Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | A Mind Spread Out on the Ground | 2019 | Alicia Elliott | Buy |
| 2 | And Then She Fell | 2023 | Alicia Elliott | Buy |
A Mind Spread Out on the Ground (2019) collects essays about Indigenous experience in Canada, covering poverty, mental health, language loss, and the weight of colonialism. And Then She Fell (2023) is a psychological thriller following a Mohawk woman whose attempt to retell the Sky Woman creation story pulls her into paranoia and crisis.
The essay collection draws on Elliott’s personal experience growing up on the Six Nations reserve and later navigating life off-reserve. She writes about her family, the foster care system, and how Western psychiatry often fails Indigenous patients. The title refers to the Haudenosaunee concept of depression as a mind literally spread across the ground.
And Then She Fell takes a very different approach. It is a novel about a writer named Alice who lands a book deal to retell the Haudenosaunee creation story, only to find her mental state deteriorating as the project consumes her. Elliott weaves the creation narrative into Alice’s unraveling in a way that blurs the line between myth and breakdown. The book was longlisted for the Giller Prize.