A mind spread out on the ground

Summary: "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."--

Record details

ISBN: 9781612198668
ISBN: 161219866X
Physical Description: print
240 pages ; 21 cm
Edition: [Updated and expanded American edition].
Publisher: Brooklyn, New York : Melville House, 2020.
Copyright: ©2019

Content descriptions

General Note:

First published in 2019 by Doubleday Canada.

Formatted Contents Note:

A mind spread out on the ground -- Half breed: a racial biography in five parts -- On seeing and being seen -- Weight -- The same space -- Dark matters -- Scratch -- 34 grams per dose -- Boundaries like bruises -- On forbidden rooms and intentional forgetting -- Crude collages of my mother -- Not your noble savage -- Sontag, in snapshots: reflecting on "In Plato's Cave" in 2018 -- Extraction mentalities.