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Why We Should Read: A Mind Spread Out on the Ground
The Warmland Book & Film Collective – a response to the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada – next meets online October 13th to discuss Split Tooth by Tanya Tagaq. Email WarmlandBFC@gmail.com for zoom link.
Alicia Elliott is not a writer who pulls her punches. In this collection of essays, she confronts the issues which have constrained the lives of indigenous people in Canada for centuries: loss of land, poverty, hunger, abuse and intergenerational trauma and the racism which is at the root of it all. This is an intentional pushing back at what Elliott calls the literary colonialism which defines the narrow range of what is acceptable from an indigenous writer. Elliott uses the pain of her personal life to bring forth the truth of the lives of many indigenous people. She writes openly of her experience
with hunger, head lice, abusive relationships and her battle with “a mind spread out on the ground,” the Mohawk phrase for depression. Through her willingness to be vulnerable, she shows the inner strength which has helped her people survive generations of sustained effort to destroy their culture. She describes this effort as the “policies of starvation” WHY WE SHOULD READ undertaken by the Canadian A Mind Spread Out government: “First, remove the means on the Ground for the people to independently look after and support themselves and their community. Next, force them to become dependent upon the very state that wants to destroy them. Withhold basic necessities. Wait.” Social Services then comes in to take the children, conflating their parents’ lack of choice with making poor choices. In each chapter Elliot takes us to a place we were not expecting, tying together concepts we might have thought were unrelated. In one essay she compares racism to dark matter; it is the all-pervasive frame on which everything in the known universe is hung but which is impossible to detect directly. At times the book can make for uneasy reading, which is perhaps Elliot’s intention. It is only when non-indigenous Canadians are willing to accept the discomfort of facing the nasty truth of Canada’s treatment of indigenous people that true reconciliation can begin.
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