Susan Devan Harness

In the mid-1960’s two year old Victoria Charmaine was removed from her Salish family and adopted by a white couple. She was renamed Susan.

Her white father held many of the typical racial stereotypes against Indians “Goddam-crazy-drunken-warwhoops”.

Her mother loved her dearly but fought mental illness.

Neither wanted their daughter to search for her birth family. They wanted her to grow up completely assimilated into a white world. They told her that her family had all been killed in a car crash.

But Susan’s very face and color made her a target of anti-Indian racism and she never felt accepted by the white community.

Nor was she accepted by her Indian relatives when she searched and finally found them. They saw her mannerisms, speech, body language and cultural norms as white and foreign.

She was an ‘apple’ – red on the outside, white on the inside; caught between two cultures and accepted by neither.… (mehr)

BITTERROOT is an eye-opener of a memoir. In it Susan Devan Harness movingly describes her life as a Native American child, taken from her birth mother and family before she was two, and adopted by a childless white couple. As it turned out, her adoptive parents had some serious problems of their own, the father being a bigoted alcoholic, and the mother displaying signs of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Harness recalls her life from her earliest memories all the way up to the present. There are telling incidents of physical, sexual and emotional abuse during her younger years, as her family moved around a lot in Washington, Oregon and Montana until her parents' marriage ended in divorce. And there were some wild years of out-of-control drinking, drug use and promiscuity during her first college years, until she flunked out and had to find some temp jobs. Throughout these years she felt the sting of being an "in-between," neither Indian nor White. And in her early interactions with other Indian youths, was often called an "apple," the Indian equivalent of an "oreo."

But Harness did finally finish college, married and had two sons. The mystery of her birth mother and "other family," however, continued to haunt her, perhaps even causing her frequent bouts of depression. Eventually she tracked down her birth mother - an alcoholic depressive - and other family members on the Flathead Indian Reservation. But immediate acceptance is not forthcoming, and it takes Harness years of digging and research - she even goes back to college in her forties to earn a graduate degree - to piece together her origins and begin to understand that earlier family. But even now she knows she'll probably always inhabit that in-between world, never quite accepted as either Indian or White. Harness has become a sought-after speaker on the subject of transracial adoption, taking comfort in advice once offered by a much older man, similarly affected, who told her -

"Never stop telling people what has happened to us, what's been done to us. They need to know. "

This memoir is testament that Harness has taken that advice to heart. She is telling people what happened, not just to her, but to an entire race of people, and the far-reaching, often damaging effects of transracial adoption. Highly recommended, especially for those interested in Native American Studies.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (mehr)