2019 High Plains Book Award Winner for the Creative Nonfiction and Indigenous Writer categories In Bitterroot Susan Devan Harness traces her journey to understand the complexities and struggles of being an American Indian child adopted by a white couple and living in the rural American West.
In the process Bitterroot also provides a deep and rich context in which to experience life..
Making sense of her family, the American Indian history of assimilation, and the very real-but culturally constructed-concept of race helped Harness answer the often puzzling questions of stereotypes, a sense of nonbelonging, the meaning of family, and the importance of forgiveness and self-acceptance.
In her fifties she realized that the concept of "home" she had attributed to the reservation existed only in her imagination.
In her forties Harness decided to get serious about finding answers when, conducting oral histories, she talked with other transracial adoptees.
Meeting her biological family in her early thirties generated even more questions.
New questions followed her through college and into her twenties when she started her own family.
Harness\'s search for answers revolved around her need to ascertain why she was the target of racist remarks and why she seemed always to be on the outside looking in.
He replied that they had died in a car accident not long after she was born-except they hadn\'t, as Harness would learn in a conversation with a social worker a few years later.
When Harness was fifteen years old, she questioned her adoptive father about her "real" parents. 2019 High Plains Book Award Winner for the Creative Nonfiction and Indigenous Writer categories In Bitterroot Susan Devan Harness traces her journey to understand the complexities and struggles of being an American Indian child adopted by a white couple and living in the rural American West
