Burn Your Pity and Bury Your Judgement: Reading Helen Knott’s IN MY OWN MOCCASINS

What does it mean to read and write about a book that wasn’t written for you?

This is the question on my mind as I read and write about Helen Knott’s In My Own Moccasins: A Memoir of Resilience (2019).

A woman of Dane Zaa, Cree, Métis and mixed European descent from northern British Columbia, Knott writes an account that is at once a profoundly personal tale of having her sense of self and her place in the history of her people ripped apart by racism, sexual assault and addiction, and a collective history of Indigenous women in the Americas and the violent legacy of Canadian settler colonialism.

In My Own Moccasins weaves through the singular and plural voice, between “I” and “we”. Unlike the “we” that often figures in public political debate — ostensibly representing a universal human subject, but typically speaking on behalf of a “royal we” — the plural first person in Knott’s memoirs represents specific communities of people with shared experiences: women who have been sexually abused, people struggling with addiction, Indigenous people.

The early parts of the memoir recount Knott’s experiences of sexual assault and her use of drugs to try to dull the searing emotional pain. The chapters filled with nights spent in hotels and…