Helen Knott transforms grief into hope in her new memoir, ‘Becoming a Matriarch’

While Helen Knott’s memoir In My Own Moccasins: A Memoir of Resilience was climbing bestseller lists and making the rounds in awards chatter, the Dane-zaa, nêhiyaw, and mixed European author and activist was saying goodbye to her mother and grandmother — the women whose love and guidance had provided her light in the dark. 

In August 2019, the book was released. Three months later, Knott’s mother, Shirley, passed. Six months later, her beloved Asu (grandmother), Junie Bigfoot, was also gone.

With the same vulnerability and profoundly moving prose that made her debut a bestseller, Knott explores these devastating losses and the journey they set her upon in her latest memoir, Becoming a Matriarch. With wit and courage, Knott takes the reader along her journey of self-discovery from the depths of loss and grief to her rise as a matriarch herself.

IndigiNews spoke with Knott from her home in Dane-zaa territory about her newest work.

IndigiNews: Tell us about how you came to write Becoming a Matriarch.

HK: Initially, I started writing the book to uncover a set of guiding principles that would help me in the world without my mom and my Asu, and then it did that funny thing where it became something else. Instead, I learned a lot about navigating grief, learning to live in the body, and also what it means, looks like and feels like when you start to move toward a state of living in Indigenous joy and challenging some of the roles you’ve learned to live by.

Memoirs are a really courageous genre to take on because it’s a lot of heavy emotional work. What was it like to explore these memories and losses?

I was gentle with myself in the writing process. Sometimes, I would sit down to write, cry within the first five minutes, and just close my laptop and say, ‘Okay, that’s enough for today.’ But also, every time I sat down to write, I had this conversation with my mom and my grandma in the spirit world to say, ‘Okay, we’re writing today, so I need you two to show up for me,’ and really relying on that connection to be able to complete the work that needed to be done.

You wrote in In My Own Moccasins about the healing journey you started many years ago. What new places did this memoir take you?

The process of writing forces you to sit with memory, and I feel that it’s like a smoothing-out process, like if you find something rough and keep rubbing it over and over again until it becomes smooth. It allowed me to sit with memory in new ways and sit with stories from so many different angles and, through that, I found freedom. If I weren’t writing the book, it probably would have been easier to turn away from a lot of things and to seek more comfort and distraction rather than sitting with it. I feel that has allowed me to be able to walk in the world in a different way than I had before. 

It’s a beautiful and lyrical book, sometimes extremely sad and sometimes very funny, and fun. Tell me about your mother and how your relationship with her guided this work and your work in general as a writer and activist.

My mama was so many things to so many people. For me, she was the person who always put me back together. 

We put a lot of work into our relationship because it wasn’t always smooth. We learned through discussion, arguments, prayers, fights, and tears to have a good relationship and communicate better. 

My mom was a very loving person. She was one of the aunties who made you feel at home, welcomed, and very loved. She was often my bravery or backbone when I moved in the world because I was a very shy kid and still very much an introvert as I grew older. I would get really nervous when I had to speak in different places or take on new roles, and she would always take the time to pray with me to ensure that I felt okay moving in the world.

After her passing, I still would ask her to pray with me and show up and help me, and there was a specific point where I felt she was, like, ‘Okay, you got this. I’m going to step back now. I’ll still be here, but you got this.’ 

What did you discover about your grandmother while writing the book?

My grandma told stories all the time, and I held on to those stories she would tell. I said it in the book, and I’ll say it again: I wish I had held on to more of her. Because there’s so much that I don’t remember, especially when it comes to place memory and stories, she would tell me about specific places as we were moving past them. I wish I held on to those stories.

What do you hope readers take from reading this work?

I feel whoever reads a specific work always takes different things from it. Certain elements will stand out to certain people. But I do hope the healing elements stand out for most people.

I see part of my purpose connected to learning how to carry memory and do it in a good way, where it’s not heavy and hard. So many of us Indigenous people have that memory regarding the generations before us and our connection to our land, or even the disconnection from the land base.

Being able to (carry memory) in a good way, in a way that also shows the messiness of healing and learning how to navigate that, I always hope that my writing reflects that healing process. Being able to move through things and find lightness and even humour is what I hope my writing reflects for people.

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Becoming a Matriarch is published by Knopf Canada and is available now in bookstores.