26 pages • 52 minutes read
Terese Marie MailhotHeart Berries
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Little Mountain Woman”
Addressing Casey directly as “you”, Mailhot reflects on her feelings of inferiority and uncleanliness. She compares herself to a squaw, a derogatory term used by non-Natives to describe an Indian woman, with “greasy hair and nimble fingers” (86). She runs through her early history once again, explaining her marriage to Vito, her migration to a friend’s house in El Paso to escape the reservation, and the lost custody battle for her first son, Isadore. She writes about the shame and pain she felt nursing her newborn baby, Isaiah, after losing her first child. She compares herself to the White women that Casey has loved and flirted with, and the way he befriends them, which is something he has never offered her. She describes her tribal chief naming her Little Mountain Woman as her body grew, and how she fled the mountains and lost her power. She describes, lyrically, the pain of loneliness and grief, violent marriages, and her desire to be loved.
Chapter 8 Summary: “The Leaving Deficit”
Mailhot considers leaving Casey and goes to her friend Barbara’s house. They exchange traditional gifts: sweetgrass and silver rings. She feels like Casey’s anger is the anger of a White man; it has no purpose or depth. She describes him as “impotent” (98). She and her mother find an eagle carcass won the river. It was shot down by a White man and left on her reservation. She thinks about the act of leaving and how nobody ever wonders about what happens to Indian women or where they go. She recalls her first departure from her mother’s house. She moved in with Vito’s Republican family who fed her steak and asked her to vote for Bush. Native women are always leaving, trying to escape painful homes and finding themselves in strange cars, on the side of highways, in a White man’s home. Mailhot returns to her home after her mother dies and recalls all the men she left. She doesn’t know if she’ll stay with her husband, but it feels good to have the power to leave him.
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
In Chapter 7, Mailhot details to Casey the early events of her life, including a violent marriage and the traumas that brought her to the present day. By giving a broad overview of her life up to the present, Mailhot reveals patterns of grief, violence, and lack of agency. She juxtaposes these events so they speak to one another. Similarly, in Chapter 8, Mailhot describes a pattern of departures. These departures have a similar effect. They reflect a cultural history of escape and escapism, especially by young Native women. By placing her experiences as a child and a woman beside each other, Mailhot demonstrates a desire to reveal cultural and historical patterns that run through the narrative.
Mailhot also introduces the squaw as a symbol in this section. Squaw is a sexualized slur for an Indian woman used by non-Natives, but Mailhot uses it to describe the most-hated parts of herself. She compares herself to White women and finds herself lacking. She sees herself as only a sexual object, not a woman worthy of respect. The squaw is a symbol of her internalized racism, made more real by the internalized racism of her White partner.
