'I'm grateful for her strength' — IsKwé on Terese Marie Mailhot's memoir Heart Berries
June is Indigenous Book Club Month and National Indigenous History Month in Canada. To celebrate, CBC Books asked Indigenous artists, community leaders and advocates to share their favourite #IndigenousReads.
Cree and Dene musician IsKwé chose the memoir Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot.
"My new favourite book by an Indigenous author would be Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot. This was a beautiful story of a woman learning how to understand her mind and her heart, and how the two don't always work together. By addressing her realities of mental health — and how this impacted her family, her son and her relationships — I found her story relatable and kind, in spite of the amazing hardships that accompanied her experiences. I can only imagine how sharing her truth could be a combination of cathartic relief and extreme bravery. I'm grateful for Terese and I'm grateful for her strength."
IsKwé is a Juno-nominated musician whose albums include The Fight Within and iskwe. Her song Nobody Knows was written to raise awareness for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls and was turned into a graphic novel called Will I See? with writers David A. Robertson, Aaron Leslie and illustrator Greg Chomichuk.