A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

The seventh essay in A Mind Spread Out on the Ground focuses primarily on the author’s childhood, which has been hinted at but not focused on up to this point. The essay illustrates how Elliott’s family has been targeted by Canadian systems and institutions for their poverty, trauma, and mental illness. The author goes in and out of homelessness, experiencing the depths of poverty including the lice she and her family suffered, referenced in the title of the essay. The author experiences homelessness and extreme poverty, leading her family to move in with her white, maternal grandmother. Elliott’s lice are something that causes her shame both in school and among her white family members, as her grandmother prohibits her and her mixed-ancestry siblings—but not her 100% white sibling Teena— from staying in her more stable household after the lice are discovered.

Additionally, the lice represent the ways her mother’s mental illness incapacitated her, often leaving Elliott’s father alone to take care of the children. He constantly works to make ends meet, yet he still lacks the time and resources to ever completely get rid of the lice that plague the family. This familial friction, described through the lens of the lice that Elliott lived with all her childhood, paints a picture of the insidious ways poverty and race intersect. It shows how trauma can become a secret, hidden beneath layers of shame and pressure to seem “normal” in order to avoid being separated from one’s family by the Canadian government. This essay adds to the theme of trauma and Indigeneity by heavily drawing from Elliott’s personal experiences after, adding intimacy to her points and addressing the lack of understanding and the perpetuation of racist and classist ideals in white Canadian society.