A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

The 12th essay expands significantly on the theme of Canada’s social, systemic, and institutional failings when it comes to Indigenous Canadians. It does so by focusing mainly on two domains: Canada’s literary world and its politics. Elliott describes non-Native Canadians seeking to control who has access to the status of Indigeneity. She then transitions to how this is reflected in the wider Canadian literary scene, finishing with the unreliable commitments of the Canadian government. Elliott thus gives the reader a look at this theme on several scales, individually and collectively. This gradual scaling up as she nears the end of her essay collection has been paved by the background she builds in the beginning. After establishing this background, she zooms into her own life more intimately before opening wider than ever to provide a sense of the weight that her personal stories hold as representations of the struggles of so many other Indigenous people. As she is not at the end of the book yet, this essay balances the personal with the societal more equally than the following essay, and in doing so, provides additional depth to her theme of Indigenous oppression by state actors.