A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

This second essay details Elliott’s complicated relationship to her ethnicity and the ways having a Haudenosaunee father and a white Catholic mother play out as she is growing up. She breaks this down into five parts, beginning by describing the common presence of alcohol among Six Nations members, then delving into her time in school and the ways she was taught to be ashamed of her Indigenous heritage. As someone with Caucasian ancestry, Elliott can pass as a white person, but this chapter outlines the harm of denying herself the simultaneity of both sides of her heritage. She feels as though she is “drowning” when she is forced to choose between being white and being Indigenous; but she also learns to hide behind her whiteness as a means to avoid the mistreatment of her more visibly Indigenous brethren.

There is an additional strain within her family as the maternal side is staunchly Catholic, and her mother feels threatened by her father’s movement toward Indigenous lifeways. Elliott states that her mother felt as though “[e]very step he took towards his Native identity was another step away from her. [...] We had other heritage and we shouldn’t hide it. Were we ashamed of our own mother?” (41). This conditional acceptance Elliott experiences with her mother reflects the treatment of Native Americans as a whole by Christian settlers. In Canada, the Church and Canadian government inflicted trauma on First Nations people. The schools there forcibly removed Indigenous children from their communities, stripped them of their language and basic human rights, and then released them years later, estranged and disconnected from their cultural heritage. Elliott uses these examples to explain the tension she feels when passing for white while knowing she’s Haudenosaunee, recalling “the pain of passing. The way you deny parts of yourself to appease others, as though identity were so easily partitioned,” (49). She closes the essay by describing her mixed relief giving birth to a baby that looked white, because she knew that child would be able to similarly hide behind their whiteness, despite the heavy cost she felt hiding her own Indigeneity.