A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

This essay addresses the concept of diaspora and gentrification. The author acknowledges the changes that have altered the Toronto neighborhood where she lived in college, comparing it to the diaspora of her Indigenous ancestors. She paints a vivid picture of a neighborhood people were forced to live in because they could afford it, before being priced out as upper-middle class white people came in and altered it to their liking. She describes the attitudes of the settlers, coming into the resource-rich region and displacing the native peoples who had inhabited and stewarded it for generations. She ties in her own experiences during college, describing how in her last year of studying English Literature, she finally felt so overwhelmed by her history that she had to express it in writing after a lifetime of hiding her tumultuous homelife. All of this contributes to themes of displacement and trauma, illustrating the ways the author expresses and hides her trauma, paralleling it to the trauma of displacement that Indigenous people across the world live with. In describing the ways spaces change, and the implications of being forced into or out of a space, Elliott fleshes out her understanding of space from an Indigenous standpoint and, more generally, from a lower-class Canadian