A Mind Spread Out on the Ground

by Alicia Elliott

  With my mother in the hospital, my dad had to deal with this round alone. He opted to totally shave off Jon’s hair. Jon wasn’t impressed. In his grade one school photo he looks like he missed Christmas. Dad treated my sister and me, but given his track record we had very little faith in his abilities. Being independent young women of nine and eleven, we decided to deal with it ourselves. Every night we’d close the door to our bedroom, turn on the TV and start picking nits out of each other’s hair. To us, this seemed like a foolproof plan. We would not only be allowed back at Grandma’s house, we’d also help out our hapless parents.

  Eventually I figured out there was a fundamental flaw in our plan: we pulled the nits from one another’s hair and deposited them directly onto our carpeted floor, where they’d hatch and climb onto our beds, couches and clothes. So our objective changed. Instead of getting rid of the lice—which was clearly impossible—we would focus on getting rid of the really obvious bright white nits, hoping the hard-to-spot dark brown ones we left behind would go undetected by the head lice squad at school. It wasn’t the worst plan. After all, that was the way every type of social service seemed to approach our unsavoury realities: don’t solve the problems of poverty or racism or violence or mental illness. Just hide them away.

  It actually worked for a while. No one could tell there was an entire ecosystem on our heads, and since no one could tell, no one cared. This was helped along immensely by my entry into junior high the next year. The school was so big no one dared recommend a school-wide lice check. Olly olly oxen free.

  Child and Family Services continued to pop in regularly. My father prepped us like key witnesses in a murder trial: readymade answers to probable questions, a list of dos and don’ts. Do mention everything is fine. Don’t mention Mom and Dad’s raging fights or the head lice.

  We didn’t have any problem shaking them off. The stakes were too high. We knew none of those social workers were interested in repairing our broken family. They were waiting for the right time to take a sledgehammer to it, scatter the shards and call it a job well done. Regardless of our parents’ feelings for one another, which were becoming more and more toxic, I knew that none of us kids were in their crosshairs, at least not overtly. Instead of targeting us for violence, our parents would turn our sympathy into weapons to use against each other. If we witnessed anything, either physical or verbal, we would immediately come to the defence of the person being attacked. Mom didn’t utilize this as dramatically as Dad did—he would make a show of the slightest shove—but Mom still had much more historical material to draw from, considering how long and how badly Dad had abused her. The constant manipulation was like getting hit with shrapnel: painful enough, but nowhere near as bad as direct hits. As the oldest child, I took on the responsibility of refereeing their fights, sending the youngest siblings into another room to watch TV while I picked a side and screamed my allegiance. I could handle them, I told myself. My siblings were safe as long as I was around. I needed to be able to see them, to protect them from the stress of managing two warring adults. I couldn’t do that in a foster home.

  Against all odds, my parents had another son, Dakota. Now there were seven of us squeezing into a three-bedroom house. The space was too tight, the neighbours were too close. The police continued to be called on us whenever my mom was ill, my mother continued her biannual residency at the hospital. My father was looking for an out, I could feel it. We all were.

  As if on cue, my dad’s stepfather died back in Canada. While my grandparents’ beautiful house was left to my aunt, a considerable patch of land behind it was Dad’s for the taking. Within a week of hearing the news, Dad was done with Mentor, done with Ohio, done with the United States of America. He was heading out to find gold and glory on a new frontier: the Six Nations reserve.

  Right before we moved, Missy and I borrowed a Ouija board from one of my friends. We knew our mother wouldn’t approve, so we used it out in the woods behind our house. We asked the usual teenage girl questions about boys and boobs. Then my sister asked one I wasn’t expecting: “How old will I be when we get rid of the lice?” The planchette sat unmoving for a moment, then gradually moved to the numbers 1 and 6. Five years away. That meant I’d be eighteen.

