A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

“There is nothing in the book about the importance of culture, nothing about intergenerational trauma, racism, sexism, colonialism, homophobia, transphobia. As if depression doesn’t ‘see’ petty things like race or gender or sexual orientation. ‘We’re all just people, man,’ melancholia mutters, pushing its white-boy dreads aside as it passes me a joint.” 

This quote from the first essay, “A Mind Spread Out On The Ground,” refers to a book that the author checked out from the library to learn more about her depression. In particular, she laments the challenge of understanding depression as a member of a marginalized community, living with the impact of intergenerational trauma passed down through her Indigenous ancestors. She points out that modern psychology and mental health resources tend to offer explanations and support without encapsulating those cultural trappings that burden marginalized populations. This is an important initial step in her exploration of mental health through an Indigenous lens, along with the acknowledgement of her intersecting identities. This quote also exemplifies the dry tone as she sets forth on a very personal but also historically and socially contextualized analysis of her life.

“That’s when it became clear: Whiteness meant different things in different contexts. On the rez, Carrie and I could share skin colours and still be perceived entirely differently as Native people. While my culture was derived solely from Michael Jackson videos and Disney’s dubious visions of femininity, Carrie’s culture was slowly, carefully poured into her hands the same way generations of Six Nations people had culture poured into theirs. It didn’t matter that I never chose to be born in Buffalo and raised generically American; that’s just the way it was.” 

This quote from the second essay, “Half-Breed: A Racial Biography in Five Parts,” illustrates the complexity of Elliott’s racial and ethnic identity growing up. Carrie is a girl on the school bus with Elliott, one who is also half White and half Native, but who was raised in Canada and socialized among Six Nations people rather than separated like Elliott was. This difference is what motivates Carrie and others on the bus to bully Elliott, who experiences a realization as to the fluidity of her racial and ethnic identities. This quote is a key consideration in the theme of intersectionality, as Elliott experiences Whiteness in conjunction with identities such as being Haudenosaunee, immigrant, female, and having a low socioeconomic status.

“I was both the winner and the loser, the victim and the abuser. Two strains married in me, impossibly. Any time I felt outrage at something a White person said or did to my people, I felt like a fraud, as if I, too, were culpable. Yet if a Native person made a sweeping statement about White people, I couldn’t help but question my belonging. After all, I didn’t have enough knowledge of my culture to mitigate my skin colour. Defences were always up. The tear always widening.” 

This quote from the second essay, “Half-Breed: A Racial Biography in Five Parts,” is a culmination of Elliott’s conflicting feelings about her mixed heritage. It is a vital passage addressing the recurring theme of intersectionality; the unique ways the author’s Whiteness and Indigeneity manifest simultaneously, revealing the strain that can result from bearing the heritage of both the oppressors and the oppressed. By including this dimension of tension in her identity, it provides a better understanding to the reader of the weariness Elliott experiences as she tries to balance the racial and ethnic implications of her White identity and her Indigenous identity, both within herself and as she moves through the social milieu.

“But writing with empathy is not enough. It never has been. Depictions like these—reactions like these—are proof that White people are willing to extend only so much empathy to those who aren’t White. Empathy has its limits—and, contrary to what some may think, it is possible to both have empathy for a person and still hold inherited, unacknowledged racist views about them […]. To truly write from another experience in an authentic way, you need more than empathy. You need to write with love.”

In this quote from the third essay, “On Seeing and Being Seen,” Elliott explains the racism and oppression perpetuated by authors writing about characters with races or ethnicities different from their own, particularly white authors. Elliot states that the issue is not that they’re writing from a perspective they’ve never experienced, as authors write experiences they haven’t had all the time; the issue is writing such experiences without genuine empathy and love toward an author’s subjects. In explaining how one can write about these experiences, Elliott goes beyond elucidating the issues and insidious racism within the literary world, providing one potential answer to how healing these issues may begin. This quote plays a supportive role in her themes of Indigenous oppression and healing by explaining the ways harm is perpetuated toward Indigenous people through White authors in literature.

“Suddenly, your professor declares that mothers are the most hated group of people in the world. He doesn’t elaborate, he just lets the statement sit. Your stomach churns as you glance around at similarly slack-jawed students. Despite the looks of confusion, and the general tendency for university students to argue, no one protests. Not even you.” 

