opening as well.
Alicia shared about feeling alone in a trailer filled with family. But more than loneliness or grief, she felt anger. She wrote her first suicide note at age 16. Tears fell onto the paper faster than she could write— she was writing and crying .... so hard —so fast —
until she exhausted herself... disgusted herself...then eventually collapsed onto her bed and listened to the radio.
As I read the personal aspects of Alicia‘s life—real raw—honest—heartbroken herself... I was pausing to contemplate what she was teaching...messages she wanted readers to take away.
She says:
“Writing with empathy is not enough”.
“Empathy has its limits—and, contrary to what some may think, it is possible to both have empathy for a person and still hold inherited unacknowledged racist views about them and their worth”.
Maybe it was good that Alicia grew more angry than depressed —she directed that anger — and rather than turn her frustrating infuriating rage on herself — she set out to educate and make a difference.
The effects of colonization has ballooned so much that as of 2013, suicide and self-inflicted injuries are the leading cause of death for native people living in Canada under the age of 44.
A 2019 study revealed that, since 1999, the suicide rate among Native men living in the U.S. has gone up 71%.
The suicide rate for Native women is an even more staggering 139%.
Native youth in America face a suicide rate 2 1/2 times the national average, with suicide being the second leading cause of death for Native Youth between the ages of 10 and 24. For LGBTQ2S + Onkwehon, there was no data.
The less Canada maintains its historical role as the abusive father, micromanaging and undermining First Nations at every turn, the better off people are—In other words the center of suicide prevention found lower rates of depression and suicide among communities that exhibit cultural continuity.
There was much less suicide found in communities were more than 50% of the people spoke their Indigenous language.
Alicia drives home the value of language and culture.
It’s been said that when you learn peoples language you learn their culture. That’s why translation is often so difficult you have to take one way of seeing the world and translate it to another while still piecing words together that makes sense.
Page after page, swipe after swipe on my kindle — I felt as though I was getting a better understanding of the struggle against colonialism— in the same way against depression.
Revolution, rebellion, the struggle of American democracy, complex understandings of leadership, diplomacy, and responsibility...
no wonder this book was titled “A Mind Spread out on the Ground”.
...Part history, (Canadian relations to Indigenous people, White supremacy and racism)
...Part coming-of-age, identity, memoir (tragedy and love)
...Part essays,
...Part political,
...Part poetry,
...Part family legacy,.....
Alicia writes:
“Being both Haudenosaunee and white ( daughter of a Catholic mother and Haudenosaunee father), wasn’t a curse meant to tear me in two; it was a call to uphold the different responsibilities that came with each part of me”.
I’m not if the truth shall set you free... but it’s it’s a great place to start from.
Beautiful written debut, by a wonderful Mohawk writer....
a bestseller in Canada and shortlisted for the Hillary Weston Prize for nonfiction.
I look forward to reading Alicia Elliot’s next book.
Non-fiction/A biography....
“Can a metaphor or simile capture depression? It was definitely heavy, but could I compare it to a weight? Weight in and of itself is not devastating; depression is”.
When what was left of Alicia’s family— they moved to the Six Nations of Grand River reserve in Ontario, Canada. They lived in a two bedroom trailer. She and her sister in one small room, and her three younger brothers in the master bedroom. Her parents had no bedroom, no bed. They slept in a living room on the couch and recliner.
Alicia’s mother had been diagnosed and re-diagnosed many times. Postpartum depression, manic depression, schizophrenia, or post traumatic stress disorder, depending on which doctor you talked to.
For she and her siblings —those diagnosed words meant that their mother‘s health was on a timer. They never knew when the timer would go off, but when it did, they’re happy, playful, hilarious mother would disappear behind a curtain and another word emerge: alternatively angry and mournful, wired and lethargic.
Their mother often was very still and quiet during those times — hard to know where their mother floated off to.
Alicia‘s childhood was chaotic, and heartbreaking.
Not only did her mother suffer with mental illness, but her father was abusive. Add a tribe kids—all crammed into a small trailer, and my god.... there is a lot of seething and suffering going on.
But this book —is beautifully and powerfully written.
Alicia examined her own life—as adults do—( especially if they came from dysfunctional families) by putting pieces of the puzzle together... as a way to gain a greater understanding and compassion for herself and others.
Alicia’s chapters were not only written as autobiography...
“They’re meant as lenses through which the author and reader can can view what would otherwise be too vast to take in at once: the ongoing cultural catastrophe Indigenous people have experienced under colonialism”.
Alicia weaves together the development & devastation of her own broken family with that of a broken nation—the genocide perpetrated by the United States government on Indigenous people.
“Can you imagine going to a funeral every day, maybe even two funerals, for 5 to 10 years? the chief Haudenosaunee chief asks.
He’s giving a decolonization presentation, talking about the way colonization has affected our people since contact. Smallpox, tuberculosis, even the common cold yet our communities particularly hard. Then, on top of that, we had wars to contend with—some against the French, son against the British, some against either or neither or both. Back then death was all you could see, smell, hear or taste. Death was all you could feel”.
“What does that type of mourning, pain and loss due to you? he asks. We reflect on our own losses, our own mourning , our own pain. We say nothing”.
“After a moment he answers himself. It creates numbness”.
“Numbness is often help people describe their experience of depression”.
This book may sound depressing but my goodness I could not put it down —it’s educational and eye-opening as well.
Alicia shared about feeling alone in a trailer filled with family. But more than loneliness or grief, she felt anger. She wrote her first suicide note at age 16. Tears fell onto the paper faster than she could write— she was writing and crying .... so hard —so fast —
until she exhausted herself... disgusted herself...then eventually collapsed onto her bed and listened to the radio.
As I read the personal aspects of Alicia‘s life—real raw—honest—heartbroken herself... I was pausing to contemplate what she was teaching...messages she wanted readers to take away.
She says:
“Writing with empathy is not enough”.
“Empathy has its limits—and, contrary to what some may think, it is possible to both have empathy for a person and still hold inherited unacknowledged racist views about them and their worth”.
Maybe it was good that Alicia grew more angry than depressed —she directed that anger — and rather than turn her frustrating infuriating rage on herself — she set out to educate and make a difference.
The effects of colonization has ballooned so much that as of 2013, suicide and self-inflicted injuries are the leading cause of death for native people living in Canada under the age of 44.
A 2019 study revealed that, since 1999, the suicide rate among Native men living in the U.S. has gone up 71%.
The suicide rate for Native women is an even more staggering 139%.
Native youth in America face a suicide rate 2 1/2 times the national average, with suicide being the second leading cause of death for Native Youth between the ages of 10 and 24. For LGBTQ2S + Onkwehon, there was no data.
The less Canada maintains its historical role as the abusive father, micromanaging and undermining First Nations at every turn, the better off people are—In other words the center of suicide prevention found lower rates of depression and suicide among communities that exhibit cultural continuity.
There was much less suicide found in communities were more than 50% of the people spoke their Indigenous language.
Alicia drives home the value of language and culture.