  I remembered my grandparents’ house on Six Nations as the pinnacle of luxury and beauty. Cupboards stocked with cookies and unopened products from the Home Shopping Network. Hundreds of channels playing on tons of TVs. Dolls dressed up like Indian girls I’d never resemble. And surrounding everything, most magical of all, planters. Hanging white planters and large plastic planters and small terracotta planters spilling out snapdragons and pansies and tulips.

  We, on the other hand, moved into a two-bedroom trailer with fake wood panelling and no running water. Our electricity came from an exceedingly complicated network of extension cords, strung up and spliced to shit by my father. Our heat came from a tiny wood-burning stove in the living room. For the first few months we paid for a port-a-potty to be set up next to the trailer. Eventually that became too expensive, so we used a commode that we dumped in the woods whenever the bucket got too full. To wash meant pouring water from a giant blue jug into a pot, heating it on the stove, then sponging ourselves off in the otherwise useless bathroom. Washing our hair was the same, though we did that over the kitchen sink once we removed all the dishes, still sticky with ketchup and leftover Kraft Dinner.

  Dad told us that he’d have running water and full electricity within a year.

  Missy and I had stopped nit-picking one another, but any time one of my younger brothers had the misfortune of laying his head on my lap, my fingers would instinctively start sifting through his hair. It was easy enough to find the white nits in nearly black strands, but I prided myself on being able to find the incognito eggs so many school nurses had overlooked. I’d also started compulsively nit-picking myself. I’d slide my hand through my hair until I felt them like tiny poppy seeds scattered at my scalp, grasp them between two fingers, then dig the nail of my index finger into the flesh of my thumb and pull to the ends of my hair. I’d do it for hours, unthinking, until there were indentations in my thumbs. I didn’t bother to hide what I was doing. I knew I was crossing some invisible, unspoken line; like my mother’s mental illness, we did not speak of the lice unless we absolutely had to. Still, I was desperate for normalcy. This seemed like the only thing I could control, the only thing I had any chance to change. I had to get rid of the lice.

  Yet despite my best intentions, I couldn’t change the facts. To really treat lice, you need to treat everyone at the same time, wash any clothes that may have been contaminated, wash any sheets that have been contaminated, vacuum floors and couches and mattresses, then do it all again in seven to ten days to prevent reinfestation. We were five kids and two adults with barely enough money to pay for our normal loads at the laundromat. Plus, even after a year, even after two years, even after five years, we still had no running water. Those were the facts. What’s more, we were tired. My dad still treated us with Nix and spent hours combing our hair with a fine-tooth comb whenever any of us were sent home from school, but I could see he’d given up. Lice were inescapable, part of the package.

  My mother’s mental illness kept coming back like a nightmarish refrain. She’d be gone once, twice, three times a year, leaving me to mother my siblings, make some dinners, wash some clothes. Though our neighbours were now too far away to either hear my parents screaming or see Mom doing anything they might deem worth a 911 call, that didn’t keep the social workers at bay. Two of my siblings went to one school, and two went to another, a Mohawk immersion school. There were frequent head lice checks at both. My youngest brothers got sent home every single time. Eventually their school notified the Children’s Aid Society. As soon as we found out we scrubbed everything. The trailer was never as clean as it was before social workers were scheduled to show. Like a stage director, Dad would block the scene. He made sure the living room and kitchen looked nice, that we
were all sitting obediently on the couch, that we had our scripts memorized, then gently encouraged the social worker to interview each of us outside. That way she couldn’t see how cramped the two bedrooms were or witness the horror that was our bathroom. It worked. It always did.

  It used to strike me as strange the way social workers and police officers flocked to our family. My siblings and I were great students. We had no problems at school; no mysterious bruises discoloured our skin. We were liked by our teachers, made friends easily. Any time any of us played sports, our dad was in the stands and in the coach’s ear, politicking our way to better positions. Our mom knew the names of all of our friends, even though we were too embarrassed to invite them to meet her. We never went hungry. We never lacked for love or encouragement. Our parents were far from perfect, but their main barriers to being better parents were poverty, intergenerational trauma and mental illness—things neither social workers nor police officers have ever been equipped to address, yet are both allowed, even encouraged, to patrol.

