Heart Berries

Casey is Mailhot’s White lover and a former professor. The reader views Casey only through Mailhot’s lens in this collection; his character development is based on her shifting perception of him throughout the memoir.

In the beginning of Heart Berries, Casey is an idealized lover and Mailhot can’t imagine her life without him. When he abandons her in the hospital after her breakdown, she is angry, but continues to idealize him. She needs him in her life because, as a White man and a writer, his love validates her existence and talent. If he chooses her, she is valuable. If he doesn’t, she has nothing.

As the memoir progresses and her relationship with Casey becomes more chaotic, Mailhot begins to self-doubt. Casey seems to value White women more than her, demonstrated through his offering of friendships to White women, which leaves Mailhot feeling inferior, but also causes her to question his worth as a lover and a person. Mailhot sees Casey as a quintessential White man, who can’t understand the depth of her pain and possesses an empty, “impotent” (98) anger. Though she still doubts herself and her worth, she begins to realize he isn’t the idealized person she imagined him to be.

Towards the end of the book, Mailhot considers leaving Casey. She finds power and agency in her ability to come to that decision. By realizing she doesn’t need Casey to validate her existence, she can engage in a healthier relationship with him. Mailhot continues to love Casey, but no longer sees his love as her sole reason for existing. Casey is no longer a romantic hero who has come to save the crazy Indian woman—he is just a man, with his own flaws and desires. 

Mailhot’s mother, also called Wahzinak, is a woman of dualities. She is sober but brings alcoholics into her home. She is an activist, but her children are in foster care. She believes in social equity and the value of Native lives, but sometimes forgets to feed her children.

Mailhot reflects on her mother’s nuance to paint a portrait of her struggles, triumphs, and failures. Her mother embraces her traditional culture, sleeping in the woods, bringing healers into her home, and departing for weeks to reflect on her existence. Unfortunately, often her actions lead to abandoning her children for weeks at a time. Wahzinak struggles with love in the same way that Mailhot does. She tries to save drunk men, such as Mailhot’s father, and gives herself away to unworthy lovers. Mailhot admires her mother’s traditional values, but not the way she treated her children. By coming to terms with her mother’s complexity at the end of the book, Mailhot can forge her own path forward and discover her own balance of traditional culture, self-love, and motherhood.