It’s been said that when you learn peoples language you learn their culture. That’s why translation is often so difficult you have to take one way of seeing the world and translate it to another while still piecing words together that makes sense.
Page after page, swipe after swipe on my kindle — I felt as though I was getting a better understanding of the struggle against colonialism— in the same way against depression.
Revolution, rebellion, the struggle of American democracy, complex understandings of leadership, diplomacy, and responsibility...
no wonder this book was titled “A Mind Spread out on the Ground”.
...Part history, (Canadian relations to Indigenous people, White supremacy and racism)
...Part coming-of-age, identity, memoir (tragedy and love)
...Part essays,
...Part political,
...Part poetry,
...Part family legacy,.....
Alicia writes:
“Being both Haudenosaunee and white ( daughter of a Catholic mother and Haudenosaunee father), wasn’t a curse meant to tear me in two; it was a call to uphold the different responsibilities that came with each part of me”.
I’m not if the truth shall set you free... but it’s it’s a great place to start from.
Beautiful written debut, by a wonderful Mohawk writer....
a bestseller in Canada and shortlisted for the Hillary Weston Prize for nonfiction.
I look forward to reading Alicia Elliot’s next book.
June 20, 2019
An intense book! Super intense. So many gems and real points. Review to come.
--- update: review -/----
You know what’s crazy... that publishers didn’t think it was important in the past to publish diverse voices telling their own stories from way back when. Now that white people are going out of style and we ain’t trying to really hear none of their morally bankrupt and dry stories, literary diversity is becoming the in-thing. Okay, I’m being a little cheeky, but what I mean is that on one hand I’m sick that we’re just getting these stories out now and on the other hand I’m glad more and more BIPOC first-person accounts and BIPOC & LGBTQIA fiction & nonfic is coming to the forefront.
Something like this shouldn’t just exist now. Iterations of this book spanning decades should exist and should be easily accessible; but there’s no one to blame but racist publishing practices from the top down. There should be hundreds of books like this — spanning decades. I want to compare a book like this to a book like this from the 1950s/1960s. I want to read about progress and progression. I want to experience the breadth of these experiences through reading, I want to read about people like me and these books need to exist for girls and boys who need to see themselves in history and it should have always existed. I'm repeating myself but I’m not talking crazy — representation matters. It makes you feel less crazy.
It’s Indigenous History Month and I feel so lucky to get to experience Alicia Elliott’s book. The title captured me and is what made me want to read this work. I shouldn’t feel “lucky” — more writing from black and brown writers need to be centered and should have always been centered in the public discourse. I commend Alicia Elliott's writing, putting truths out there detailing real Canadian history juxtaposed with current relatable content and topics from her personal life, lived. She broke down huge truths on trauma, colorism, white-passing privilege, capitalism, greed and the murder and rape of not just indigenous culture and people but the inefficacy of the justice system and the perpetuation of racism and genocide. She served up truths on truths and truths and quite literally gave us space to ask ourselves questions and challenge our own biases. She wasn't pulling any punches and I could follow her lead and her lines like they were charted out on the wall, true-detective style.
This book was PROPER. It brought about the same feelings in me that I felt reading Eloquent Rage by Brittney Cooper, the same way feelings I felt reading When they Call You A Terrorist by Patrisse Khan-Cullors. I'm just inspired that there are women out here claiming space in the literary world telling our distinct stories.
This is a must-read!
--- update: review -/----
You know what’s crazy... that publishers didn’t think it was important in the past to publish diverse voices telling their own stories from way back when. Now that white people are going out of style and we ain’t trying to really hear none of their morally bankrupt and dry stories, literary diversity is becoming the in-thing. Okay, I’m being a little cheeky, but what I mean is that on one hand I’m sick that we’re just getting these stories out now and on the other hand I’m glad more and more BIPOC first-person accounts and BIPOC & LGBTQIA fiction & nonfic is coming to the forefront.
Something like this shouldn’t just exist now. Iterations of this book spanning decades should exist and should be easily accessible; but there’s no one to blame but racist publishing practices from the top down. There should be hundreds of books like this — spanning decades. I want to compare a book like this to a book like this from the 1950s/1960s. I want to read about progress and progression. I want to experience the breadth of these experiences through reading, I want to read about people like me and these books need to exist for girls and boys who need to see themselves in history and it should have always existed. I'm repeating myself but I’m not talking crazy — representation matters. It makes you feel less crazy.
It’s Indigenous History Month and I feel so lucky to get to experience Alicia Elliott’s book. The title captured me and is what made me want to read this work. I shouldn’t feel “lucky” — more writing from black and brown writers need to be centered and should have always been centered in the public discourse. I commend Alicia Elliott's writing, putting truths out there detailing real Canadian history juxtaposed with current relatable content and topics from her personal life, lived. She broke down huge truths on trauma, colorism, white-passing privilege, capitalism, greed and the murder and rape of not just indigenous culture and people but the inefficacy of the justice system and the perpetuation of racism and genocide. She served up truths on truths and truths and quite literally gave us space to ask ourselves questions and challenge our own biases. She wasn't pulling any punches and I could follow her lead and her lines like they were charted out on the wall, true-detective style.
This book was PROPER. It brought about the same feelings in me that I felt reading Eloquent Rage by Brittney Cooper, the same way feelings I felt reading When they Call You A Terrorist by Patrisse Khan-Cullors. I'm just inspired that there are women out here claiming space in the literary world telling our distinct stories.
This is a must-read!
August 15, 2019
Many things came back to me while reading A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by Alicia Elliott, things I hadn’t even realized I’d half repressed (childhood summers full of lice) and made me realize what I’d taken for granted (a mother masterfully skilled at banishing them from my scalp.)
These essays had me rejoicing in solidarity. Here was someone who shared many of my thoughts, beliefs and even my experiences which I suppose isn’t surprising because Elliott is correct: the effects of colonialism are ongoing, and many Indigenous children have had similar experiences because of it. Whether it be lice, food instability, unhealthy family dynamics, sexual trauma (the list goes on,)
Elliott refuses to tip toe around these experiences, in speaking truths.
She has carved out a safe space for Indigenous women/2Spirited folk within these pages, this was evident to me as I read. I felt I’d found an ally, someone I knew wouldn’t judge me or grimace if I were to tell them the darkest parts of my life growing up as an Anishinaabe woman, because this Haudenosaunee has experienced her own darkness and managed to create words for her people to hold onto as well as words for non-Indigenous people to learn from. I’m going to be recommending this book to everyone I talk to.
(Especially Margaret Atwood if I ever run into her. *cringe*)
I never recommend anything I don’t personally love and I can say wholeheartedly that you need to read this book. This is required reading. There is a lot to learn from it.
Miigwech
These essays had me rejoicing in solidarity. Here was someone who shared many of my thoughts, beliefs and even my experiences which I suppose isn’t surprising because Elliott is correct: the effects of colonialism are ongoing, and many Indigenous children have had similar experiences because of it. Whether it be lice, food instability, unhealthy family dynamics, sexual trauma (the list goes on,)
Elliott refuses to tip toe around these experiences, in speaking truths.
