A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

De: Alicia Elliott

Narrado por: Kyla Garcia

The Mohawk phrase for depression can be roughly translated as 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 the 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 best seller 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.

©2020 Alicia Elliott (P)2020 Dreamscape Media, LLC

important

necessary for folks to read who don't know much about colonial Canadian history and the racism therein. indigenous communities are still abused and exploited systemically today as they have been since first contact. Alicia offers a personal micro and national macro history of how this has affected individuals and communities. she offers different paths forward that don't require abuse and gaslighting.

Important and powerful, but narrator ruined it

This is an important work by a Native American writer. I had read Morgan Talty's excellent book "Night of the Living Rez," and this book takes Native American rights one step further, as a set of hard-hitting essays by a fierce supporter of their nation. Unfortunately, the unendingly strident tone of the narrator, and her lack of intonation, wore me down to a nub. I made it through half of the audiobook before realizing I would prefer to read the remainder instead. But the bad narration does not detract from the power and brilliance of Alicia Elliott's work.

Read it

A powerful point of view that should be acknowledged and lifted up, Challenges how you see the world and hopes up a mirror to yourself.

Well written, heartfelt, revealing

Informative regarding journey of present day native Americans (females in particular) and the root cause of their problems. Eye opening Indigenous perspective on navigating systemic colonial based barriers to personal safety, economic survival, cultural preservation and family unity for non-‘whites’