Helen Knott shares emotional memoir inspired by family loss in “Becoming a Matriarch”

FORT ST. JOHN, B.C. — One of Helen Knott’s fondest experiences for being nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction wasn’t the call, which she says brought her to tears.

It was an interaction during her book tour in Alberta, where she met a mother and daughter at a stop at Métis Crossing in Smoky Lake.

She described the moment as one which made her feel “beautiful and Indigenous.”

“I was getting a coffee, and the mother stopped me,” says Knott, the Fort St. John-based author of Dane-Zaa, Nehiyaw, Métis, and European ancestry. “Her daughter was no more than eight years old. The mother stopped me and said, ‘I’ve read your book.’ We shook hands.”

“She turned to her daughter, and she introduced me.  She said, ‘She writes books.’ I was standing there in my ribbon skirt. It was a cool thing because I thought, ‘What would have that meant to me as a little girl who loved books, to see an Indigenous female author and be like, ‘that’s possible.’ ”

Her latest memoir, Becoming a Matriarch, was also nominated for one of Indigo’s best books of the year in 2023.  

Inspired by the losses of her mother and grandmother in a six-month span, she told energeticcity.ca about how the grief was able to motivate her. 

“I feel as human beings, we get very attached to the idea of who we are and how we are supposed to be in the world,” said Knott. 

“When you’re in a state of grief, and you have lost people or lost things, it challenges the very idea of who you think is supposed to be and how the world is supposed to be. If you submit to that process, there’s a space where you can become.”

Described as a book of “chronicle, grief, love, and legacy,”  Knott says the book was a shift from another project.

“I was working on a proposal for a completely different book,” said Knott, “but when faced with the losses that I had in my family, I no longer could write that book because it wasn’t at the forefront. I had to write what was needed at the time.”

“Sometimes writing is so much about survival, so much about trying to, especially if you’re writing memoir or nonfiction, to make meaning. But also, it’s how I know how to become whole again.”

The Governor General’s Literary Awards will be announced on Wednesday, November 13th.  

Knott’s works, including her debut book In My Own Mocassins, are available at bookstores and online through Amazon.