She has carved out a safe space for Indigenous women/2Spirited folk within these pages, this was evident to me as I read. I felt I’d found an ally, someone I knew wouldn’t judge me or grimace if I were to tell them the darkest parts of my life growing up as an Anishinaabe woman, because this Haudenosaunee has experienced her own darkness and managed to create words for her people to hold onto as well as words for non-Indigenous people to learn from. I’m going to be recommending this book to everyone I talk to.
(Especially Margaret Atwood if I ever run into her. *cringe*)
I never recommend anything I don’t personally love and I can say wholeheartedly that you need to read this book. This is required reading. There is a lot to learn from it.
Miigwech
January 11, 2019
It's hard not to just write, "Holy s**t! This is an incredible book." So I guess I did write that. And I stand by it. What a stunning collection. Alicia Elliott is a master of the essay form and such a deeply intelligent writer. This book is beautiful, haunting, funny, emotionally astute, and captivating with every turn of the page. I will come back to these essays often. What a gd work of art.
January 10, 2019
I've heard one person translate a Mohawk word for depression to, roughly, “his mind fell to the ground”. I ask my sister about this. She's been studying Mohawk for the past three years and is practically fluent. She's raising her daughter to be the same. They're the first members of our family to speak the language since a priest beat it out of our paternal grandfather a handful of decades ago.
“Wake'nikonhra'kwenhtará:'on,” she says. “It's not quite 'fell to the ground'. It's more like, 'His mind is...'” She pauses. She repeats the word in Mohawk. Slows it down. Considers what English words in her arsenal can best approximate the phrase. “'His mind is...'” She moved her hands around, palms down, as if doing a large, messy finger painting. “Literally stretched or sprawled on the ground. It's all over.”
In the collection of essays, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, Haudenosaunee writer Alicia Elliott begins with a title piece on depression (from which she suffers) and it suitably sets the tone for what is to come: a frank examination of Elliott's life, focussing on the ways that colonialism, capitalism, and intergenerational trauma intensified the challenges of having been raised in a family plagued by poverty, abuse, and mental illness. My reaction to this provocative collection wasn't really crystallised until the final essay, “Extraction Mentalities”, in which Elliott writes about domestic abuse and the systemic abuse of First Nations, then asks questions, complete with room for readers to record their answers (Elliott states that those who don't actually write out answers are saying a lot, too). At one point Elliott writes, “Do you see where I'm going with this? Am I moving too fast?”, and that's pretty much the tone of the whole thing: Elliott is articulate in her anger, and she demands a response from the reader; this isn't a passive reading experience. However, just because an author is intelligent and emphatic in laying out their “facts” doesn't make them indisputable; this is a vital record of a lived experience, from which its author has drawn personal conclusions, and that is necessary and valuable. But anyone who doesn't agree with Elliott's black and white premises – that First Nations are universally opposed to resource development, that every Indigenous child would be better off outside the foster care system (no matter the home conditions), that systemic racism is the only explanation for the under-representation of Indigenous writers in Canadian publishing – wouldn't find anything persuasive here; Elliott is stating her subjective facts, not joining a debate. And for that unpersuaded reader, the obstreperous tone is just a further turn off. As for me – I respect what Elliott has crafted here, I appreciate what experiences have led to her beliefs, but I was constantly jarred by her conclusions; even so, it adds a necessary voice to the national conversation and this collection deserves to be widely read. (Note: I was fortunate to have received an ARC and quotes may not be in their final forms.)
When Elliott writes about racism in the Canadian publishing industry – taking swipes at Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, deriding Joseph Boyden (and the witless Canadians “who read The Orenda and it, like, changed their lives”) – her main point seems to be about blood quantum and the nerve of those in positions of power who think they have the right to determine who is an “authentic” Indigenous voice. This, naturally, fends off any noting of the fact that Elliott herself has a white mother – and while I totally accept Elliott as a Haudenosaunee writer, it seems disingenuous for her to repeatedly write about what “they” did/do to “us”, when she is as responsible for the actions of the colonisers as she is heir to their effects (she also has several justifiably angry comments to make about the Catholic Church, despite her Catholic mother attempting to raise her children in the faith). Provocation seems to be the point of these essays, though, so I'm going to note a few passages that gave me pause. On being caught trying to steal convenience store pastries as a child:
The cost of our attempted theft was no more than five dollars. Probably closer to three. It was almost nothing but it was enough. We were no longer an eight- and ten-year-old under this woman's gaze; we were not sad kids trying to cope with poverty and abuse. We were thieves, criminals. Not-quite-humans who would one day get what we deserved. But what did we deserve? To go to some juvenile detention facility and have our responses to poverty punished? How would her reaction have changed if we were visibly Indigenous? Would she have called the cops then and there, as opposed to giving us a chance to leave and “wise up”? Did our white skin give us a chance at redemption my brown cousins wouldn't have gotten under the same circumstances?
Not only do I object to framing theft as a “response to poverty”, but Elliott ends on an angry hypothetical that adds nothing to her actual experience. The following is from the essay “Scratch”, in which Elliott describes her family's years-long struggle with lice and efforts to hide it (and other signs of neglect in their overcrowded trailer without running water) from visiting social workers:
Our parents were far from perfect, but their main barriers to being better parents were poverty, intergenerational trauma and mental illness – things neither social workers nor police officers have ever been equipped to deal with, yet are both allowed, even encouraged, to patrol...Even as a kid (I intuited that Indigenous children have more reason to fear government care than they do their parents' poverty.) I knew it was bullshit that social workers and cops had so much control over our family, that they could split us up the moment we didn't cater to their sensibilities. Knowing this then made me hate social workers and cops. Knowing this now makes me hate the systems that empower them – systems that put families in impossible situations, then punish them for not being able to claw their way out.
“Hating the systems” is a running theme, and anti-capitalism/anti-corporations is a frequent focus:
Since empty calories are both cheap and widely available, it should be no surprise that the biggest indicator of obesity is a person's income level. And since so many Western countries are built on white supremacy, it should also come as no surprise that the biggest indicator of poverty is race. In Canada, a staggering one in five racialized families live in poverty, as opposed to one in twenty white families. This puts many poor, racialized families in the position where they have no choice but to rely on cheap, unhealthy food and, as a result, support the same companies that have converted their poverty into corporate profit in the first place.
Which brings us back to the final essay, “Extraction Mentalities”:
Under capitalism, colonialism, and settler colonialism, everything Indigenous is subject to extraction. Words from our languages are extracted and turned into the names of cities, states, provinces or, in the case of Canada, an entire country. Resources from our traditional territories are extracted and turned into profit for non-Indigenous companies and strategic political donations. Our own children are extracted so that non-Indigenous families can have the families they've always wanted, so our families will fall to ruin and our grief will distract us from resisting colonialism.
