A mind spread out on the ground

Summary: The Mohawk phrase for depression, Wake' nikonhra'kwenhtará:'on, can be roughly translated to 'a mind spread out on the ground.' Alicia Elliott explores how apt a description that is for the ongoing effects of persona, intergenerational, and colonial traumas she and so many Native people have experienced. Elliott's 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 connections between the past and present, the personal and political.

Record details

ISBN: 9781432885397
ISBN: 1432885391
Physical Description: 329 pages ; 23 cm.
Edition: Large print edition.
Publisher: Waterville, ME : Thorndike Press, a part of Gale, a Cengage Company, 2021.
Copyright: ©2020

Content descriptions

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 -- Sontag, in snapshots: reflecting on "In Plato's cave" in 2018 -- Two truths and a lie -- Extraction mentalities.