Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption

Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption

Harness, Susan Devan

Paperback

Series: American Indian Lives

Biographies GeneralNative American HistoryPregnancy & Adoption

Publisher Price: $24.95

ISBN10: 1496219570
ISBN13: 9781496219572
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: Mar 1 2020
Pages: 360
Weight: 1.10
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.20 Depth: 8.80
Language: English
2019 High Plains Book Award (Creative Nonfiction and Indigenous Writer categories)
2021 Barbara Sudler Award from History Colorado

In Bitterroot Susan Devan Harness traces her journey to understand the complexities and struggles of being an American Indian child adopted by a white couple and living in the rural American West. When Harness was fifteen years old, she questioned her adoptive father about her real parents. He replied that they had died in a car accident not long after she was born--except they hadn't, as Harness would learn in a conversation with a social worker a few years later.

Harness's search for answers revolved around her need to ascertain why she was the target of racist remarks and why she seemed always to be on the outside looking in. New questions followed her through college and into her twenties when she started her own family. Meeting her biological family in her early thirties generated even more questions. In her forties Harness decided to get serious about finding answers when, conducting oral histories, she talked with other transracial adoptees. In her fifties she realized that the concept of home she had attributed to the reservation existed only in her imagination.

Making sense of her family, the American Indian history of assimilation, and the very real--but culturally constructed--concept of race helped Harness answer the often puzzling questions of stereotypes, a sense of nonbelonging, the meaning of family, and the importance of forgiveness and self-acceptance. In the process Bitterroot also provides a deep and rich context in which to experience life.

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