, center, in a yearbook photo from 1981 with fellow graduates at Westmount High. By Dan Bilefsky Published Oct. 5, 2020Updated Nov. 3, 2020

MONTREAL — There were heirs to Canadan fortunes who lived in hillside mansions and arrived at their high school in luxury cars.

There were children of Caribbean immigrants who commuted by bus or subway from a historically Black neighborhood.

There were Anglophones, Francophones and kids from Chinatown. And then there was Kamala Harris, an extroverted American teenager who had moved to Montreal from California at age 12, dreamed of becoming a lawyer and liked dancing to Diana Ross and Michael Jackson.

Thrown into one of Montreal’s most diverse public high schools, the young Ms. Harris — whose father was from Jamaica and mother from — identified as African-American, her friends from high school recalled. At the same time, they said, she deftly navigated the competing racial and social divisions at the school.

“In high school, you were either in the white or the Black group,” said Wanda Kagan, her best friend from Westmount High School, who had a white mother and an African-American father. “We didn’t fit exactly into either, so we made ourselves fit into both.”

The future senator spent her formative adolescent years in a multicultural environment typical of many Canadian public schools. As she makes history as the first woman of color on a presidential ticket, Canadians have claimed her as a native daughter, seeing her as an embodiment of the country’s progressive politics.

Wanda Kagan, Kamala Harris’s best friend from high school, lived with Ms. Harris’s family for a time during a difficult period in her adolescence. Credit...Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times “’s new running mate, Kamala Harris, is a Westmount High graduate,” gushed the CBC, the Canadian national broadcaster. Such is the Kamala mania here that the school has designated an official to field media calls, which have come from across Canada as well as Latin America and Japan.

Some also have a sense that if her ticket wins, it could mend Canada’s fraught ties with a once dependable ally.

“She got educated in her earliest years through a Canadian lens and that was bound to have rubbed off,” said Bruce Heyman, a former ambassador to Canada under President .

Ms. Harris came to Montreal with her sister, Maya, and her mother, Dr. Harris, a breast cancer researcher who was divorced from the girls’ father, an eminent economist, and moved the family to pursue her career.

Ms. Harris, who was born in 1964, has downplayed her time in Canada amid a racist misinformation campaign that she was not born American. She declined to comment for this article.

But in her memoir, “: An American Journey,” she described the culture shock of the move.

“I was 12 years old, and the thought of moving away from sunny California in February, in the middle of the school year, to a French- speaking foreign city covered in 12 feet of snow was distressing,” she wrote.

The area of Westmount in Montreal was home to many of Westmount High’s wealthy students. Credit...Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times “My mother tried to make it sound like an adventure, taking us to buy our first down jackets and mittens, as though we were going to be explorers of the great northern winter,” she wrote. “But it was hard for me to see it that way.”

Her mother initially sent the sisters to a Francophone school. It was a tumultuous time in Quebec, with an ascendant nationalist party and culture wars over language.

“I used to joke that I felt like a duck, because all day long at our new school I’d be saying, ‘Quoi? Quoi? Quoi?’” — What? What? What? — Ms. Harris wrote in her memoir. At age 13, childhood friends said, Kamala mobilized local children to demonstrate in front of their apartment building because the owner had banned children from playing on the lawn. He backed down.

Eventually the family settled on the top floor of a spacious Victorian home in an affluent neighborhood bordering Westmount, one of Canada’s wealthiest districts.

“It was a comfortable home, with high ceilings, hardwood floors, Persian carpets,” recalled Ms. Kagan, who first met Ms. Harris in eighth grade and lived with her family for a time to escape an abusive stepfather.

In September, Ms. Harris wrote a tweet about her friend’s abuse, saying, “One of the reasons I wanted to be a prosecutor was to protect people like her.”

Westmount High, which counts Leonard Cohen among its alumni, was founded in 1874. Its catchment included not only the moneyed Westmount municipality, but also Little Burgundy — once known as “the Harlem of the North” — whose Black churches, Black community center and storied jazz clubs made it a center for Black culture.

In 1981, Ms. Harris graduated from Westmount High, one of the most diverse high schools in Montreal.Credit...Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times

The school was roughly 60 percent white and 40 percent Black in 1978 to 1981, when Ms. Harris attended it, said Garvin Jeffers, a former principal who then led the math department. Still, Ms. Kagan said the school’s divisions “were more about who had the latest Jordache jeans than about race.”

Ms. Harris straddled the school’s diverse worlds, her friends said.

