Summary

The afterword, which is attributed to Joan Naviyuk Kane, is a question-and-answer interview between Kane and Mailhot. Kane asks Mailhot about her experiences within the general field of Native memoir and her stylistic writing choices. Terese responds that she wanted her book to "stand apart from some of the identified themes within our genre," and that the experimental form and use of language gives her a sense of freedom (134). Kane asks about the book's original conception as fiction and Mailhot discusses the process of using fiction initially to show herself the truth and then stripping away the made-up elements. Kane and Mailhot discuss the themes of shame, forgiveness, and "the zeitgeist of Indian in the twenty-first century" (139). They then discuss the criticism that writing about trauma is sentimental and "can't be art" as well as the question of "memoir being therapeutic" (141). Kane and Mailhot...