A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

A Mind Spread Out on the Ground by the Haudenosaunee writer Alicia Elliott is an essay collection published by Doubleday Canada in 2019, titled for the Mohawk translation of the word “depression.” As a member of the Six Nations reserve navigating poverty, racism, sexism, and colonialism, Elliott uses her essays to shed light on problems that affect a wide range of people, from the seldom-heard perspective of the Indigenous community. She provides historical context on current issues while delving into the ways they manifest on a personal level through vulnerable glimpses into her own life growing up as a biracial, Haudenosaunee woman in the US and Canada.

Summary

In the first and titular essay, Elliott considers her mental health challenges, establishing the theme that depression among Indigenous and other oppressed peoples mirrors the effects of colonialism on these individuals’ ancestors. In the following essay, “Half-Breed: A Racial Biography in Five Parts,” Elliott discusses her family history as the daughter of a white Catholic woman and a Haudenosaunee father. Elliott’s ability to pass as a white person complicates her feelings as a member of the First Nations community, as does her mother’s reluctance to embrace Haudenosaunee culture.

The third essay, “On Seeing and Being Seen,” concerns Elliott’s struggles to become published in the predominantly white literary world. Even when she is given the opportunity to write for a broader audience, Elliott feels pigeonholed and tokenized by white editors as an Indigenous writer.

In “Weight,” Elliott details the profound emotional weight of becoming a teenage mom while living on a reservation in Canada. Here, she introduces Mike, a young white man who is the father of her child and later her husband.

“The Same Space” concerns gentrification in Toronto. Elliott likens it to the diaspora of Indigenous North Americans after they were displaced by European settlers. In the following essay, “Dark Matters,” Elliott compares the scientific discovery of dark matter to the European “discovery” or Indigenous peoples in North America. Like dark matter, she argues, racism is invisible to many who refuse to see it.

In the seventh essay, “Scratch,” Elliott examines her family’s years-long struggle with lice growing up, as they go in and out of homelessness. Ultimately, their white grandmother kicks Elliott and her family out of the house, in part because of a lice infestation. However, her grandmother allows Elliott’s fully white sister Teena to stay.

The title of the eighth essay, “34 Grams per Dose,” refers to the amount of sugar in a serving of packaged cookies. Here, Elliott discusses the difficulty of accessing healthy food for families living below the poverty line—families that are disproportionately non-white.

After the ninth essay, a brief letter to her husband Mike, Elliott discusses her experience as a sexual assault survivor in “On Forbidden Rooms and Intentional Forgetting.” The author discusses how female sexual assault survivors are expected to process their trauma publicly in specific performative ways, if they hope to be believed.

In “Crude Collages of My Mother,” Elliott explores her mother’s lifelong struggles with bipolar disorder and the lessons she learned from her father about how not to handle a spouse’s mental health issues. While her father regularly institutionalized her mother without her consent, Elliott is far more understanding of Mike’s issues of depression.

In “Not Your Noble Savage,” Elliott returns to the literary world to discuss the conundrum Native writers face, in that they are often criticized for either being “too Native” or “not Native enough.” The following essay, “Sontag, In Snapshots: Reflecting on ‘In Plato’s Cave’ in 2018,” Elliott discusses how photography is used as both a tool of colonization and a tool of empowerment.

Finally, in “Extraction Mentalities,” Elliott speaks frankly about her father’s physical abuse, juxtaposing it with the abuse of the Canadian government against Indigenous people.