Terra Trevor is an essayist, a memoirist, a contributor to fifteen books, and the author of two memoirs, We Who Walk the Seven Ways (University of Nebraska Press), and Pushing up the Sky (KAAN). Her essays appear widely 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), Voices Confronting Pediatric Brain Tumors (John Hopkins University Press), Take A Stand: Art Against Hate (A Raven Chronicles Anthology), and Unpapered: Writers Consider Native American Identity and Cultural Belonging (University of Nebraska Press). 

 

She is the granddaughter of Oklahoma sharecroppers, born in the early 1950s, and raised in a large extended family in a banjo and fiddle tradition, rich with storytelling and music. She grew up in Compton, California. Of mixed descent, including Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, German, her stories are steeped in themes of place and belonging, and are shaped and infused by her identity as a mixed-blood, and her connection to the landscape.

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 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 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. 

Native American And Indigenous Studies | Memoir 

University of Nebraska Press

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