A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

By Alicia Elliott

Book Overview

"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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 161219866X
• ISBN13: 9781612198668
• Release Date: August 2020
• Publisher: Melville House Publishing
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.77 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Incredible

The short essay format is excellent, Elliott has fantastic timing and is direct and vivid in both language, and topic. It's not everyone's cup of tea but it explores poverty, trauma, abuse and indigeneity in extremely compelling and informative ways. I recommend it I started and finished it in a night, the ideas can be challengeing when you actually engage with them but I found it an easy read.