and Author-in-Residence Susan Devan Harness
WVU’s LGBTQ+ Center hosts this award-winning film that tracks the lives of six houseless LGBTQ+ young people. Advocates from the local community and West Virginia will lead the evening’s discussion.
Wednesday April 2, 2025
7:00 - 9:00 PM
4002 Field Hall, WVU Downtown Campus
Doors open at 6:30 Refreshments Served Open to the Public
WVU’s LGBTQ+ Center hosts "A Road to Home", an award-winning film that tracks the lives of six houseless LGBTQ+ young people over an 18-month-long period. Their lives reflect the experiences of the estimated 500,000 houseless youth on American streets, 40% of whom are LGBTQ+. For some of these people, being LGBTQ+ is the third strike against them, for they’ve grown up as people of color from poor households. All six youth were rejected by their families. Following them around New York City offers glimpses of how they learned to survive in the streets while struggling to find beds and some sense of purpose and direction for their lives.
In the course of their journeys, four receive aid from the Ali Forney Center, a program devoted solely to houseless LGBTQ+ youth. Founder Carl Siciliano’s struggle to keep the Center’s programs alive mirrors the journeys of the youths themselves. The film shares not only the dangers, fears, and lonely anxiety of houselessness, but also the resulting heart wounds that must be healed. The people in this film are determined that their traumas will not define them for the rest of their lives.
In addition to the film, Author-In-Residence Susan Devan Harness presents “Racialized: Power Structures in American Indian Transracial Adoption.”
Wednesday April 9, 2025
7:00 - 9:00 PM
4002 Field Hall, WVU Downtown Campus
Doors open at 6:30 Refreshments Served Open to the Public
“Lost birds” is a term for Native children adopted out of their tribal communities. Beautiful and intimate, the film follows Native adoptee Kendra Mylnechuk Potter on her journey to 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 two connecting with relatives and navigating what it means to be Native and to belong to a tribe from the outside looking in. Along the way, Kendra uncovers generations of emotional and spiritual beauty and pain and comes to the startling realization that she is a living legacy of U.S. assimilationist policy. By sharing a deeply personal experience of inherited cultural trauma, the film opens the door to broader and more complicated conversations 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
Susan Devan Harness (Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes) is WVU’s 2025 Native American Studies Author-in-Residence and an associate producer of Daughter of a Lost Bird. Her award-winning book Bitterroot: A Salish Memoir of Transracial Adoption has won wide acclaim...‘Making sense of her family, the American Indian history of assimilation, and the very real—but culturally constructed—concept of race have helped Harness answer the often puzzling questions of stereotypes and explore a sense of non-belonging, the meaning of family, and the importance of forgiveness and self-acceptance... Bitterroot provides a deep, rich context in which to experience life.’
The Film Series is made possible by the WVU Community Human Rights Film fund established by Morgantown residents Carol Howe Hamblen and Don Spencer. and is overseen by WVU’s Native American Studies Program. Additional support is provided by the WVU LGBTQ+ Center and the Native American Studies Program, which coordinates the Film Fund.
In the spring of 2024, the WVU Native American Studies Program hosted two Human Rights film screenings and discussions: “Amá” (April 10), the poignant story of involuntary sterilization of thousands of Native American women, and “Madan Sara” (March 27), the rich story of women entrepreneurs who are the foundation of Haiti's markets. View the 2024 Human Rights Film Series. Learn more about the 2024 Human Rights Film Series.