Words Facing West by Terra Trevor (Substack)
Stories steeped in themes of home, place and belonging, a mixed-blood identity, and a connection to the landscape
Words Facing West
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.
Harvard Book Store, Strand Books, Green Apple Books
Pegasus Bookstore, Bookshop Santa Cruz, Chaucers Books
Barns & Noble, Bookshop, Amazon
“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.” —Poets & Writers
“Raised to conceal her Native ancestry, Terra Trevor learns from elders to nurture her mixed blood identity and shape her activism in transracial adoption, Indian health and education, and community building. This is an inspiring, heartfelt memoir of one Native woman’s spirit journey from childhood to her own elderhood.”
—Robert Bensen, editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education
“Terra Trevor’s memoir is a gentle invitation to journey with her across decades, an invitation to notice with her as she seeks healing and finds belonging. There were phrases and sentences I underlined, places where I wept, passages that will remain with me as they drew me to insights I’d previously struggled to name. I closed the final pages and knew that in reading this book, I had been the recipient of a generous and much-needed gift. While I can certainly finish a book in a day, I chose to move slowly through this one, letting each idea, each paragraph, each reflection gently spill over me, allowing the pages to alter me in some way.”
—Patrice Gopo, author of Autumn Song: Essays on Absence and We Deserve to Heal
Books by Terra Trevor, and anthologies containing her work
University of Nebraska Press
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.
KAAN: Korean Adoptee Adoptive Family Network, First Edition 2006 Hardcover out of print.
"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
Unpapered, edited by Diane Glancy and Linda Rodriguez, is a collection of personal narratives by Indigenous writers exploring the meaning and limits of Native American identity beyond its legal margins.
University of New Mexico Press
Tending the Fire by photographer Christopher Felver with an introduction by Linda Hogan and a foreword by Simon J. Ortiz, celebrates the poets and writers who represent the wide range of Native American voices in literature today. In these commanding portraits, Felver’s distinctive visual signature and unobtrusive presence capture each artist’s strength, integrity, and character. Accompanying each portrait is a handwritten poem or prose piece that helps reveal the origin of the poet’s language and legends.
The University of Arizona Press
Children of the Dragonfly, edited by Robert Bensen, is the first anthology to document this struggle for cultural survival on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border. Invoking the dragonfly spirit of Zuni legend who helps children restore a way of life that has been taken from them, the anthology explores the breadth of the conflict about Native childhood. Included are works of Joy Harjo, Sherman Alexie, Eric Gansworth, Terra Trevor and others. They take readers from the boarding school movement of the 1870s to the Sixties Scoop in Canada and the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 in the United States. They also spotlight the tragic consequences of racist practices such as the suppression of Indian identity in government schools and the campaign against Indian childbearing.
Children of the Dragonfly, edited by Robert Bensen, is the first anthology to document this struggle for cultural survival on both sides of the U.S.-Canadian border. Invoking the dragonfly spirit of Zuni legend who helps children restore a way of life that has been taken from them, the anthology explores the breadth of the conflict about Native childhood. Included are works of Joy Harjo, Sherman Alexie, Eric Gansworth, Terra Trevor and others. They take readers from the boarding school movement of the 1870s to the Sixties Scoop in Canada and the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 in the United States. They also spotlight the tragic consequences of racist practices such as the suppression of Indian identity in government schools and the campaign against Indian childbearing.
University of Oklahoma Press
Native literature, composed of western literary tradition is packed into the hyphens of the oral tradition. It is termed a “renaissance” but contemporary Native writing is both something old emerging in new forms and something that has never been asleep. The two-hundred-year-old myth of the vanishing American Indian still holds some credence in the American Southeast, the region from which tens of thousands of Indians were relocated after passage of the Indian Removal Act in 1830. Yet, a significant Indian population remained behind after those massive relocations. This is the first anthology to focus on the literary work of Native Americans with ancestry to “people who stayed” in southeastern states after 1830 and represents every state and every genre. Edited By Geary Hobson, Janet McAdams and Kathryn Walkiewicz.
A Raven Chronicles Anthology
Take a Stand: Art Against Hate, contains poems, stories and images from 117 writers, 53 artists, divided into five fluid and intersecting sections: Legacies, We Are Here, Why?, Evidence, and Resistance. We begin with Legacies because the current increased climate of hate in this country didn’t begin with the 2016 election, and to find its roots we must look to U.S. history.
Fulcrum Publishing
Writers from around the world were asked to consider the devastating nature of conflict-inner wars, outer wars, public battles, and personal losses. Their answers, in the form of poignant poetry and essays, examine war in all its permutations, from Ireland to Iraq and everywhere in between, this moving anthology encompasses a wide range of voices. Edited by MariJo Moore.
Johns Hopkins University Press
A Guide for Families, Friends and Caregivers
INDIGENOUS THOUGHTS CONCERNING THE UNIVERSE
Renegade Planets Publishing, edited by MariJo Moore.
"All the tribes say the universe is just the product of mind... It fits perfectly with the quantum. Indians believe the universe is mind, but they explore the spiritual end of it, not the physical end." —Vine DeLoria Jr.
Gunpowder Press
Women in a Golden State includes poems and micro-essays from across California, ranging from awarded Poets Laureate to writers who are finding new forms of expression. The collection examines the mythology and reality of being a woman of a certain age, especially in youth-obsessed California, inviting its readers to reconsider aging not as an end, but as an ongoing journey—one filled with beauty, strength, and boundless possibilities.
WRITERS ON MULTIRACIAL IDENTITY & BOTH/AND BELONGING
Beacon Press-Penguin Random House, coming October 2026
Edited by Anne Liu Kellor
29 personal essays exploring mixed identity, belonging, family, racism, community and the paradoxical ways of being in the world Mixed people carry lifelong embodied knowledge about existing in non-binary, intersectional worlds. Mixed Roots presents 29 personal essays that complicate the narrative around race and identity—dispelling narrow ideas that there is ever one “right” or singular way for folks to identify.
Born out of a community of writers formed through editor Anne Liu Kellor’s annual writing workshop, Mixed Roots is filled with pieces infused with a deep examination of privilege, microaggressions, whiteness, ancestral trauma, internalized racism, and paradoxical truths—going beyond common tropes found in many mixed-race narratives. Highlighting various Asian, Black, Native, Latine, and Arab mixed voices from writers ranging from their 20s to 70s, Mixed Roots invites more multiracial and mixed roots people in to actively contribute to the dialogue around race, whether or not they publicly identify as “mixed.”
A powerful collection of personal truths and cultural insight, Mixed Roots reveals how community and narrative can be useful tools to see how alike we are. We all carry in our bodies the historical legacies, confusion, trauma, and harm caused by racialized experiences—Mixed Roots says we are multilayered, not easily defined or contained by one story, and as such, can speak to us all.
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