In this quote from Elliott’s fourth essay, “Weight,” Elliott is struck by this statement made by one of her professors. As a teen mom, this is something that stays on her mind for weeks. It’s an important addition to her theme of intersectionality, as she grapples with her new identity as a mother in conjunction with her race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and womanhood. The essay’s title, “Weight,” implies the burden of this new identity, and this statement prompts Elliott to realize that motherhood seems to usurp personhood as she reflects on how she and her siblings treated her mother less as a person and more as an extension of themselves.

“Though Mike is sympathetic and supportive, he doesn’t seem to feel nearly as guilty as you do. He still seems whole. You watch movies together, you cuddle, you load into your father’s van and drive to his mother’s house to see your baby on Friday nights. Though everyone back home asks you about your child, no one ever asks him about his.” 

In this quote from Elliott’s fourth essay, “Weight,” Elliott considers the weight of motherhood and realizes that its distribution is uneven compared to the weight of fatherhood. She is a teen mother, and Mike is her boyfriend and father of her child, but the intersection of parenthood falls more heavily on her as a woman. This contributes to the intersectional complexity in Elliott’s work, as she explores her womanhood and motherhood, in addition to her Indigeneity. She realizes that as a woman she is expected to give herself up in many ways to be a mother. Elliott is guilt-ridden and constantly reminded of her new identity as a mother, whereas her male partner “seems whole.”

“‘Why do you think I included Indigenous literature in a diaspora course?’ she asked one day. I surprised myself by answering without a second’s hesitation. ‘Because Indigenous people are almost always put in the position where they’re displaced on their own lands.’” 

This quote from Elliott’s fifth essay, “The Same Space,” adds another dimension to the theme of Indigenous oppression by the nation-state with the concept of diaspora. She brings the historical context to a contemporary scene with the idea that the descendants of these Indigenous people still live in the same places their ancestors were forced out of. Elliott, for example, was living in Toronto while she was going to college, and although that was land her ancestors had lived on, it was no longer “the same space” because it became Canadian land and Indigenous people were no less displaced even if they returned to it generations later.

“In Leslie Jamison’s essay ‘Fog Count,’ she goes to visit a friend in prison and, while there, realizes her experience of the prison as a visitor will never be the same as his as an inmate: ‘The truth is we never occupied the same space. A space isn’t the same for a person who has chosen to be there and a person who hasn’t.’ Jamison can ask as many probing questions as she wants, can write down all the details, but she will always, in effect, be a tourist in that space because she can always choose to leave.” 

In this quote from the fifth essay, “The Same Space,” Elliott draws from a text by Leslie Jamison to describe the gentrification of the neighborhood she lived in when she was attending university. She says that the people who bring in money and “paint over its poverty” (93-94) are no more than tourists, not occupying the same space that she does at all. This description of inhabitants of the neighborhood being priced out of their homes and businesses parallels her description of the diaspora that her Indigenous ancestors were forced into, as European settlers drove them out of their lands and later the Canadian state forced them onto reservations. The theme of Indigenous oppression by the nation-state becomes more complex with the addition of this concept that the same space can be and is occupied differently, whether that is due to modern day gentrification or as part of the legacy of colonialism.

“But what did we deserve? To go to some juvenile detention facility and have our responses to poverty punished? How would her reaction have changed if we were visibly Indigenous? Would she have called the cops then and there, as opposed to giving us the chance to leave and ‘wise up’? Did our White skin give us a chance at redemption my brown cousins wouldn’t have gotten under the same circumstances?” 

This quote, from Elliott’s sixth essay “Dark Matters,” comes from a scene in which Elliott and her sister are caught shoplifting for the first time as children, after trying it out in a nicer neighborhood where their poverty is more noticeable. This speaks to the intersectionality in the author’s experience as an Indigenous woman who passes as white but also lives well below the poverty line, and how this intersection is perceived by the store clerk in this case. The quote asks the reader to consider where the blame lies—if a child’s reaction to poverty is the responsibility of the child, and how would the situation have played out had she not passed for being white. This is juxtaposed with examples of visibly Indigenous people being harmed or murdered by White Canadians without ramification, and the ways the criminal justice system upholds racist ideals.