The book ends with the following questions: What do you want? Are those desires based on extraction? Are they dependent upon capitalism or colonialism? If the answers to those last two questions are yes, please revisit the first question. I don't see capitalism or colonialism being reversed as the official “systems” at work in Canada, so I really don't know what Elliott is asking here. On the other hand, I don't deny that the First Nations haven't thrived under these systems and things need to change; I do wish this book had some workable ideas for what those changes could be.
March 7, 2021
I received this book in a book exchange - you can hear my thoughts in a Booktube video!
November 21, 2020
I have been alternately reading and talking about this essay collection for the past two weeks. At one point I interrupted a conversation to fetch this book, opened it to the appropriate page, and said "Read." And read he did, all 18 pages. I can't remember that ever working before.
I consider myself fairly well read on First Nations experiences. Alicia Elliott writes essays that challenge you to reshape what you thought you knew, to broaden and complexify your perspective. Herein we find: a cogent essay on how unhealthy diets are a direct result of residential schooling; a narrative of a childhood of head lice, beacon of shame; a take-down of anyone trying to pigeonhole native writers; a brilliantly structured inquiry into the nature of abuse. That's just a quick sampler. Every single essay was good, hard reading.
I consider myself fairly well read on First Nations experiences. Alicia Elliott writes essays that challenge you to reshape what you thought you knew, to broaden and complexify your perspective. Herein we find: a cogent essay on how unhealthy diets are a direct result of residential schooling; a narrative of a childhood of head lice, beacon of shame; a take-down of anyone trying to pigeonhole native writers; a brilliantly structured inquiry into the nature of abuse. That's just a quick sampler. Every single essay was good, hard reading.
January 13, 2020
I enjoyed anecdotes about the author's life and hearing about the Canadian context in current nonfiction. However, I didn't find this book or the author's thoughts groundbreaking, and I found them instead repeatedly problematic. I think she is at the beginning or middle stages of thoughts on these topics. I wouldn't mind this but for how influenced people seem to be by a book that falls victim to logical fallacies, some bad science, and cognitive distortions. It is not well reasoned in many parts though it sounds compelling on its surface.
September 2, 2020
First of all, if I could give this book more than 5 stars I would.
Secondly, I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway and I thank the author and publisher for the opportunity to read this gem and give a review.
I must admit in the essence of being truthful, that I, like author Alicia Elliott, am a member of the Haudenosaunee Nation. I am Oneida on my paternal side. Therefore, I took this book in a different way than many other readers may, because I can relate to it on so many levels. I am also 1/2 Italian on my maternal side, so I live with one foot in both worlds so to speak. It is a balancing act sometimes.
That being said, I highly recommend this collection of essays to each and every single one of you. It brilliantly - and brutally - talks about indigenous issues, problems, prejudices, and the remaining (albeit mostly hidden) deep-seated hatred that still reigns within, and against, indigenous populations not only of Canada and the U.S., but of the world.
It isn't an easy read, nor should it be. The time for sugar coating such things is long gone, and the time for brutal honesty is here.
Many people believe that racism against indigenous people is a thing of the past. That is woefully incorrect. All you need to do is check out MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) to see that a missing Native woman will never get the publicity as would a woman or child of another race. The same, unfortunately, holds true for other peoples of color. Racism is a terrible disease that is far from being tamed, or even lessened, although the present situation with people of African descent in this country is finally being given the publicity it deserves.
Take this book, immerse yourself in it, see if you see yourself in it either as a minority or as a person who wants to know more about the issue of racism against your friends, neighbors, and members of your family.
The book also speaks about health issues - it is not widely known about the diseases that are much more prevalent in people of color, or the lack of proper treatment available to them. Educate yourself. Start here.
Secondly, I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway and I thank the author and publisher for the opportunity to read this gem and give a review.
I must admit in the essence of being truthful, that I, like author Alicia Elliott, am a member of the Haudenosaunee Nation. I am Oneida on my paternal side. Therefore, I took this book in a different way than many other readers may, because I can relate to it on so many levels. I am also 1/2 Italian on my maternal side, so I live with one foot in both worlds so to speak. It is a balancing act sometimes.
That being said, I highly recommend this collection of essays to each and every single one of you. It brilliantly - and brutally - talks about indigenous issues, problems, prejudices, and the remaining (albeit mostly hidden) deep-seated hatred that still reigns within, and against, indigenous populations not only of Canada and the U.S., but of the world.
It isn't an easy read, nor should it be. The time for sugar coating such things is long gone, and the time for brutal honesty is here.
Many people believe that racism against indigenous people is a thing of the past. That is woefully incorrect. All you need to do is check out MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) to see that a missing Native woman will never get the publicity as would a woman or child of another race. The same, unfortunately, holds true for other peoples of color. Racism is a terrible disease that is far from being tamed, or even lessened, although the present situation with people of African descent in this country is finally being given the publicity it deserves.
Take this book, immerse yourself in it, see if you see yourself in it either as a minority or as a person who wants to know more about the issue of racism against your friends, neighbors, and members of your family.
The book also speaks about health issues - it is not widely known about the diseases that are much more prevalent in people of color, or the lack of proper treatment available to them. Educate yourself. Start here.
January 24, 2020
Alicia Elliott is a survivor. She has faced more challenges in her young life than many of us face in a lifetime. These challenges include but are not limited to: poverty; homelessness; family violence; teen-age pregnancy; depression and a parent with major mental health problems. I want to start off my review by recognizing her strength and resilience.
A Mind Spread out on the Ground is a collection of essays. These essays are excruciatingly personal in parts, but written with a surprising detachment. At first I wondered whether this might be a consequence of Elliott’s depression or perhaps tied to culture. The more I thought about it, though, the more it struck me that perhaps it was a kind of literary device. Elliott doesn’t want these essays to be about her so much as she wants them to shine a light on the ills of society and so she keeps a distance. Elliott sees herself as an activist and above all these essays are meant to champion Indigenous rights.
The problem is, although the more autobiographical parts of her essays are fully engaging, she often loses me when she extrapolates to society at large. This tends to happen when she makes grand statements that are written as fact with no footnotes or meaningful evidence to support them. It’s obvious there are biases/ assumptions that underpin her ideas, but she does not share them with the reader. There’s a lack of transparency. This makes me distrust her.
For example, in the essay “Sontag, In Snapshots” she writes:
"Capitalism always relies upon exploitation to create profit, and therefore it must always rely upon differing valuations of people’s humanity."
I suspect this statement is based on Marxist theory, but there’s no way of knowing based on what she provides in the text. The point is, she writes it as though it is fact when it most certainly isn’t and there are conflicting theories that argue the opposite.
Another example is on page 25 when she mentions that “colonialism, racism, and sexism have systematically kept Indigenous women out of the literary community” once again written as though it is well documented fact. Grand statements like these don’t sit well with me unless there’s some evidence to back them up. It wouldn’t be hard to test out her hypothesis and doing so would make an excellent research thesis in a women’s studies program. All it would entail is submitting the same piece of writing to various publishers under different names, some names clearly Indigenous, others not, some female, some male and tracking the acceptance/rejection rates. Alternatively, one could submit short stories that include Indigenous stereotypes versus similar stories with real Indigenous people and track the acceptance/rejection rates.
