Resources
Welcome to the MidWest Mixed Resource Library!
Our goal is to connect mixed folks and transracial adoptees with local and educational resources for learning, healing, and community building.
Within, Between, and Beyond
Book Highlights
Visit the physical resource library at the "Within, Between, and Beyond" exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art
Organizations
Mental Health Resources
Nonfiction books
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza
Anzaldúa, Gloria
Aunt Lute Books, 3rd ed., 2007
Somebody’s Children: The Politics of Transracial and Transnational Adoption.
Briggs, Laura
Duke University Press, 2012
An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States
Dunbar-Oritz, Roxanne
Beacon Press, 2015
The Intimacies of Four Continents
Lowe, Lisa
Durham: Duke University Press, 2015
Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality
Mahtani, Minelle
UBC Press; Reprint edition 2015
The Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race
Ocampo, Anthony Christian
Stanford University Press, 2016
Blues Vision: African American Writing from Minnesota
Pate, Alexs and Pamela Fletcher and J. Otis Powell, eds.
Minnesota Historical Society Press: 2015
Invisible Asians: Korean American Adoptees, Asian American Experiences, and Racial Exceptionalism
Nelson, Kim Park
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016
A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota
Shin, Sun Yung, ed.
Minnesota Historical Society Press: 2016
The Black Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) Mental Health Collective (MHC) was formed in January 2019 due to a community desire to create a radical healing space to foster conversations around the topic of Mental Health and Wellbeing in our communities. We acknowledge that much of the current resources/services at the University of Minnesota fit within traditional white western mental health framework and our collective strives to disrupt that model. Our group is open to students (undergraduate and graduate), staff, and faculty at the University of Minnesota.
Black Table Arts is a community driven arts cooperative located in Minneapolis, Minnesota gathering black communities through the arts toward better black futures. Complete with a bookstore, shared workspace and a performance space (BTA) makes bold the connection between art and grassroots organizing by providing programs that invite local artists to see themselves as change makers and organizers of their collective liberation.
Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) Association is a collective of scholars, artists, community activists, clinicians, and students whose work analyzes and critiques social, cultural, and political institutions based on dominant conceptions of race. CMRS emphasizes the fluidity of race and other intersecting identities to critique processes of racialization and social stratification. CMRS works to undo local and global systemic injustice rooted in systems of racism and white supremacy through scholarship, teaching, advocacy, the arts, activism, and other forms of social justice work.
Founded in 1998, KAAN is an all-volunteer organization that is a special project under The Foundation for Enhancing Communities, fiscal sponsor. Our mission is to improve the lives of Korean-born adoptees by connecting the community and providing opportunities for dialogue, education, and support.
NPA’s mission is to strengthen, cultivate, and improve the lives of adoptees by building community power. Through solution-focused action, we advance adoptee justice by telling our own stories and collectively working towards systemic change within adoption.
Established in 2015, the Race, Indigeneity, Gender & Sexuality Initiative (RIGS) was created to support innovative research, teaching, and community-building for scholars engaged with issues of race, indigeneity, gender, and sexuality. RIGS is dedicated to bringing faculty and students together to pursue lines of inquiry that challenge systems of power and inequality, assert human dignity, and imagine
We envision a world without racism that honors the culture, knowledge, power, and healing of Black, Indigenous, and communities of color. We are committed to building power through collective cultural & healing strategies for racial justice across Minnesota using organizing, leadership training, community policy & research. Our Theory of Change drives our ecological model of organizing where we all have a role to play in building power for impactful change with community and systems. We believe that by tending to the soil or those closest to the issues, using tools that uplift their leadership, culture, wellbeing and expertise, we can overcome toxins in our environment, in turn allowing us to enjoy the harvest of long-term change for racial justice.
Peer articles
Essays & poetry
Hybrida: Poems
Chang, Tina
W.W. Norton, 2019
islands of decolonial love
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake
Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2013
citizen: An american lyric
Rankine, Claudia
Graywolf Press, 2014
Not My White Savior
Lee, Julayne
Rare Bird Books, 2018
The Fire Next Time
Baldwin, James
Dial Press, 1963
Mixed: My life in black and white
Nissel, Angela
Villard, 2006
Unbearable Splendor
Shin, Sun Yung
Coffee House Press, 2016
Rough and Savage
Shin, Sun Yung
Coffee House Press, 2012
sister outsider: essays and speeches
Lorde, Audre
Crossing Press, Reprint 2007
catrachos
Guzmán, Roy G.