“To really treat lice, you need to treat everyone at the same time, wash any clothes that may have been contaminated, wash any sheets that have been contaminated, vacuum floors and couches and mattresses, then do it all again in seven to ten days to prevent reinfestation. We were five kids and two adults with barely enough money to pay for our normal loads at the laundromat. Plus, even after a year, even after two years, even after five years, we still had no running water.” 

In this quote from the seventh essay, “Scratch,” Elliott recounts the challenge of head lice that plagued her childhood, a symbol of her family’s extreme poverty. This quote outlines the barrier to getting rid of the lice, which is impossible for her to overcome alone or for her family to afford to focus on as they move in and out of homelessness. She faces discrimination at school and from extended family members for this infestation, which she is unable to end until she moves away on her own at 18 and accesses the necessary resources. This quote weaves another narrative into Elliott’s intersectional, Indigenous identity by examining the ways poverty affects health and informs all other identities Elliott may hold.

“It used to strike me as strange the way social workers and police officers flocked to our family. My siblings and I were great students […]. We never went hungry. We never lacked for love or encouragement. Our parents were far from perfect, but their main barriers to being better parents were poverty, intergenerational trauma and mental illness—things neither social workers nor police officers have ever been equipped to address, yet are both allowed, even encouraged, to patrol.” 

In this quote from her seventh essay, “Scratch,” Elliott moves from her personal narrative of the inescapable head lice that plagued her childhood to a more expansive social critique of the social welfare and criminal justice system. Social workers and police officers put her family in an impossible situation, as the family does not have the resources to address issues such as head lice, mental health challenges, or deep-rooted intergenerational trauma that the state itself caused. This violence and oppression is only perpetuated through the welfare system and criminal justice system. This quote provides a point of connection between all the most important themes in A Mind Spread Out On The Ground by illustrating how intergenerational trauma and mental health intersect with poverty and are manipulated by the nation-state to oppress marginalized people.

“Since empty calories are both cheap and widely available, it should be no surprise that the biggest indicator of obesity is a person’s income level. And since so many Western countries are built on White supremacy, it should also come as no surprise that the biggest indicator of poverty is race.”

This quote from the eighth essay, “34 Grams per Dose,” addresses the issue of intersectionality—the interplay between poverty, race, and health. Elliott is building the framework for understanding how race and health are connected socio-culturally. She expands upon her specifically Indigenous experience by acknowledging the role of White supremacy that is inextricable from the origins of countries such as the United States and Canada. These countries’ racist policies, systems, and institutions have led to racialized groups experiencing much higher rates of poverty and poor health due to the inaccessibility of healthy lifestyle choices.

“Something as traumatic as genocide doesn’t have a definitive ending point. Its horrors live on in the memories of those who survive, playing over and over with no reprieve. What are you supposed to do once you know the depths of human suffering? Once you’ve experienced the limits of human depravity and indifference? [...] Everything has a different taste, a different tone. No amount of economic or educational success can change that.” 

This quote from Elliott’s eighth essay, “34 Grams per Dose,” is used to explain the parallel the author draws between Ukraine’s post-genocide population’s drug abuse and low life expectancy, despite a rapidly growing economy and high literacy rate, and the issues faced by Indigenous people living in Canada. After elaborating on the Ukrainian example, Elliott begs the question of long-term impacts when a population has experienced a genocide. By characterizing the trauma of genocide as something without a “definitive ending point,” she impresses upon the reader the longevity of such trauma and the insidiousness of the Canadian government’s refusal to acknowledge its complicity in genocidal events.

“The ways Indigenous peoples deal with our trauma, whether with alcohol or violence or Chips Ahoy! cookies, get pathologized under colonialism. Instead of looking at the horrors Canada has inflicted upon us and linking them to our current health issues, Canada has chosen to blame our biology, as though those very genes they’re blaming weren’t marked by genocide, too.” 

