Inspiring Women Magazine November 2023

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Building Bridges Between
Cultures
Psychotherapist Harriet Cannon, FAUSA, returned to the United States
from a posting in Chile with a new passion, helping others with
cultural transitions.
My parents fell in love at a Army base
after WWII. They were from different
parts of the United States, with
different religions, different world views, urban
and rural. Family holidays were spent driving the
blue highways from Detroit to the northeast and
southeast to visit family. Both my parents loved
history. We would stop in small towns for the
flavor of regional delights, parks and monuments.
Although much of my childhood was spent in
suburban Detroit, Michigan, my heart's home,
where our family clan gathered every summer,
was the South Carolina low country and our
family cottage built on stilts. When my father
died, my mother went to work full time. Back
in the day, there wasn’t affordable summer
childcare. My brothers and I spent summers
with my grandparents at the beach, free and
safe, body surfing and crabbing with my uncles
and cousins. Along with wanderlust, at an early
age, my brothers and I developed the skill of
code-switching between our diverse family
cultures to keep everything copacetic.
Harriet Cannon
I went to Stephens College, then transferred
to the University of Southern California, where
I became interested in social justice. After
graduation, my first job was as one of two white
teachers at 112 th Street School in Los Angeles in
the 1970s, personally experiencing
the challenges faced by ethnic
minorities in a workplace setting.
The Atacama
Desert in
Northern Chile,
the driest place
in the world
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