Graywolf Press, 2020
Intimations
Smith, Zadie
Penguin Books, 2020
War Baby / Love Child: Mixed Race Asian American Art
Kina, Laura
University of Washington Press, 2013.
EMERGING FEMINISMS, (F)Act of Blackness: The Politics of Mixed Race Identity.” The Feminist Wire, 2016.
Article written by Jazlyn Andrews for The Feminist Wire.
Love Imagined: Sherry
“Sherry Quan Lee approaches writing as a community resource and as culturally based art of an ordinary everyday practical aesthetic. Lee is a Community Instructor at Metropolitan State University (Intro to Creative Writing, Advanced Creative Writing), and has taught at Intermedia Arts, and the Loft Literary Center.”
Mixed American Life
“Fight racism and bias by always questioning race.
We curate and share photos, articles and videos on the topics of mixed culture, mixed heritage and mixed identity; whether mixed by proximity, relationships, or adoption. We also post unique articles by various bloggers, and we especially like to discuss intersectionality.
All this blends with our mission of reducing xenophobia and hate which we blog about at Community Village, which then lead to starting the blog OppressionMonitor to expose those against peace, multiculturalism and pluralism.”
The Tragic Mulatto Myth.
Pilgrim, David. Ferris State University, 2000
“Bill of Rights for Mixed People” and “The Multiracial Oath of Responsibility.”
Root, Maria P.P.
Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies
“(JCMRS) is a peer-reviewed online interdisciplinary journal dedicated to Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS). JCMRS functions as an open-access forum for critical mixed race studies and will be available without cost to anyone with access to the Internet. JCMRS is sponsored by UC Santa Barbara's Department of Sociology and is hosted on the eScholarship Repository, which is part of the eScholarship initiative of the California Digital Library.”
Mixed Media
a latto thought
Host: CA Davis
a LATTO thought’s mission is to promote a new era of critical mixed race studies that compares and deconstructs race and its application in society. The show evaluates contemporary misperceptions about mixed race identity through the lenses of history, science studies, and personal perspectives in a way that is pro-Black, antiracist, and self-critical. The intent is to arm individuals with the clarity of how systems of law and power shape our feelings about who — not ‘what’ — we as individuals are so that we can begin to reshape the societies in which we collectively live. After all, we’re all already mixed. We’re simply taught to not see it that way.
All my relations
Host: Matika Milbur and Adrienne Keene
All My Relations is a podcast hosted by Matika Wilbur (Swinomish and Tulalip) and Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation) to explore our relationships— relationships to land, to our creatural relatives, and to one another. Each episode invites guests to delve into a different topic facing Native peoples today as we keep it real, play games, laugh a lot, and even cry sometimes.
Adapted
Host: Kaomi Goetz
ADAPTED PODCAST explores the experiences of Korean adoptees, from post-reunion stories, living in Korea as adults, identity and belonging and more. Since the 1950s, an estimated 200,000 Korean children were sent overseas for adoption to about a dozen countries. This transnational movement of children from Korea set a global precedent in intercountry adoption. But for decades, what was known about adoption was written and spoken about by non-adopted researchers and adoptive parents. These narratives not only failed to center the voices of adult adoptees, they presented intercountry and transracial adoption from the perspectives of parents who who didn’t understand the complicated racial complexities for adopted children of color in transracial families or the trauma of losing one’s first family and having been severed from one’s native country, culture and language. Now, 70 years since intercountry adoption began, adult adoptees have reclaimed the narrative and established themselves as the experts on their own experience.
Adoptees On
Host: Haley Radke
“Adoptees On is a gathering of incredible adopted people willing to share their intimately personal stories with you about the impact adoption has had on our lives. Listen in and you will discover that you are not alone on this journey.”
