Kaleb Poor – Staff Writer
Terese Mailhot, a New York Times bestselling author and advocate for indigenous people, delivered an emotional speech at Coe Library on Monday night.
The speech was titled “Rising to the Occasion of a Dream” and focused largely on the hardships Mailhot endured while growing up on Seabird Island, an indigenous community in British Columbia. Among these hardships were food insecurity, domestic violence, the death of her father, and the enduring effects of indigenous genocide.
Mailhot delivered her address on Indigenous Peoples Day, and said that her intent as an indigenous writer was to share her individual experiences and to push back on the generalization of hardships faced by indigenous peoples.
“When I think about Indigenous Peoples Day, I think about the survivors who I love, and some of them I don’t even know,” Mailhot said. “My grandmother was a residential school survivor… [she] went to St. George’s school, where Indian agents kind of pressured her family to give her up when she was a child to assimilate and go to a boarding school.”
Visibly emotional at times, Mailhot talked at length about forced assimilation. Her many anecdotes covered the whitewashing of indigenous culture, the lost history of her people, economic subjugation, and the statistical realities of being an indigenous woman in today’s world.
“On some reservations, indigenous women are ten times more likely to experience violence and to be murdered,” said Mailhot. “84 percent of indigenous women, according to the National Institute of Justice, have experienced physical, sexual, or psychological violence in their lifetime, and one out of three native women have been raped or will have experienced an attempted rape in their lifetime.”
Mailhot said that just 13 percent of sexual assaults reported by native women resulted in an arrest. She said it is important to know these statistics because native women are too often “quantified and then marginalized.” Mailhot said she doubted the accuracy of those statistics, citing her personal experience and speculating that the reality is far worse.
“It’s based on census data, and when I was growing up on my reserve we would rather die than tell Census how many people lived in our house,” Mailhot said. “Because it affected our welfare, it affected everything if we told the truth.”
After reading two large excerpts from her bestselling book Heart Berries: A Memoir, Mailhot praised UW’s indigenous student group, Keepers of the Fire, who held a demonstration on campus earlier that day. Keepers of the Fire also presented Mailhot with a small gift as thanks for her visit.
Mailhot also offered praise for those who show acceptance and support to indigenous peoples.
“Seeing the acceptance from non-indigenous people is really important because it’s really important that you hold space for our lived experiences, so that we can connect in a human way,” Mailhot said. “I think that genuinely makes a better community.”
Mailhot’s book, Heart Berries: A Memoir, is a New York Times bestselling memoir and was a selection in actor Emma Watson’s book club, and was selected as Book of the Year by both NPR and the New York Public Library, among others. She was invited to speak by the Wyoming Institute for Humanities Research (WIHR) as part of UW’s School of Culture, Gender and Social Justice Fall Speaker Series.
