Her debut essay collection navigates the deeply personal and that which all settlers in Canada and the U.S. should already know—their implication with racism—with depth, wit and never-ending heart. This is not an easy collection to read ... Yet, Elliott’s first collection also—as most inspections of the very painful do—brims with sharp humour and a love that radiates off the page ... [in] the last essay...the reader cannot distance themselves from direct address. Here, Elliott asks us to review the previous essays, to fully implicate ourselves in this narrative of colonial Canada, colonial America, and the colonized mind. In a word, that feat is, exceptional. How we readers react in our own minds and our active lives dictates our engagement in the process that is decolonial love and antiracism; Alicia Elliott has shown us her mind and life and process in stark, beautiful detail.
... she tells the impassioned, wrenching story of the mental health crisis within her own family and community ... Elliott uses the symbol of the Two Row Wampum—a beaded belt whose rows of purple and white represent the parallel, amicable paths the Haudenosaunee and the Europeans initially agreed to take—as a moving metaphor for the love between herself and her white husband (and the aforementioned father of her child), Mike. Unfortunately, she only scratches the surface of this fascinating history ... Throughout the book Elliott sketches a broad-strokes map of Native brokenness ... Midway, you think that you’ve read the worst that has happened to this author, but the floor drops yet again. Her book is a searing cry to stanch the bleeding.
Elliott's essays...[are] elegantly written, constructed with a fine attention to style while remaining rooted in a profoundly honest, unalloyed anger ... Elliott also delivers stand-out critiques of racism and tokenism in literature, and the narrow and stereotypical caricatures which colonial literary circuits produce ... While her personal essays are profoundly moving and deeply important, Elliott is at her best in these critical essays, drawing on Indigenous and anti-colonial analysis to pry open innovative insights on creative endeavors like literature and photography, and the ways in which they aid and abet the political operations of colonialism when allowed to operate unchallenged ... Innovative and insightful, Elliott's work reveals an important dedication not just to content but to style, an often neglected element in today's burgeoning marketplace of personal essay collections.
... riveting and haunting ... So often we talk about ‘life-altering experiences’ – reading this book can be that, but I think foremost it is a mind-altering experience. Be prepared to see the world differently; through the eyes of someone that has straddled the lines between countries, races and customs, someone who may never have danced in a powwow but can throw shade with the precision of an expert marksman ... There are powerful insights, there are truths that hit you with the force of a battering ram, there are pains that claw at your heart, the prose is superb ... Buy it. Read it. Absorb it. And then buy a copy for a friend.
Having experienced explicit racism, inadequate access to healthy food, and disadvantages in education, Elliott here entwines her personal history with thoughtful, well-researched cultural criticism ... Elliott’s intelligence and inquisitive reflection are humbling; her book should be required reading.
... [a] powerful set of essays ... Elliott evokes both fear and considerable melancholy as she chronicles the hardships of life at Six Nations ... Elliott writes with honesty and empathy of her life and the lives of family, constantly reckoning with institutional racism and less intentional private prejudices ... her larger views on the treatment of Indigenous peoples by the Canadian and American governments and critiques of racism, sexism, and other such offenses are well thought through and elegantly argued. An impressive debut from a welcome new voice in Native letters.