Code Switch
Host: Journalists on NPR
“Code Switch is a team of seven NPR journalists who cover race, ethnicity and culture. Our work appears on-air and online, across NPR's shows and digital outlets...
As you've probably heard, the U.S. is in the midst of a big demographic shift. Over the next few decades, people of color will come to compose a majority of the country's population, a transition that's already happened among the nation's youngest residents. Already, race, ethnicity and culture play a starring role in some of the biggest stories unfolding in the news, and that role will only increase as this demographic shift continues. We want to cover these matters with the depth, nuance, intelligence and comprehensiveness they deserve.”
Militantly Mixed
Host: Sharmane, aka MixedGirlManed
“Militantly Mixed is a podcast about race and identity from the Mixed-Race perspective. Every week, host Sharmane aka MixedGirlMane, speaks with Mixed Folk from around the globe about what it is like maneuvering the world as a Mixed-Race person.”
Blood Memory (2019)
Host: Drew Nicholas
Battles over blood quantum and ‘best interests’ resurface the untold history of America’s Indian Adoption Era – a time when nearly one-third of children were removed from tribal communities nationwide. As political scrutiny over Indian child welfare intensifies, an adoption survivor helps others find their way home through song and ceremony.
Closure (2013)
Director: Bryan Tucker
“A documentary about a transracial adoptee who finds her birth mother, and meets the rest of a family who didn't know she existed, including her birth father. A story about identity, the complexities of trans-racial adoption, and most importantly, closure.”
Geographies of kinship (2019)
Director: Deann Borshay Liem
In this powerful tale about the rise of Korea’s global adoption program, four adult adoptees return to their country of birth and recover the personal histories that were lost when they were adopted. Raised in foreign families, each sets out on a journey to reconnect with their roots, mapping the geographies of kinship that bind them to a homeland they never knew. Along the way there are discoveries and dead ends, as well as mysteries that will never be unraveled.
Children's library
Mixed: A Colorful Story
Picture Book
Chang, Aree
Henry Holt and Co., 2018
The Patchwork Bike
Picture Book
Clarke, Maxine Beneba
Candlewick Press, 2018
They Call me Guero
Middle Grades
Bowles, David
Cinco Puntos Press, 2018
Hurricane Child
Middle Grades
Callender, Kheryn
Scholastic Press, 2018
Bird
Middle Grades
Chan, Crystal
Antheneum, 2014
Front Desk
Middle Grades
Yang, Kelly
Arthur A. Levine Books, 2018
The Poet X
Young Adult
Acevedo, Elizabeth
HarperTeen, 2018
You Bring the Distant Near
Young Adult
Perkins, Mitali
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017
Black Enough: Stories of Being Young and Black in America
Young Adult
Zoboi, Ibi
Balzer + Bray, 2019.
Pride. Balzer + Bray, 2018
Funding opportunities
Gift of Identity
Type: Adoptee Travel Scholarship
Our mission is to build a fund so that ALL international adoptees have a chance to visit their birth country and explore their beginnings—accompanied by family who loves them, and supported in a way that is emotionally healthy. The Gift of Identity Fund, Ltd. provides funding to international adoptees visiting their birth country with the goal of helping them understand their identity, heritage, and culture while traveling via The Ties Program, a family based heritage program. Until now, there has been no funding for international adoptees who need to visit their birth country to feel whole, but cannot afford the expense.
Global Overseas Adoptees Link (G.O.A.L.)
Type: Korean Adoptee Resources and Scholarships
Today, hundreds of adoptees visit and live in Korea. As an adoptee-led organization, our mission first and foremost is to serve the Korean adoptee community both here and abroad. The mission of the Global Overseas Adoptees’ Link (G.O.A.’L.) organization is to act as a ‘link’ between adult adoptees and their native country by providing services and resources to its members, creating partnerships and collaborating with governmental and nongovernmental organizations while serving the local and greater communities.
Additional
Resources and
Services
Daniela GR Consulting
Decolonization education and lifestyle design coaching for living life differently.
Hey TRA
Consulting services for adoptee identity reclamation, mentoring, parenting.
Mixed Bloom Room
Working with mixed adults and parents of mixed children. In-person and virtual coaching sessions for mixed families.