Resilience seems ascribed to a human conditioning in white people. It’s an Indian condition to be proud of survival but reluctant to call it resilience. I’m a river widened by misery, and the potency of my language is more than human. In my first writing classes, my professor told me that the human condition was misery. In order to outlast the many traumas burned into her psyche, Mailhot also refutes myths surrounding Indigenous (and especially Indigenous feminine) resilience. Marrying the wrong person as a teenager, for example, teaches her that “despair isn’t a conduit for love.” Through her many misadventures Mailhot is always learning something the hard way, as it’s the only way afforded to her. I learned how story was always meant to be for Indian women: immediate and necessary and fearless, like all good lies.įor Mailhot, this impulsive sense of fun often mixes with a conditioned sense of caginess as she rejects neat, linear conceptions of healing and virtue. I didn’t feel compelled to tell any moral tales or ancient ones. Mailhot details the “spiritual fraud” of convincing the tarot reader that she is communing with her dead grandmother. Shortly after we are introduced to the author, she describes hoodwinking a “white mystic”, one of many “healers” her mother brought to their home to try and “exorcise” her as a child. Mailhot’s playing with temporality mirrors other ways that chaos and comfort constantly overlap in the book too.

The sense of outrunning the self that she ascribes to her Nlaka’pamux heritage pervades Heart Berries’ account of Mailhot’s life as the reader unpredictably slingshots backwards and forwards in time along with the author. Relating her life through bright flashes of sensation and emotion, Mailhot evokes a sense of freedom, of respite from colonial aspirations to empiricism and anodyne happiness through this ambivalent way of making meaning. The author often delights in the irreverent and mischievous potential of narrative, using a sense of safety found in the obscurity of memory and story as a vital survival mechanism. This powerful sense of contempt for those too cowardly or careless to handle raw testimony with compassion is a trademark of Mailhot’s voice throughout. The thing about women from the river is that our currents are endless. My story became the hustle…When I gained the faculty to speak my story, I realized I had given men too much. I was silenced by charity - like so many Indians. I tried to tell someone my story, but he thought it was a hustle. The words were too wrong and ugly to speak.

The first two things that Terese Marie Mailhot lets you know in her memoir Heart Berries are that she’s a hustler and that there isn’t much of a difference between hustling and telling the truth.

Heart berries mailhot