Terra Trevor is an essayist, a memoirist, a contributor to fifteen books, and the author of We Who Walk the Seven Ways: A Memoir (University of Nebraska Press), and Pushing up the Sky: A Mother's Story (KAAN). Her essays are widely published in anthologies, including Tending the Fire: Native Voices and Portraits (University of New Mexico Press), 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), and Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging (University of Nebraska Press). Terra is the granddaughter of Oklahoma sharecroppers, born in the early 1950s and raised in Compton, California. Of Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca and German descent, her stories are steeped in themes of home, place and belonging, her identity as a mixed-blood, and her connection to the landscape.

We Who Walk the Seven Ways: A Memoir

We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After she endured a difficult loss, a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided Trevor (mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) through the seven cycles of life in 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 every ending 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. 

University of Nebraska Press, May 2023

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