Author Alicia Elliott says Indigenous artistry has never had so spectacular a presence across Canada’s cultural spectrum— but that real reconciliation is going to require an internal reformation within non-Indigenous Canada.
It really is the perfect time for Alicia Elliott’s A Mind Spread Out on the Ground to be published. In what the 31-year-old Tuscarora writer calls the Indigenous renaissance, Indigenous artistry has never had so spectacular a presence across Canada’s cultural spectrum. Maliseet composer Jeremy Dutcher took the Polaris Music Prize last year, the third Indigenous winner in five years, while three Indigenous artists have won the annual Sobey Art Award since 2013.
It’s “complicated,” Elliott says of her own identity, in her first use of a word that becomes a theme running right through an interview with her. She calls herself Tuscarora, one of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee , whose reserve near Brantford, Ont., is the country’s most populous. That’s not the federal government’s assessment of Elliott’s ethnicity. “Haudenosaunee people are matrilineal,” she continues. “But the imposition of the Indian Act changed everything.
“Although,” she adds, in what could be a swipe at an unnamed Joseph Boyden, or, to be precise, at Boyden’s fans, “should the genuine artifact be unavailable, Canada will happily accept a handsome, agreeable white dude with tenuous Indigenous ‘roots’ as a substitute.” There are a lot of supposed “individual” choices in Indigenous life that are in fact out of people’s control, Elliott notes. Reading a study on the lingering effects of the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine deliberately induced by a Soviet government determined to extinguish Ukrainian resistance and identity, she feels her breath catching in her throat. Never before had she seen an account of a non-Indigenous people sharing “my people’s experience of genocide,” especially as the decades roll on.
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