Terra is the granddaughter of sharecroppers, born in 1953 and raised in a large extended family in a banjo and fiddle tradition, rich with storytelling and music. She grew up on the border between Compton and Paramount, 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. Learn more at terratrevor.com
Photo by Lawrence K. Ho
KAAN: Korean American Adoptee Adoptive Family Network
First Edition; Hardcover 2006
out of print
New eBook Edition Compliments of Terra Trevor
"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
University of Nebraska Press, 2023
We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After enduring 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.
“In this personal history, Trevor considers what it has meant to navigate the world as a “mixed-blood” Native woman, whose light complexion belies her ancestors among the Cherokee, Lenape, and Seneca peoples. Born to a white mother and American Indian father in the early 1950s, Trevor delves into her relationship with her paternal grandparents and Auntie, who taught her about the heritage that felt more authentic than her white identity, as well as the elder Native women who welcomed her into their community and schooled her in the “seven ways” of being in tune with Native tradition. Moving back and forth across time, Trevor recounts the complexity of her relationships and experiences and how they were shaped by U.S. law and policies governing Native life and culture. Foreword Reviews calls We Who Walk the Seven Ways “a moving memoir about friendship and identity.”
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