I've heard one person translate a Mohawk word for depression to, roughly, “his mind fell to the ground”. I ask my sister about this. She's been studying Mohawk for the past three years and is practically fluent. She's raising her daughter to be the same. They're the first members of our family to speak the language since a priest beat it out of our paternal grandfather a handful of decades ago.
“Wake'nikonhra'kwenhtará:'on,” she says. “It's not quite 'fell to the ground'. It's more like, 'His mind is...'” She pauses. She repeats the word in Mohawk. Slows it down. Considers what English words in her arsenal can best approximate the phrase. “'His mind is...'” She moved her hands around, palms down, as if doing a large, messy finger painting. “Literally stretched or sprawled on the ground. It's all over.”
In the collection of essays, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, Haudenosaunee writer Alicia Elliott begins with a title piece on depression (from which she suffers) and it suitably sets the tone for what is to come: a frank examination of Elliott's life, focussing on the ways that colonialism, capitalism, and intergenerational trauma intensified the challenges of having been raised in a family plagued by poverty, abuse, and mental illness. My reaction to this provocative collection wasn't really crystallised until the final essay, “Extraction Mentalities”, in which Elliott writes about domestic abuse and the systemic abuse of First Nations, then asks questions, complete with room for readers to record their answers (Elliott states that those who don't actually write out answers are saying a lot, too). At one point Elliott writes, “Do you see where I'm going with this? Am I moving too fast?”, and that's pretty much the tone of the whole thing: Elliott is articulate in her anger, and she demands a response from the reader; this isn't a passive reading experience. However, just because an author is intelligent and emphatic in laying out their “facts” doesn't make them indisputable; this is a vital record of a lived experience, from which its author has drawn personal conclusions, and that is necessary and valuable. But anyone who doesn't agree with Elliott's black and white premises – that First Nations are universally opposed to resource development, that every Indigenous child would be better off outside the foster care system (no matter the home conditions), that systemic racism is the only explanation for the under-representation of Indigenous writers in Canadian publishing – wouldn't find anything persuasive here; Elliott is stating her subjective facts, not joining a debate. And for that unpersuaded reader, the obstreperous tone is just a further turn off. As for me – I respect what Elliott has crafted here, I appreciate what experiences have led to her beliefs, but I was constantly jarred by her conclusions; even so, it adds a necessary voice to the national conversation and this collection deserves to be widely read. (Note: I was fortunate to have received an ARC and quotes may not be in their final forms.)
When Elliott writes about racism in the Canadian publishing industry – taking swipes at Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, deriding Joseph Boyden (and the witless Canadians “who read The Orenda and it, like, changed their lives”) – her main point seems to be about blood quantum and the nerve of those in positions of power who think they have the right to determine who is an “authentic” Indigenous voice. This, naturally, fends off any noting of the fact that Elliott herself has a white mother – and while I totally accept Elliott as a Haudenosaunee writer, it seems disingenuous for her to repeatedly write about what “they” did/do to “us”, when she is as responsible for the actions of the colonisers as she is heir to their effects (she also has several justifiably angry comments to make about the Catholic Church, despite her Catholic mother attempting to raise her children in the faith). Provocation seems to be the point of these essays, though, so I'm going to note a few passages that gave me pause. On being caught trying to steal convenience store pastries as a child:
The cost of our attempted theft was no more than five dollars. Probably closer to three. It was almost nothing but it was enough. We were no longer an eight- and ten-year-old under this woman's gaze; we were not sad kids trying to cope with poverty and abuse. We were thieves, criminals. Not-quite-humans who would one day get what we deserved. 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 a 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?Not only do I object to framing theft as a “response to poverty”, but Elliott ends on an angry hypothetical that adds nothing to her actual experience. The following is from the essay “Scratch”, in which Elliott describes her family's years-long struggle with lice and efforts to hide it (and other signs of neglect in their overcrowded trailer without running water) from visiting social workers:
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 deal with, yet are both allowed, even encouraged, to patrol...Even as a kid (I intuited that Indigenous children have more reason to fear government care than they do their parents' poverty.) I knew it was bullshit that social workers and cops had so much control over our family, that they could split us up the moment we didn't cater to their sensibilities. Knowing this then made me hate social workers and cops. Knowing this now makes me hate the systems that empower them – systems that put families in impossible situations, then punish them for not being able to claw their way out.“Hating the systems” is a running theme, and anti-capitalism/anti-corporations is a frequent focus:
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. In Canada, a staggering one in five racialized families live in poverty, as opposed to one in twenty white families. This puts many poor, racialized families in the position where they have no choice but to rely on cheap, unhealthy food and, as a result, support the same companies that have converted their poverty into corporate profit in the first place.Which brings us back to the final essay, “Extraction Mentalities”:
Under capitalism, colonialism, and settler colonialism, everything Indigenous is subject to extraction. Words from our languages are extracted and turned into the names of cities, states, provinces or, in the case of Canada, an entire country. Resources from our traditional territories are extracted and turned into profit for non-Indigenous companies and strategic political donations. Our own children are extracted so that non-Indigenous families can have the families they've always wanted, so our families will fall to ruin and our grief will distract us from resisting colonialism.The book ends with the following questions: What do you want? Are those desires based on extraction? Are they dependent upon capitalism or colonialism? If the answers to those last two questions are yes, please revisit the first question. I don't see capitalism or colonialism being reversed as the official “systems” at work in Canada, so I really don't know what Elliott is asking here. On the other hand, I don't deny that the First Nations haven't thrived under these systems and things need to change; I do wish this book had some workable ideas for what those changes could be.