This quote from Elliott’s eighth essay, “34 Grams per Dose,” brings up the biological markers of intergenerational trauma. Canada has gaslighted its Indigenous inhabitants, shifting the blame for poor health back onto the people experiencing it rather than considering the underlying factors that cause issues such as alcoholism, abuse, and disordered eating. Elliott brings up the field of epigenetics and the wealth of scientific literature on the ways violence can become imprinted in the very genetic code that a person then passes onto their offspring. This quote also connects to the theme of Indigenous oppression by the nation-state, illustrating how the Canadian government instigated the violence that resulted in poor mental and physical health for Native people, and how it continues to perpetuate that violence in the present day.

“It’s a belt of white wampum beads, representing the river of life. There are two rows of purple wampum that travel through the centre. One row represents the ship the settlers are steering; the other represents the canoe the Haudenosaunee are steering. Each vessel holds those peoples’ culture, language, history and values. The boat and canoe go down the river of life together—parallel but never touching, never crossing into the other’s path, never attempting to steer the other’s vessel or interfere with the other’s responsibilities. Neither vessel is better than the other. Neither group can make decisions for the other. It is a treaty based on peace and friendship, anchored in a deep respect for each culture’s distinct differences.” 

This quote in her ninth essay, “Boundaries like Bruises,” comes from when Elliott’s father first taught her about the Two Row Wampum, a wampum belt that was a treaty between the Haudenosaunee and the settlers. This speaks to the abuse of Indigenous people by the nation-state because it is a treaty Canada has never upheld. However, it also speaks to the theme of healing, as Elliott feels she and her settler-descendant husband can consider their relationship with the same intent. In describing this treaty made by First Nations hands, Elliott illustrates what a healthy relationship between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous Canadians could look like, providing a juxtaposition to the rest of her essays outlining how those relationships historically and presently play out.

“I often wonder about this burden of proof. Is my pain valid only when someone bears witness to it? Must I be hypervigilant about my entire person, always? Make sure that my face is composed in the perfect silhouette of trauma—any hint of a smile hastily swept away—whenever I expect someone to believe me? Must I forsake all joy, all warmth, to take up my role as ‘perfect victim’?” 

In this quote from her 10th essay ,”On Forbidden Rooms and Intentional Forgetting,” Elliott contemplates the performative nature of pain and trauma, adding the perspective of her own sexual assault. She observes the heavy burden on women to perform their trauma—in public, in the courtroom, with their friends and family—in order for injustices against them to be taken seriously, particularly when they hold additional marginalized identities such as being Indigenous. This contributes to the understanding of Indigenous identity in relation to the criminal justice system, illustrating how society’s judgment of women and other marginalized people put them at a disadvantage.

“Arguing that a manipulative woman is making false claims of rape to get ‘even’ with an innocent man is not hard; it’s merely spitting back up the same ideas about men and women we’ve all been forced to swallow for centuries. But arguing that a woman deserves the right to police the boundaries of her own body […]. It’s contrary to all that we’ve been taught about women and men. It questions the very legitimacy of Western misogyny, and thus, Western society.” 

This quote from the 10th essay, “On Forbidden Rooms and Intentional Forgetting,” is refers to the perpetuation of Western misogyny and racism in the criminal justice system, particularly in cases of violence against Indigenous women. This quote sums up Elliott’s assertion that in the court of law, both sides are just arguing until a side is chosen, and an argument against a woman—especially a poor woman or a woman of color—has the easier task of enforcing already accepted norms of female treachery and assumptions of Indigenous guilt. This adds a criminal justice element to the theme of Indigenous oppression by the nation-state, prompting the reader to consider that a woman who pursues justice in the court of law, particularly an Indigenous woman, is in a much more precarious position than any man who has committed violence against her.

“Most of the time when we talk, my mother and I just pretend nothing ever happened, though the evidence of it is always there. Everything we say to one another bears the weight of our unacknowledged, ever-present, fucked-up family history. I can’t look at her or talk to her without feeling it, darting in and out of my mind’s peripherals like some thick-limbed jungle cat. There’s only so much a person can repress.” 

In this quote from her 11th essay, “Crude Collages of My Mother,” Elliott describes the weight of mental illness in a familial environment where it is taboo to discuss. This is a major facet of mental health and healing as a theme in her collection of essays, as her denial of mental illness within herself and her loved ones stems from the need for secrecy that was heavily impressed upon her growing up. This quote represents the aspect of repression active within this theme, a dimension to mental health that she grapples with and a barrier to healing that she works to overcome.

