Heart Berries: A Memoir

by Terese Marie Mailhot

I was silenced by charity—like so many Indians. I kept my hand out. My story became the hustle.

Indian girls can be forgotten so well they forget themselves.

What potential there was in being awful. My mindlessness became a gift.

How could misfortune follow me so well, and why did I choose it every time?

It’s an Indian condition to be proud of survival but reluctant to call it resilience. Resilience seems ascribed to a human conditioning in white people.

Nuns and priests ran out of places to put bones, so they built us into the walls of new boarding schools.

I wondered if maybe falling in love looked like a crisis to an observer.

I’m going to die an Indian death. I want to lay my neck on the cool steel alloy of the train tracks back home. I want the death of a rez dog. Mutts can’t keep away from the tracks.

Observation is a skill. Observation isn’t easy, and the right eyes can make me feel like a deer, while the wrong ones make me feel like a monster.

I remember once an elder skinned a rabbit in our yard. He wanted to teach me how to do it. He said so many times that a body is a universe.

Nothing is too ugly for this world, I think. It’s just that people pretend not to see.

In white culture, forgiveness is synonymous with letting go. In my culture, I believe we carry pain until we can reconcile with it through ceremony. Pain is not framed like a problem with a solution. I don’t even know that white people see transcendence the way we do. I’m not sure that their dichotomies apply to me.

I think self-esteem is a white invention to further separate one person from another. It asks people to assess their values and implies people have worth. It seems like identity capitalism.

It seems innate that I am fucked up. I think I have the blood memory of my neurotic ancestors and their vices.

You seemed engaged by my dysfunction because you are a writer and not because I had experienced it.

God couldn’t watch it; he sent us his boy, but I doubt he watched his son die. I think he just waited for him on the other side.

Her family lives away from her, and when her husband died, she wanted to die. She seemed certain that it was her time. Sometimes suicidality doesn’t seem dark; it seems fair.

I don’t think that I am lonely. I think that I am starved and maybe ravenous for the very thing you withhold from me.

I might be gone, but you can still see me with a black light in your mattress.

I realized that love can be mediocre and a safe comfort, or it can be unhinged and hurtful. Either seemed like a good life.

Making Indian women inhuman is a problem for me. We’ve become too symbolic and never real enough.

Pain feels faster than light. I react to pain, and there’s too much of it.

I was the third generation of the things we didn’t talk about.

My people cultivated pain. In the way that god cultivated his garden, with the foresight that he could not contain or protect the life within it. Humanity was born out of pain.