Heart Berries contributes to the process of rewriting the myth of Indigenous ancestry, reminding the reader that Indigenous people, like all people, represent the totality of human experience and are not simply spirit guides that “hover around to admonish people about what they should be doing, what they’re doing wrong, how they’re destroying nature,” as the Ojibwe writer David Treuer said in 2006. She writes, “I was the third generation of the things we didn’t talk about,” in a nod to how her early life embodied silences. Mailhot’s tale stretches much further than the saga of one life, however it spans across many ages as it reckons with intergenerational trauma.
Her odyssey is marked by a failed teen marriage, the loss of her eldest child in a custody battle, an undergraduate degree from New Mexico State University, a period in psychiatric care, an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, a second marriage, and a position as a Tecumseh Postdoctoral Fellow at Purdue University. Mailhot recounts her flight from the grip of abuse, mental illness, and the brutal poverty of life on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia. By that definition, what Terese Marie Mailhot encapsulates in the 124 pages of her bestselling memoir Heart Berries is an epic excavation and experiment to uncover and tell the mythology of her lineage. Mythology is the “penultimate truth”-it is what can be known but not directly told, explains Joseph Campbell in the documentary series Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth.
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