“I was terrified that if I admitted my problems to myself, every person who thought of me as strong, put-together and fearless would see my mental illness peeking out from behind my eyes and turn on me, the way everyone had eventually turned on my mom. History would repeat itself through me.” 

In this quote from “Crude Collages of My Mother,” Elliott admits to herself that she has severe depression and anxiety. This quote illustrates why it is a challenge for her to acknowledge this; after seeing how mental illness took over her mother, and how it stole away her mother’s agency, Elliott cannot stand to consciously believe she inherited similar issues. Additionally, Elliot addresses the “strong woman” stereotype that is put on women, especially women of color, which eats away at a woman’s ability to admit weakness or reach out for help. This quote especially speaks to the theme of mental health from an intergenerational perspective, this time passed down from Elliott’s white side rather than from her Indigenous ancestors.

“All of this injustice can coexist with non-Native Canadians proudly declaring Canada the best country in the world precisely because of the existence and continued maintenance of national fairy tales. Without them, the narrative of ‘Canada the good’ crumbles, and with it, the identities of so many Canadians.” 

This quotation from Elliott’s 12th essay, “Not Your Noble Savage,” addresses Elliott’s explanation as to why non-Native Canadians can hold contradictory beliefs about the harm committed against Native Canadians and the goodness of Canada as a nation. This supports her descriptions of the violence Canada continually commits against First Nations, and her arguments that the violence against Indigenous peoples is not a thing of the past but is alive and well. In addressing the need for national myths to continue the sense of nationalism that Canada uses to uphold its capitalist and colonial aims, Elliott points out the issues in the very identity of being Canadian and how that identity is wrapped up in the oppression of Indigenous people.

“[Dayna Danger’s] photos demand your attention, demand you to look in the eyes of the Black or Indigenous woman you might otherwise dismiss or demean and see the power of choice. She is choosing to show you her body, to show you her desire, to look you in the eye, to not be ashamed. That is the pinnacle of decolonization: an empowered, unashamed Black woman beside an empowered, unashamed Indigenous woman.” 

This quote from “Sontag, in Snapshots: Reflecting on ‘In Plato’s Cave’ in 2018” shifts the conversation from the ways photography is used as a tool of colonization to the ways it is used by and for people’s empowerment. Dayna Danger is a “2Spirit/Queer Métis/Saulteaux/Polish visual artist” (300) who creates consensual art that Elliott considers to be by and for people who have been historically objectified and extracted from by colonizers without their consent. This quote is vital to the theme of healing, which helps create a sense of purpose to Elliott’s work in educating the reader on systemic, institutional, and personal injustices faced by her and similarly marginalized people.

“This is how beauty becomes an imperial project: those who are considered ‘beautiful’ according to these standards are also considered inherently more valuable than those who aren’t.” 

This quote from “Sontag, in Snapshots: Reflecting on ‘In Plato’s Cave’ in 2018” describes the imperialism behind beauty standards, and how these standards are upheld in societies across the world. In doing so, Elliott connects intergenerational trauma and the oppression of Indigenous peoples by the nation-state to the ways marginalized groups are valued less than groups with money, white skin, manhood, and other forms of power and privilege in society. In particular, she gives the example of who the society protects or defends compared to whose struggles are ignored—or worse, who experiences the most violence. Elliott uses the logic from this quote to explain why so many Indigenous men, and especially women, are murdered or go missing with very little media coverage and few resources extended for justice compared to white Canadians.

“They [Canadian settlers] were concerned with capitalistic ownership. They wanted to suck up everything they could possibly take, regardless of future consequences, and turn it into material wealth—ostensibly for their countries, but realistically for a select few who would benefit much, much more than the average citizen.” 

This quote is the author’s definition of an “extraction mentality” from her 14th and final essay. It’s meant to highlight the difference between Indigenous respect for the land and resources, which considered the long-term impacts of society, and the settlers’ unchecked consumption. Elliott characterizes colonization as inextricably linked to capitalism, and the extraction mentality includes the exploitative consumption of Indigenous resources, labor, and culture. This spans from the arrival of Europeans on the American continent to present day settler descendants attending pow-wows or taking part in cultural appropriation of Indigenous materials.