Heart Berries

A prominent theme in Mailhot’s narrative is how the story of her mental illness is tied to her culture. As an indigenous woman, she struggles with the differences in cultural perception and treatment of mental illnesses that she experiences in the Western world. Mailhot’s view of her mental illness, as an inheritance to reconcile, is dramatically different from the Western idea, which focuses on symptom-management and medication.

The longest essay in this collection takes place in a psychiatric hospital. Mailhot writes about checking herself in: “I was signing a new treaty.” (18) Her use of the word treaty calls back the tortured history of Indian and American/Canadian relations. By calling her medical documentation a new treaty, she considers the colonial roots of Western medicine and hospitalization, and the dangers Western medicine poses for an Indian woman such as herself. Though the hospital is a healing space, it is also a dangerous space.

Mailhot recalls similar dark histories when she says in the same essay: “I woke up as the bones of my ancestors locked in government storage.” (16) The thought of being locked away and forgotten as an indigenous woman living with a mental illness is not lost on her.