Tribeless

For many adoptees, feeling out of place with no sense of true belonging is all too common. From the time she was a small child, Shana Ross struggled with these emotions. She felt mismatched from her family and her environment - like an outsider waiting to be let in.

And then the truth came: her parents told her she was adopted. From that moment forward, Shana felt that her inner nature overruled nurture at every turn. She felt isolated and alone.

Tribeless is Shana's account of her tumultuous upbringing by parents who never understood the biracial child they adopted from an agency in 1950s Texas. She shares the pivotal events that finally pushed her to challenge the Texas court system in 1994 to unseal her closed birth records and begin a two-year search for her birth mother that ended in heartbreaking failure. Her quest gained new hope with the advent of online DNA testing that led to the discovery of her accepting tribe twenty-two years after her search first began.

Tribeless: Discovering the Truth about Nature vs. Nurture as One Woman Finds Her Birth Mother is a guiding memoir for adoptees who have craved a family that truly understood them - for those who have been waiting for their true tribe.