A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

by Alicia Elliott

"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.

• ISBN10: 161219866X
• ISBN13: 9781612198668
• Publish Date: 4 August 2020 (first published 26 March 2019)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Melville House Publishing
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 256
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9781612198668

Reviews

[clementine]

Very insightful essays about contemporary Indigeneity and how mental illness, poverty, nutrition, family dysfunction, racism, colonialism, and more are all interconnected. Equal parts compassionate and angry. At times I wished the writing itself had been pushed just a little bit further; there are parts that feel a bit social justice academia jargon-y, which tends to give the impression of an underdeveloped style. However, the ideas presented in these essays are thought-provoking and necessary.