A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is a personal and critical meditation on trauma, legacy, oppression, and racism in North America. It’s 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 and understanding to the ongoing legacy of colonialism. What are the links between depression, colonialism, and loss of language – both figurative and literal? How does white privilege operate in different contexts? How do we navigate the painful contours of mental illness in loved ones without turning them into their sickness? How does colonialism operate on the level of literary criticism?

A Mind Spread Out on the Ground is Elliott’s attempt to answer these questions and more. In the process, she engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrification, writing, and representation. With deep consideration and searing prose, Elliott extends far beyond her own experiences to provide a candid look at our past, an illuminating portrait of our present and a powerful tool for a better future.

DIVE DEEPER:

Articles

• “On Literary Festivals and Crossed Boundaries” — open-book.ca
• “‘I Wanted to Be Beautiful—Or, at Least, Clean’: What It’s Like To Grow Up Without Running Water” — Chatelaine
• “Plan to ban single-use plastics has First Nations with long-term drinking water advisories worried” — cbc.ca
• “How I Made It” — Flare

Interviews

• “Whose Story is it? In Conversation with Alicia Elliott” — Room
• “Alicia Elliott reflects on media bias in MMIWG report” — Broadview

Reviews

• “Haudenosaunee author Alicia Elliott explores how our actions ripple for generations into the future” — The Star
• “Alicia Elliott on the spectacular Indigenous renaissance in Canadian arts” — Macleans