A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

by Alicia Elliott

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 HILARY WESTON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2019 BY THE GLOBE AND MAIL • CBC • CHATELAINE • QUILL & QUIRE • THE HILL TIMES • POP MATTERS

A bold and profound meditation on trauma, legacy, oppression and racism in North America from award-winning Haudenosaunee writer Alicia Elliott.

In an urgent and visceral work that asks essential questions about the treatment of Native people in North America while drawing on intimate details of her own life and experience with intergenerational trauma, Alicia Elliott offers indispensable insight into the ongoing legacy of colonialism. She engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrifcation, writing and representation, and in the process makes connections both large and small between the past and present, the personal and political—from overcoming a years-long battle with head lice to the way Native writers are treated within the Canadian literary industry; her unplanned teenage pregnancy to the history of dark matter and how it relates to racism in the court system; her childhood diet of Kraft Dinner to how systemic oppression is directly linked to health problems in Native communities. 

With deep consideration and searing prose, Elliott provides a candid look at our past, an illuminating portrait of our present and a powerful tool for a better future.

• ISBN10: 0385692382
• ISBN13: 9780385692380
• Publish Date: 26 March 2019
• Publish Status: Out of Stock
• Out of Print: 23 September 2020
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Doubleday Canada
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 240
• Language: English

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.