Thinking the way she does, though, I wonder how she accounts for the success of her own book and the fact that it remains a top seller close to a year after its publication. Personally, I suspect there is much more at play than a straight forward case of oppression when it comes to Indigenous women and the literary community. The Indigenous cultures have an oral tradition of storytelling. Could there be some reluctance on their part to embrace a written tradition of storytelling they associate with the colonizing culture? Would it indicate an acceptance of assimilation to them at some level? It seems a reasonable question. Perhaps part of the answer would be for the Canadian Arts community not to focus only on books but to expand to include oral forms of literature.
Bottom line, there was much to like about these essays and many interesting questions raised but Elliott seemed too bogged down in blame to come up with much in the way of suggestions and/or solutions. I would have liked more nuance. Maybe next time.
A Mind Spread out on the Ground is a collection of essays. These essays are excruciatingly personal in parts, but written with a surprising detachment. At first I wondered whether this might be a consequence of Elliott’s depression or perhaps tied to culture. The more I thought about it, though, the more it struck me that perhaps it was a kind of literary device. Elliott doesn’t want these essays to be about her so much as she wants them to shine a light on the ills of society and so she keeps a distance. Elliott sees herself as an activist and above all these essays are meant to champion Indigenous rights.
The problem is, although the more autobiographical parts of her essays are fully engaging, she often loses me when she extrapolates to society at large. This tends to happen when she makes grand statements that are written as fact with no footnotes or meaningful evidence to support them. It’s obvious there are biases/ assumptions that underpin her ideas, but she does not share them with the reader. There’s a lack of transparency. This makes me distrust her.
For example, in the essay “Sontag, In Snapshots” she writes:
"Capitalism always relies upon exploitation to create profit, and therefore it must always rely upon differing valuations of people’s humanity."
I suspect this statement is based on Marxist theory, but there’s no way of knowing based on what she provides in the text. The point is, she writes it as though it is fact when it most certainly isn’t and there are conflicting theories that argue the opposite.
Another example is on page 25 when she mentions that “colonialism, racism, and sexism have systematically kept Indigenous women out of the literary community” once again written as though it is well documented fact. Grand statements like these don’t sit well with me unless there’s some evidence to back them up. It wouldn’t be hard to test out her hypothesis and doing so would make an excellent research thesis in a women’s studies program. All it would entail is submitting the same piece of writing to various publishers under different names, some names clearly Indigenous, others not, some female, some male and tracking the acceptance/rejection rates. Alternatively, one could submit short stories that include Indigenous stereotypes versus similar stories with real Indigenous people and track the acceptance/rejection rates.
Thinking the way she does, though, I wonder how she accounts for the success of her own book and the fact that it remains a top seller close to a year after its publication. Personally, I suspect there is much more at play than a straight forward case of oppression when it comes to Indigenous women and the literary community. The Indigenous cultures have an oral tradition of storytelling. Could there be some reluctance on their part to embrace a written tradition of storytelling they associate with the colonizing culture? Would it indicate an acceptance of assimilation to them at some level? It seems a reasonable question. Perhaps part of the answer would be for the Canadian Arts community not to focus only on books but to expand to include oral forms of literature.
Bottom line, there was much to like about these essays and many interesting questions raised but Elliott seemed too bogged down in blame to come up with much in the way of suggestions and/or solutions. I would have liked more nuance. Maybe next time.
December 21, 2020
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is a powerful collection of personal essays written by the Iroquoian author, Alicia Elliott. Each essay leverages Elliot's personal memories and reflections to make poignant, vulnerable and raw social critiques on the inequality, discrimination and experience faced by Indigenous Canadians.
Elliot's writing is beautiful and compelling. She touches on internalized racism, sexual assault, mental illness, motherhood, food deserts and stereotypical depictions of Indigenous communities and celebrations. The examples that Elliot uses are so relatable yet unimaginable which further emphasizes the role of deeply entrenched oppression in producing such disparate realities. For example, in one essay, Elliot describes her battle with lice. For nearly ten years the young woman and her sister were ostracized and humiliated due to their inability to get rid of their head lice. As a reader, I felt both deep sympathy and uncontrollable rage as she described her trauma over something that could have been so easily avoided.
This book is a poetic and personal illustration of the individual and inter generational consequences of systemic racism. A Mind Spread Out on the Ground should be required reading for all non-Indigenous folk.
Elliot's writing is beautiful and compelling. She touches on internalized racism, sexual assault, mental illness, motherhood, food deserts and stereotypical depictions of Indigenous communities and celebrations. The examples that Elliot uses are so relatable yet unimaginable which further emphasizes the role of deeply entrenched oppression in producing such disparate realities. For example, in one essay, Elliot describes her battle with lice. For nearly ten years the young woman and her sister were ostracized and humiliated due to their inability to get rid of their head lice. As a reader, I felt both deep sympathy and uncontrollable rage as she described her trauma over something that could have been so easily avoided.
This book is a poetic and personal illustration of the individual and inter generational consequences of systemic racism. A Mind Spread Out on the Ground should be required reading for all non-Indigenous folk.
September 21, 2020
phew. alicia elliott can WRITE. AN. ESSAY. this was top notch.
RTC
RTC
November 28, 2020
Oof.
Review to come.
Review to come.
September 10, 2020
This is now one of my favorite non-fiction books I've ever read! Tuscarora writer Alicia Elliott makes her debut with a collection of essays that covers everything you can think of. How colonialism has effected/continues to effect Indigenous people to poverty, mental illness, sexual violence, racism, photography, trauma, and much more.
This book will spark all of the important discussions that need to be shared with family, friends, strangers, EVERYONE.
I read this from my library, but I will definitely be buying myself a copy in the future so I can read it again and again. I highly recommend this book to everyone, it's a MUST READ! 5/5 stars!
This book will spark all of the important discussions that need to be shared with family, friends, strangers, EVERYONE.
I read this from my library, but I will definitely be buying myself a copy in the future so I can read it again and again. I highly recommend this book to everyone, it's a MUST READ! 5/5 stars!
August 29, 2021
4★ Admiro cada vez mais autores que conseguem realizar um trabalho de pesquisa exímio sobre as suas origens e expô-lo de uma forma crua, directa e envolvente.
São, efectivamente, muito poucos os autores com origem indígena que possuem livros publicados e que têm os holofotes do público. É verdadeiramente gratificante ler este livro de não ficção e chegar ao fim e sentir “quero usar o meu privilégio para fazer a diferença”, “quero ler mais sobre minorias”, “quero educar-me mais”.
Este conjunto de ensaios falam-nos de temas tão importantes como a cultura indígena, apropriação cultural, justiça racial, saúde mental, assédio sexual, feminismo e muitos outros temas. Senti cada palavra dentro de mim, numa escrita cuidada, poética e cativante que não me deixou pousar o livro muitas vezes. Fiquei absorvida pelo conteúdo tão pertinente é tão pouco explorado.
