Hardcover
Published July 24, 2019 by Doubleday Canada.
In an urgent and visceral work that asks essential questions about the treatment of Native people in North America while drawing on intimate details of her own life and experience with intergenerational trauma, Alicia Elliott offers indispensable insight into the ongoing legacy of colonialism. She engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrifcation, writing and representation, and in the process makes connections both large and small between the past and present, the personal and political—from overcoming a years-long battle with head lice to the way Native writers are treated within the Canadian literary industry; her unplanned teenage pregnancy to the history of dark matter and how it relates to racism in the court system; her childhood diet of Kraft Dinner to how systemic oppression is directly linked to health problems in Native communities.
With deep consideration and searing prose, Elliott provides a candid …
In an urgent and visceral work that asks essential questions about the treatment of Native people in North America while drawing on intimate details of her own life and experience with intergenerational trauma, Alicia Elliott offers indispensable insight into the ongoing legacy of colonialism. She engages with such wide-ranging topics as race, parenthood, love, mental illness, poverty, sexual assault, gentrifcation, writing and representation, and in the process makes connections both large and small between the past and present, the personal and political—from overcoming a years-long battle with head lice to the way Native writers are treated within the Canadian literary industry; her unplanned teenage pregnancy to the history of dark matter and how it relates to racism in the court system; her childhood diet of Kraft Dinner to how systemic oppression is directly linked to health problems in Native communities.
With deep consideration and searing prose, Elliott provides a candid look at our past, an illuminating portrait of our present and a powerful tool for a better future.
These essays illuminate a lot of my own family memories and traumas. This makes it both a difficult read and a nostalgic read. Going home when home is a difficult place brings up feelings that are difficult to explain to people outside of those experiences but Alicia manages to bring the reader in without turning her stories into trauma porn.
Excellent collections of thoughtful essays! Highly recommended.
Excellent book.
This collection of essays from Alicia Elliot is both personal and political, using stories from her own family and from the systemic abuse of Indigenous peoples in Canada to paint a picture that all non-Indigenous people in Canada should read for insight into the reality of what is done in our name, not only by the individual racists everywhere but by the laws and structures designed to perpetuate the abuse and exploitation of Indigenous peoples and their land.
