COLONIAL IMPACT
Haudenosaunee writer connects her traumas to ongoing effects of how Indigenous people were treated,
Alicia Elliott was at the dentist’s office recently getting her teeth cleaned. While making small talk, Elliott was asked if she was still working at Starbucks. “No, I’m doing some freelance writing,” she said in response. What Elliott didn’t mention was that her debut book, a highly anticipated essay collection titled A Mind Spread Out on the
Ground, is about to be published by the country’s largest publisher, Penguin Random House Canada.
“I felt weird about it,” Elliott says in retrospect. “Almost like I was bragging just by acknowledging that it exists. I still don’t know how to deal with that.”
From a young age, Elliott was conditioned by the world not to talk about her accomplishments or her aspirations, let alone feel confident enough to tell anyone that she is a writer. She led a double life as the fun friend who held onto everyone else’s secret problems but stealthily never shared her own. The stakes were always too high.
But now, the Haudenosaunee author writes openly about the effects of her mother’s fervent Catholicism and bipolar disorder, and her father’s abusive behaviour. How growing up also meant covering up her family’s poverty and hunger, shuttling from homeless shelters to motel rooms until settling in a cramped trailer on the Six Nations reserve near Brantford, Ont. How she juggled university life as a teen mom, eschewing the typical partying years for breast pumps and child care, and how she struggled with the expectation to behave like a “perfect victim” following a sexual assault. Above all, Elliott con- nects her own traumas to the ongoing generational effects of colonialism on Indigenous people, and how that legacy is as inescapable as one’s DNA.
At some point while writing, Elliott realized she was integrating Haudenosaunee philosophy and its influence on her world view into her work. “It’s the idea of seven generations and whatever action you do is going to impact seven generations into the future, and that things that are happening to you now are the result of decisions made seven generations in the past,” she says. “I always want to contextualize my personal experience inside of different histories of colonialism, racism, sexism and all of these kinds of systems that are operating all the time. It’s like an inheritance we carry with us.”
Elliott isn’t exactly Twitter famous in a Kardashian sense, but her seeming fearlessness in calling out those discriminatory systems has led to her rising as an influential presence on social media, especially within Indigenous and CanLit communities. She frequently uses Twitter to support other authors and artists, peppered with occasional quips on pop culture or pro wrestling. (Elliott is openly excited that she is celebrating her book release by travelling with her husband to New York for their first WrestleMania.)
Sometimes on tough days, the open vulnerability she expresses in her book seeps into her online presence.
“We’re told we have to look good at all times and not show any weakness or uncertainty, and I don’t think that is the way we need to move forward,” Elliott says. “Sometimes that means sharing moments people think you should be ashamed of. Owning that and not being ashamed and saying, ‘This is who I am. This happened to me and I’ve learned from this, or I’m still recovering from this.’ Being OK sharing that creates so much more of a meaningful connection.”
The essays in A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, several of which have appeared in other literary publications and newspapers, were sparked by questions. Before writing a word, Elliott reads all she can on a subject, following her naturalborn inquisitiveness.
“I feel like when you enter into writing with curiosity, it reflects on the page,” Elliott says, who synthesizes her research through her own experiences in a process she likens to braiding. For instance, in the powerful essay “Dark Matters,” she weaves her devastated response upon hearing the news that white Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley was acquitted for the murder of the young Cree man Colten Boushie to the search for dark matter in the uni- verse and how its intangibility parallels the invisible pervasiveness of racism.
Elliott initially took a job at the Starbucks in Brantford because she needed to pay the bills. In August 2017, three months after she won a National Magazine Award for the book’s titular essay, she quit to focus full-time on writing. It wasn’t that long ago that a talent like Elliott might have been overlooked or told her stories were too “niche.” But the success of bestsellers including Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves and Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth is finally proving to publishers there’s a broad demand for Indigenousauthored books.
“We’re coming with our own ideas, informed by our own experiences and creating in ways that are new to a lot of readers,” says Elliott. “That’s exciting, but how many more amazing books could we have had if there was all of this investment in Indigenous artists 50 or 100 years ago?”
Elliott credits mentors such as Dimaline, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Eden Robinson and Tanya Talaga — who named Elliott winner of the 2018 RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award — for not only setting the path, but for teaching her that being a writer within a community means she carries responsibility for that community.
“It encourages me to do my best for the people that I want to write for,” Elliott says. “I particularly want Indigenous women and queer and two-spirit people to feel very comfortable in my work. I want to inspire them to write, and to enter into these conversations, too.”