Recomendo vivamente este livro a todas as pessoas. Sem excepções. É fundamental apoiarmos a literatura de uma forma diferente do que temos vindo a fazer. É imperativo transformarmos o mundo editorial.
São, efectivamente, muito poucos os autores com origem indígena que possuem livros publicados e que têm os holofotes do público. É verdadeiramente gratificante ler este livro de não ficção e chegar ao fim e sentir “quero usar o meu privilégio para fazer a diferença”, “quero ler mais sobre minorias”, “quero educar-me mais”.
Este conjunto de ensaios falam-nos de temas tão importantes como a cultura indígena, apropriação cultural, justiça racial, saúde mental, assédio sexual, feminismo e muitos outros temas. Senti cada palavra dentro de mim, numa escrita cuidada, poética e cativante que não me deixou pousar o livro muitas vezes. Fiquei absorvida pelo conteúdo tão pertinente é tão pouco explorado.
Recomendo vivamente este livro a todas as pessoas. Sem excepções. É fundamental apoiarmos a literatura de uma forma diferente do que temos vindo a fazer. É imperativo transformarmos o mundo editorial.
September 8, 2019
I not only read the book but was able to read most of it before I heard her speak at the Ottawa Writer’s Festival. I appreciate the care that she took in how she presented her aspects of personal memoir with facts about Indigenous experiences in Canada. For me it put in to perspective a connected approach to Indigenous living in Canada.
For some reason it was the third book I had read in two weeks about bipolar/schizophrenic mental health issues and though I am not close to anyone in my own family who suffers from it, it did help me to understand what it would be like to to live with someone who has it. I didn’t give the book a five star rating because there were several times where I would get the point about a certain part of her life but the similes and metaphors sometimes would often stretch out into pages and pages and it sometimes undercut the effect I think of trying to either help one understand her experiences or provide a platform for sympathetic relating.
The best essay for me was the one on photography but also the essay where she wrote about the effects that public crimes by non-Indigenous people on Indigenous people went without justice and how that affected her emotionally. I have a feeling that Indigenous folks know where they were at the time the Colten Bushie, Cindy Gladue and Tina Fontaine’s killers got off.
I also appreciated the explanation of complex dynamics when it comes to abusers / family members in our lives. She did a very good job at explaining how we can still love someone and want to be around someone who has or does abuse us.
Congratulations to Alicia in having put this book out there and of course, I’m always a little afraid of writing my thoughts about Indigenous literature because I’ll probably end up meeting the authors in person one day and that they may take the one small criticism I have (which is very minor with this book/author), and decide that I’m a crab in the bucket.
Anyway - I highly recommend this book to Indigenous and non-Indigenous folks as I think there are aspects of it which are written for both audiences.
For some reason it was the third book I had read in two weeks about bipolar/schizophrenic mental health issues and though I am not close to anyone in my own family who suffers from it, it did help me to understand what it would be like to to live with someone who has it. I didn’t give the book a five star rating because there were several times where I would get the point about a certain part of her life but the similes and metaphors sometimes would often stretch out into pages and pages and it sometimes undercut the effect I think of trying to either help one understand her experiences or provide a platform for sympathetic relating.
The best essay for me was the one on photography but also the essay where she wrote about the effects that public crimes by non-Indigenous people on Indigenous people went without justice and how that affected her emotionally. I have a feeling that Indigenous folks know where they were at the time the Colten Bushie, Cindy Gladue and Tina Fontaine’s killers got off.
I also appreciated the explanation of complex dynamics when it comes to abusers / family members in our lives. She did a very good job at explaining how we can still love someone and want to be around someone who has or does abuse us.
Congratulations to Alicia in having put this book out there and of course, I’m always a little afraid of writing my thoughts about Indigenous literature because I’ll probably end up meeting the authors in person one day and that they may take the one small criticism I have (which is very minor with this book/author), and decide that I’m a crab in the bucket.
Anyway - I highly recommend this book to Indigenous and non-Indigenous folks as I think there are aspects of it which are written for both audiences.
April 24, 2019
An emphatic 5* rating. Deeply moving, exceptionally well-written essays questioning the ever-present effects of colonialism on Indigenous peoples in North America and how colonialism / capitalism collide with / disrupt art, culture, mental health, a sense of belonging. I borrowed this from the library but it's now on my to-buy and favourites lists.
March 28, 2019
This essay collection defies words. It is brilliant and should be required reading for all.
November 3, 2020
You ever read a book and have an epiphany, only for that epiphany to evaporate before you get around to writing it down or telling others? I think that happened here—I think one of Alicia Elliott’s essays in A Mind Spread Out on the Ground inspired an epiphany regarding my relationship with poetry … yet I have totally forgotten the thought now! I even paged through the book again to see if I could recover it. Nope. Maybe one day it will return.
I was drawn to this book by Elliott’s social media presence and some of her other writing online, such as this superb article for Chatelaine about 1492 Land Back Lane and Canada’s ongoing colonialism. Elliott’s writing balances past and present tense in a way that helps us connect how the colonial actions of the past reverberate into the colonial present Indigenous people are experiencing today. A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is a very personal collection of essays. Its title comes from a translation of a Mohawk word that roughly means depression, and a great deal of this book is concerned with the effects of colonialism on Elliott and her family. Yet the essays transcend colonialism, and as Elliott mentions in “Not Your Noble Savage,” she does not want to be pigeonholed as “just” an Indigenous writer.
I really appreciate the nuance on display in these essays. For example, Elliott’s parents often appear in her writing. She makes it very clear that she thinks of them fondly—yet at the same time, her childhood and teenage years are full of moments of tension, abuse, even violence. We are so prone to simplifying people in our lives into single stories—a parent is either loving or abusive, rather than loving and abusive. Elliott rejects the dichotomy and displays both the loving moments and the darker ones. Moreover, her intention here isn’t to excuse these contrasts or to show that she has worked through and somehow processed and come to understand all of this. Rather, she admits to us that it can be difficult to fully puzzle out the way we react to, understand, and respond to the people closest to us.
Within these pages you’re going to find what you expect: the violence Canada does to Indigenous people (especially Indigenous women), the nasty fallout of racism both systemic and targeted, the pain that comes with uprooting and re-rooting oneself and one’s family and—for Elliott is light-skinned enough to “pass” as non-Indigenous—feeling like one never quite belongs anywhere. However, you will also find the moments that are often erased from Indigenous experiences that make it to the mainstream: the moments of joy—particularly when Elliott is talking about her husband and child; the moments of triumph; the moments of honesty. As she mentions herself in several essays, we place Indigenous writers in boxes. We elevate those who conform to what we expect an Indigenous writer to write, and we find reasons to ignore and erase those whose writing breaks out of those boxes.