  Of course I know now it’s not strange at all that our family was monitored by child services. Indigenous kids in Canada are anywhere from five to twelve times more likely to be taken into government care than non-Indigenous kids, depending on province. The main reason cited is neglect. Nico Trocmé, who is the director of McGill University’s School of Social Work, as well as principal researcher for the Canadian Incidence Study of Reported Child Abuse and Neglect, says that in these cases, “neglect” is another word for poverty. In an interview with The Tyee, he says, “I’ve certainly never seen any evidence from any of the research to indicate that there is something endemic to First Nations families that would explain a higher rate of placement. It has much more to do with the high rates of poverty and the difficult social and economic circumstances they’re living in.” In other words, social services conflates not being able to afford adequate housing, food, clothing and health care with choosing not to have adequate housing, food, clothing and health care. Instead of supporting poor families and helping them become financially secure, social services’ approach is to simply take the kids. It’s as though they believe that removing the added expenses of children is doing poor parents a favour, or taking kids from loving parents and throwing them in impersonal, sometimes dangerous foster homes is doing them a favour. As anyone who has had experience with child welfare might anticipate, the effects of this policy are disastrous. A 2015 national study found that 60 percent of homeless youth were once involved with child welfare. A 2009 study found that over a third of youth in British Columbia’s care were also involved in the youth justice system; in fact, they were more likely to be involved with the law than to finish high school.

  It would seem, then, that Indigenous children have more reason to fear governmental care than they do their parents’ poverty. In some sense I intuited this, even as a kid. I knew it was bullshit that social workers and cops had so much control over our family, that they could split us up the moment we didn’t cater to their sensibilities. Knowing this then made me hate social workers and cops. Knowing this now makes me hate the systems that empower them—systems that put families in impossible situations, then punish them for not being able to claw their way out.

  Though we never met her strict no-lice requirement, my grandmother eventually lifted my family’s banishment from her house. Still, ever since that first expulsion, I had a strong fear of spreading my lice to others. If I ever slept anywhere that wasn’t my house, I insisted on wearing a sweatshirt to bed, pulling the hood up over my ponytail before I laid my head down. It wasn’t a great method of containment. At seventeen I spread lice to my high school boyfriend. He was sure he’d caught them from sleeping outside on a camping trip, but when he jokingly suggested that he probably caught them from me, I felt sick. I knew he did. He got rid of them easily enough, but as long as he was with me he would never be safe. His life would become mine: always scratching, always feeling like a contaminant.

  I tried to break up with him that day. When he asked why, I couldn’t give him the real reason, and I couldn’t give a fake one with any amount of conviction, so I reluctantly gave in and stayed, promising myself I’d be more vigilant. Promising myself if he caught it one more time, I’d leave.

  Within six months I was pregnant.

  I finally got rid of my head lice at eighteen. I could only do it by leaving my parents’ house. Part of me always knew that. With only one head to treat, access to running water, enough spare cash to pay for two rounds of medication and all the necessary laundry, delousing myself was considerably easier than I’d thought it’d be. The lice were no longer impossible, insurmountable adversaries. Still, it didn’t feel triumphant like I’d always assumed it would. It felt temporary, like a trick. Any second the scratching was going to start again, I was sure. I kept trying to pull imaginary nits from my hair, itching at phantom lice.

  I wasn’t just worried about myself, though. I had a child now. As soon as they were born I decided I didn’t want their childhood to involve endless scratching. I didn’t want their childhood to involve any scratching. They were going to be lice-free forever. I would succeed where my parents failed.

  My kid is twelve now. Though they’ve caught head lice at least four times during their young, everybody-throw-your-coats-into-a-pile stage, no social worker has ever come knocking. Perhaps our skin isn’t dark enough for that sort of check-in.

  Naturally, every time my kid has had lice, I’ve caught them, too. That Ouija board was full of shit.

