Doors Open at 6:30pm, refreshments served. 

SUSAN DEVAN HARNESS (Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes) presents:“RACIALIZED: Power Structures in American Indian Transracial Adoption.” Harness is WVU’s 2025 Native American Studies Author-in-Residence and anassociate producer of Daughter of a Lost Bird. Her award-winning bookBitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption has won wide acclaim...‘Making sense of her family, the American Indian history of assimilation, and thevery real—but culturally constructed—concept of race have helped Harnessanswer the often puzzling questions of stereotypes and explore a sense ofnonbelonging, the meaning of family, and the importance of forgiveness and self-acceptance. Bitterroot provides a deep, rich context in which to experience life.’ 

ABOUT THIS DOCUMENTARY FILM, Daughter of a Lost Bird: “Lost birds” is a term for Native children adopted out of their tribalcommunities. Beautiful and intimate, the film follows Native adoptee Kendra Mylnechuk Potter on her journeyto find her birth mother, April, also a Native adoptee, and return to her Lummi homelands in Washington.With a sensitive yet unflinching lens, director Brooke Swaney (Blackfeet/Salish) documents the twoconnecting with relatives and navigating what it means to be Native and to belong to a tribe from the outsidelooking in. Along the way, Kendra uncovers generations of emotional and spiritual beauty and pain andcomes to the startling realization that she is a living legacy of U.S. assimilationist policy. By sharing a deeplypersonal experience of inherited cultural trauma, the film opens the door to broader and more complicatedconversations about the erasure of Native culture and questions of identity surrounding adoption."This poignant story provides living proof that history is not only the past, but the present too."Human Rights Watch Film Festival