So as a settler, what I take away from this collection is that reminder that I have to be careful about how I approach the Indigenous storytelling that makes it into mainstream CanLit. (Joseph Boyden’s meteoric rise and subsequent fall from grace is perhaps the textbook case for this issue.) I must do my best to check my preconceptions at the door, not to laud something merely because it meets some subconscious checklist for Indigeneity, nor to reject something from an Indigenous author merely because of its departure from that unspoken norm.
And then more generally, I just valued Elliott’s candidness. The way she spoke about her traumas, about her difficulty navigating both the racism and the misogyny of modern Canada. Hers is a life so very distinctive from mine, by dint of so many axes of experience and identity. I appreciate being able to hear her stories and briefly glimpse my country through her eyes, so I can better understand how it is failing other women less privileged than me, how it is failing Indigenous people, how it is silent about survivors of abuse and assault, and how the very structures—such as public education and childwelfare—we supposedly put in place to protect our most vulnerable turn into the most oppressive, most inequitable parts of our society for some.
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is many moments of intensity punctuated by poetical prose and thoughtful ways of weaving facts and education about this country’s colonial attitudes into very personal stories. My mind is not spread out on the ground after reading this, but you can bet that it is buzzing with ideas and interest sparked by Elliott’s essays.
Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter.
I was drawn to this book by Elliott’s social media presence and some of her other writing online, such as this superb article for Chatelaine about 1492 Land Back Lane and Canada’s ongoing colonialism. Elliott’s writing balances past and present tense in a way that helps us connect how the colonial actions of the past reverberate into the colonial present Indigenous people are experiencing today. A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is a very personal collection of essays. Its title comes from a translation of a Mohawk word that roughly means depression, and a great deal of this book is concerned with the effects of colonialism on Elliott and her family. Yet the essays transcend colonialism, and as Elliott mentions in “Not Your Noble Savage,” she does not want to be pigeonholed as “just” an Indigenous writer.
I really appreciate the nuance on display in these essays. For example, Elliott’s parents often appear in her writing. She makes it very clear that she thinks of them fondly—yet at the same time, her childhood and teenage years are full of moments of tension, abuse, even violence. We are so prone to simplifying people in our lives into single stories—a parent is either loving or abusive, rather than loving and abusive. Elliott rejects the dichotomy and displays both the loving moments and the darker ones. Moreover, her intention here isn’t to excuse these contrasts or to show that she has worked through and somehow processed and come to understand all of this. Rather, she admits to us that it can be difficult to fully puzzle out the way we react to, understand, and respond to the people closest to us.
Within these pages you’re going to find what you expect: the violence Canada does to Indigenous people (especially Indigenous women), the nasty fallout of racism both systemic and targeted, the pain that comes with uprooting and re-rooting oneself and one’s family and—for Elliott is light-skinned enough to “pass” as non-Indigenous—feeling like one never quite belongs anywhere. However, you will also find the moments that are often erased from Indigenous experiences that make it to the mainstream: the moments of joy—particularly when Elliott is talking about her husband and child; the moments of triumph; the moments of honesty. As she mentions herself in several essays, we place Indigenous writers in boxes. We elevate those who conform to what we expect an Indigenous writer to write, and we find reasons to ignore and erase those whose writing breaks out of those boxes.
So as a settler, what I take away from this collection is that reminder that I have to be careful about how I approach the Indigenous storytelling that makes it into mainstream CanLit. (Joseph Boyden’s meteoric rise and subsequent fall from grace is perhaps the textbook case for this issue.) I must do my best to check my preconceptions at the door, not to laud something merely because it meets some subconscious checklist for Indigeneity, nor to reject something from an Indigenous author merely because of its departure from that unspoken norm.
And then more generally, I just valued Elliott’s candidness. The way she spoke about her traumas, about her difficulty navigating both the racism and the misogyny of modern Canada. Hers is a life so very distinctive from mine, by dint of so many axes of experience and identity. I appreciate being able to hear her stories and briefly glimpse my country through her eyes, so I can better understand how it is failing other women less privileged than me, how it is failing Indigenous people, how it is silent about survivors of abuse and assault, and how the very structures—such as public education and childwelfare—we supposedly put in place to protect our most vulnerable turn into the most oppressive, most inequitable parts of our society for some.
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is many moments of intensity punctuated by poetical prose and thoughtful ways of weaving facts and education about this country’s colonial attitudes into very personal stories. My mind is not spread out on the ground after reading this, but you can bet that it is buzzing with ideas and interest sparked by Elliott’s essays.
Originally posted on Kara.Reviews, where you can easily browse all my reviews and subscribe to my newsletter.
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November 12, 2020"'Wake'nikonhra'kwenhtará:'on,' she says... 'His mind is...' she moves her hands around, palms down, as if doing a large, messy finger painting. 'Literally stretched or sprawled out on the ground. It's all over." [On the Mohawk phrase for depression]
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From A MIND SPREAD OUT ON THE GROUND by Alicia Elliott, 2020.
This collection of essays was staggering in it's breadth, and all together too much to describe in one post. Essays often employ the concept of micro/macro, the personal relating to the systemic or worldwide. Elliott's incisive essays range from mental illness, sexual assault, intergenerational trauma, missing and murdered Indigenous people, and parenthood to critical views of Indigenous representation.
It's the last subject that I want to delve into a little deeper in the context of the fantastic essay in the latter-half of the book, entitled "Sontag, In Snapshots: Reflecting on 'In Plato's Cave' in 2018". The essay is interspersed with excerpts from Sontag's 1977 ON PHOTOGRAPHY, relating to visual representation in photographic art/documentary.
Elliott turns this lens specifically on Indigenous and Native representations through the decades, expanding on her own aversion to selfies, and society's "photo or it didn't happen" mentality - on this last point relating specifically to the number of photographs & videos showing assault and homicide of Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and the Disabled, and yet (!) this photographic evidence not being "enough" to convict the criminals who perpetrated. She briefly discusses the Kinder Morgan and Dakota Access Pipelines as well as Abu Gharib here - seamlessly relating to her central thesis.
Additional evisceration of colonial depictions of Indigenous peoples, and National Geographic's complicity in decades of "othering" and exoticizing - Natives only shown in regalia and traditional dress - not in modern contexts (cities, at home, at work), and the new Indigenous artists who are challenging these representations.
While I've focused this review on one specific essay in a book FULL of insightful and incisive works, I have to recommend the book as a whole. Stunning in scope and voice, this was a superlative collection and one I won't forget.
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From A MIND SPREAD OUT ON THE GROUND by Alicia Elliott, 2020.
This collection of essays was staggering in it's breadth, and all together too much to describe in one post. Essays often employ the concept of micro/macro, the personal relating to the systemic or worldwide. Elliott's incisive essays range from mental illness, sexual assault, intergenerational trauma, missing and murdered Indigenous people, and parenthood to critical views of Indigenous representation.
It's the last subject that I want to delve into a little deeper in the context of the fantastic essay in the latter-half of the book, entitled "Sontag, In Snapshots: Reflecting on 'In Plato's Cave' in 2018". The essay is interspersed with excerpts from Sontag's 1977 ON PHOTOGRAPHY, relating to visual representation in photographic art/documentary.