  34 GRAMS PER DOSE

  he cookies don’t taste how I remember them. They’re Chips Ahoy! They’re triple chocolate. 170 calories per 34 grams. It usually takes at least 102 grams for me to feel like I’ve reached what I should probably call “proper dosage,” considering how and why I consume them. I’ve already swallowed 510 calories by the time I realize these cookies aren’t the medicine I’d hoped they’d be.

  For years I’ve believed food would make me happy. I believed it when my mother let me take a few sloppy bites of a secret Buster Bar from Dairy Queen. I believed it when I worked at a gas station convenience store, relying on chips and chocolate to fuel my eight-hour shifts. I believe it even now that my clothes from one year ago have started constricting me, leaving pink, tender welts across my stomach, my back. I’ll probably believe it again as soon as the thought of these six unfulfilling cookies slides from my short-term memory.

  I am twenty-five and walking down Bloor Street West, past expensive boutiques and luxury-brand storefronts I never expect to enter. One of my close friends is walking with me, telling me about a wedding she’s just attended. She hovers over details of the catering, describing dishes that sound foreign to me. I shrug, say I’ve never tried them but if she says they’re good, I trust her.

  “You’ve never had foie gras?” she asks in disbelief.

  “No. I grew up poor.”

  “So did I.”

  She has told me about her childhood poverty before. She has a very specific memory of her family combing the beach for beer bottles to take back to the liquor store so they’d have money for food. But to look at her now you’d never guess. Her skin is flawless and pale as a Southern belle’s. Her hair is perfect. I’ve never noticed so much as a split end. It’s always brushed to brilliance, or tied back simply and elegantly, or sometimes woven around her head in an intricate up-do. Her clothes are perfect. They’re never stained, never torn, never hemmed sloppily. If she’s wearing something that looks like silk, don’t bother asking. It’s definitely real silk. Her vocabulary, her manner of speaking, her delivery of smart jokes as coolly and effortlessly as a ’40s femme fatale, all of it sounds and looks like money.

  And then there’s her extensive knowledge of culinary delicacies like foie gras. Times like this I remember poverty was an unsavoury pit stop in her life, not the final destination.

  For the most part I don’t feel ashamed of my poor upbringing. Of course, it’s easier to detach that sh
ame now that I’m safely outside of it. What do I have to be ashamed of now? I have running water and the ability to buy fast food whenever I want.

  But when she asks me if I’ve ever had foie gras, her voice first so incredulous, then so dismissive, that small ember of shame that has been quietly smouldering all these years catches flame once more. I become intensely aware of my clothes, which I can only afford to buy second-hand, and which fit strangely, the way designers seem to think all plus-sized clothing should. I become aware of my shoes, which are dirty and torn. I become aware of my hair, a mass of frizzy, unruly chaos I’ve inherited from my mother. I, who survived on peanut butter and food-bank cereal during my formative years, who never had the good sense to develop a more expensive palate once I left home, have no business in this neighbourhood, casually perusing the windows of Dolce & Gabbana and Louis Vuitton. Foie gras is more than just two French words I can barely pronounce, more than just a meal certain people sometimes enjoy. It is a test that separates the high from the low, the rich from the poor, the worldly from the ignorant. The white from everyone else.

  Foie gras is a test, and I have failed. Again.

  When I lived on the Six Nations rez as a teen, food options were limited. There was a Zehrs grocery store in Caledonia, about seventeen kilometres away in one direction, and a few grocery stores in Brantford, about twenty kilometres away in the other. On the rez itself, we had a couple of restaurants. My favourites were Village Pizza, which is basically a culinary landmark on Six, and Village Café, which still serves up the best breakfast around.

  But you can’t subsist solely on delivery pizza and restaurant breakfast. Or at least, you shouldn’t. That left gas station convenience stores to fill the culinary gap. Like any convenience store, they carried everyday staples like milk, eggs and bread, but other than that their aisles were filled with junk food and canned goods. If you were lucky, one of the gas stations might have some bananas or apples for sale, but most didn’t, and nearly everything was priced higher than what you’d find at a grocery store in the city. So not only was it harder to eat healthy on the rez; it also cost more to eat unhealthy.