About the Author

Terra Trevor is the author of two memoirs, We Who Walk the Seven Ways (University of Nebraska Press) and Pushing up the Sky: A Mother's Story (KAAN: Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network). She is a contributor to fifteen books. Her essays and articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits (University of New Mexico Press). Her work is also included in Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education (The University of Arizona Press), The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal (University of Oklahoma Press), Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging (University of Nebraska Press), Voices Confronting Pediatric Brain Tumors (Johns Hopkins University Press), The Foster Parenting Tool Box (EMK Press), Take A Stand Art Against Hate: A Raven Chronicles Anthology, Adoption Today, Fostering Families Today, and in other books and publications. She volunteered with KAAN: Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network as one of the early leaders, beginning in 1998 through 2016, and as a coordinator in South Korea with KAAN's Friends of Korea Family Exchange Program.

Terra came of age in Compton, California. Of mixed descent, including Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca and German, her stories are steeped in themes of place and belonging, and are shaped and infused by her identity as a mixed-blood. —Photo by Chris Felver

PUSHING UP THE SKY: A MOTHER'S STORY

KAAN: Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network

1st Edition Hardcover 2006 out of print.

New eBook Edition

"Terra Trevor's Pushing up the Sky, is a revelation of the struggles and triumphs packed into the hyphens between Korean and Native American and American. From her, we learn that adoption can best be mutual, that the adoptive parent needs acculturation in the child’s ways. With unflinching honesty and unfailing love, Trevor details the risks and heartaches of taking in, the bittersweetness of letting go, and the everlasting bonds that grow between them all. With ‘Pushing up the Sky’, the ‘literature of adoption’ comes of age as literature, worthy of an honored place in the human story." —Robert Bensen, editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education, The University of Arizona Press

WE WHO WALK THE SEVEN WAYS

University of Nebraska Press

We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After she endured the difficult loss she wrote about in her memoir Pushing up the Sky, a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided Trevor (mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) through the seven cycles of life in their Indigenous ways. Over three decades, these women lifted her from grief, instructed her in living, and showed her how to age from youth into beauty. 

With tender honesty, Trevor explores how the end is always a beginning. Her reflections on the deep power of women’s friendship, losing a child, reconciling complicated roots, and finding richness in every stage of life show that being an American Indian with a complex lineage is not about being part something, but about being part of something.

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