Elliott turns this lens specifically on Indigenous and Native representations through the decades, expanding on her own aversion to selfies, and society's "photo or it didn't happen" mentality - on this last point relating specifically to the number of photographs & videos showing assault and homicide of Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and the Disabled, and yet (!) this photographic evidence not being "enough" to convict the criminals who perpetrated. She briefly discusses the Kinder Morgan and Dakota Access Pipelines as well as Abu Gharib here - seamlessly relating to her central thesis.
Additional evisceration of colonial depictions of Indigenous peoples, and National Geographic's complicity in decades of "othering" and exoticizing - Natives only shown in regalia and traditional dress - not in modern contexts (cities, at home, at work), and the new Indigenous artists who are challenging these representations.
While I've focused this review on one specific essay in a book FULL of insightful and incisive works, I have to recommend the book as a whole. Stunning in scope and voice, this was a superlative collection and one I won't forget.
October 15, 2020
This book is frustrating, and yet had the potential to be so much more than it is. Rather than being more than the sum of its parts, this is lessened by the fragmentary nature of the essays, which lack clarity and jump from topic to topic with little sense of progression.
The sections where Elliott writes from her lived experience are a valuable addition to the growing number of voices who challenge white privilege with their narratives of disenfranchisement.
However, once she goes beyond this she make numerous logical fallacies which are infuriating, and, worst of all, Elliott presents ‘evidence’ to support this in terms of scant research cherry picked to support her view. From this she makes worrying extrapolations, which include unfounded accusations against every white foster carer, social worker and teacher.
I would not recommend this book. There are better books out there which use higher standards of scholarship to maintain an argument and challenge the status quo.
The sections where Elliott writes from her lived experience are a valuable addition to the growing number of voices who challenge white privilege with their narratives of disenfranchisement.
However, once she goes beyond this she make numerous logical fallacies which are infuriating, and, worst of all, Elliott presents ‘evidence’ to support this in terms of scant research cherry picked to support her view. From this she makes worrying extrapolations, which include unfounded accusations against every white foster carer, social worker and teacher.
I would not recommend this book. There are better books out there which use higher standards of scholarship to maintain an argument and challenge the status quo.
April 30, 2019
Honestly one of the best essay collections I have ever read. It's powerful, timely, and incisive; expect its well-deserved awards to accumulate without hesitation.
Shelved as 'wishlist'
November 14, 2020On sale for $1.99!
February 5, 2023
What a gut punch of a book!! A step into decolonization of the mind. I’ve read my fair share of social Justice books, but reading this was as an eye opening as some of my favorites. It’s challenging you to look at things from a different angle. It dives into mental health, poverty, abuse, child welfare, among other things… and not just at an individual level, but us at a society level. All this and extremely enjoyable to read!
April 12, 2020
Alicia Elliot is fed up. In her
brilliant essays, she pulls no punches in her interrogation of colonialism. I listened to the audiobook which was a humbling experience. I will re-read (and I rarely re-read books) a paper copy as as some of her essays are interactive, requiring the reader to examine their biases and reflect on their role in perpetuating the status quo.
There are also essays that address mental illness in general and in her own family, including depression. “I ask my sister about this. She’s been studying Mohawk for the past three years and is practically fluent. She’s raising her daughter to be the same. They are the first members of the family to speak the language since a priest beat it out of our paternal grandfather a handful of decades ago. “Wake’nikonhra’kwenhtará:’on”, she says. “It’s not quite ‘fell to the ground’. It’s more like, ‘His mind is...’” She pauses. She repeats the word in Mohawk. Slows it down. Considers what English words in her arsenal can best approximate the phrase. “‘His mind is...’” She moved her hands around, palms down, as if doing a large, messy finger painting. “Literally stretches or sprawled over the ground.”
She writes about wide ranging subjects including health and nutrition, representation in the arts (she’s coming for you Atwood!), sexual assault and the court system. Some of the essays are deeply personal detailing her family life. She is Haudenosaunee from Brampton, Ontario and one of eight children. “Our parents were far from perfect but their main barriers to being better parents were poverty, intergenerational trauma and mental illness - things neither social workers nor police officers have ever been equipped to deal with, yet are both allowed, even encouraged, to patrol. Even as a kid I intuited that indigenous children have far more to fear government care and they do their parents poverty I knew it was bullshit that social workers and cops had so much control over our family that they could split us up the moment we didn’t cater to their sensibilities. Knowing this then made me hate social workers and cops. Knowing this now makes me hate the systems that empower them - systems that put families in impossible situations then punish them for not being able to claw their way out.”
There are some lighter moments, but this is a serious and often uncomfortable read. I’m okay with that and look forward to re-reading while waiting to see what she writes next. Alicia Elliott is a young writer who has a lot to say and I, for one, am listening.
Recommend to readers of Tanya Talaga, Lee Maracle, Richard Wagamese and Chanel Miller.
brilliant essays, she pulls no punches in her interrogation of colonialism. I listened to the audiobook which was a humbling experience. I will re-read (and I rarely re-read books) a paper copy as as some of her essays are interactive, requiring the reader to examine their biases and reflect on their role in perpetuating the status quo.
There are also essays that address mental illness in general and in her own family, including depression. “I ask my sister about this. She’s been studying Mohawk for the past three years and is practically fluent. She’s raising her daughter to be the same. They are the first members of the family to speak the language since a priest beat it out of our paternal grandfather a handful of decades ago. “Wake’nikonhra’kwenhtará:’on”, she says. “It’s not quite ‘fell to the ground’. It’s more like, ‘His mind is...’” She pauses. She repeats the word in Mohawk. Slows it down. Considers what English words in her arsenal can best approximate the phrase. “‘His mind is...’” She moved her hands around, palms down, as if doing a large, messy finger painting. “Literally stretches or sprawled over the ground.”
She writes about wide ranging subjects including health and nutrition, representation in the arts (she’s coming for you Atwood!), sexual assault and the court system. Some of the essays are deeply personal detailing her family life. She is Haudenosaunee from Brampton, Ontario and one of eight children. “Our parents were far from perfect but their main barriers to being better parents were poverty, intergenerational trauma and mental illness - things neither social workers nor police officers have ever been equipped to deal with, yet are both allowed, even encouraged, to patrol. Even as a kid I intuited that indigenous children have far more to fear government care and they do their parents poverty I knew it was bullshit that social workers and cops had so much control over our family that they could split us up the moment we didn’t cater to their sensibilities. Knowing this then made me hate social workers and cops. Knowing this now makes me hate the systems that empower them - systems that put families in impossible situations then punish them for not being able to claw their way out.”
There are some lighter moments, but this is a serious and often uncomfortable read. I’m okay with that and look forward to re-reading while waiting to see what she writes next. Alicia Elliott is a young writer who has a lot to say and I, for one, am listening.
Recommend to readers of Tanya Talaga, Lee Maracle, Richard Wagamese and Chanel Miller.
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