Hugh Kwok, the child of Chinese immigrants, can be seen in a 1981 yearbook photo with Ms. Harris’s arm leaning on his shoulder. Ms. Harris, he said, “melted in with everyone.”

Hugh Kwok, who has built and repaired Porsches with his father for 40 years, remembers Ms. Harris as a social butterfly [??]. Credit...Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times

Anu Chopra Sharma, who was in Ms. Harris’s French and math classes, recalled the two bonding over having Indian names. “She said to me, ‘You have an Indian name but you don’t look Indian,’ and I said the same to her,” she said.

“You couldn’t easily label her,” Ms. Sharma added.

Although Ms. Harris mingled widely, Ms. Kagan said “she identified as being African-American.” She found belonging in the Black community, and “was drawn to the Little Burgundy kids.”

She recalled that she and Ms. Harris attended Black community dance parties and griped about having to be home by 11 p.m.

Above all, she found sisterhood in an all-female dance troupe, Super Six, later Midnight Magic. The girls wore glittering homemade costumes and performed aerobically charged disco moves in front of the school and at homes for the elderly. Ms. Harris was called Angel. [photo: A collection of photographs from Wanda Kagan showing her with Ms. Harris, including when they were in the Super Six dance troupe.}

Trevor Williams, now a basketball coach and teacher, dated Ms. Harris’s sister, Maya, in high school.Credit...Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times

He recalled that the Harris sisters played down their relative affluence. “I didn’t even realize at the time that their mother was this high- powered doctor.” Ms. Harris was prepared and forceful in intellectual discussions, her classmates recalled. She was also active — performing in fashion shows, working on the yearbook and part of the Pep Club, whose members yelled and sang at school events accompanied by a rabbit mascot, Purple Peter.

Ms. Harris, center on the right page, in 1981 with fellow members of the Pep Club, in her graduating year at Westmount High.

At the heart of it all, however, was her family life.

Ms. Harris’s mother was an abiding influence. Ms. Kagan recalled the warmth of their home, where Indian rice dishes simmered and studying was mandatory. “Her mom was strong and instilled that in Kamala,” she said. Every summer, the girls filled a freezer chest with blanched tomatoes in plastic bags, sucking the air out with straws. The tomatoes were used for soups and sauces.

Dr. Gopalan Harris, who had a doctorate in endocrinology and nutrition from Berkeley, spent 16 years in Montreal, at the Jewish General Hospital and McGill University Faculty of Medicine. She developed a method for assessing cancerous breast tissue that became a standard procedure nationwide.

As high school drew to a close, the Canadian version of the prom arrived. Ms. Harris was part of a group of girls who attended without dates so that girls who hadn’t been asked out wouldn’t feel excluded.

“We decided that we were going to change the culture,” Ms. Kagan said. “Kamala was, like, ‘Let’s do it!’”

The next step for Ms. Harris was Howard University in Washington. She had already been pining for home.

In the high school yearbook she described her most cherished memory as a 1980 trip to Los Angeles. She thanked her mother and encouraged her sister: “Be cool MA YA!” Her favorite expression? “Naw, I’m just playing.”

“By the time I got to high school, I had adjusted to our new surroundings,” she wrote in her memoir. “What I hadn’t gotten used to was the feeling of being homesick for my country. I felt this constant sense of yearning to be back home.” he Making of Kamala Harris

How Kamala Harris’s Immigrant Parents Found a Home, and Each Other, in a Black Study Group Sept. 13, 2020

What Kamala Harris Learned About Power at Howard Oct. 14, 2020

Kamala Harris’s Father, a Footnote in Her Speeches, Is a Prominent Economist

How Kamala Harris’s Family in India Helped Shape Her Values Aug. 16, 2020

Dan Bilefsky is a Canada correspondent for The New York Times, based in Montreal. He was previously based in London, Paris, Prague and New York. He is author of the book "The Last Job," about a gang of aging English thieves called "The Bad Grandpas." @DanBilefsky

A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 6, 2020, Section A, Page 17 of the New York edition with the headline: As Cool Teen in Canada, Harris Yearned for Home. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/us/politics/kamala-harris- howard.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article

Kamala Harris’s Father, a Footnote in Her Speeches, Is a Prominent Economist

Donald J. Harris, a Jamaican-born economics professor, has expressed regret that a custody battle brought his close contact with his daughters “to an abrupt halt.”

Donald Harris holding his daughter Kamala in April 1965.Credit...Kamala Harris campaign, via Associated Press

By Ellen Barry Nov. 7, 2020 [Read our profile of Kamala Harris, the first woman elected U.S. vice president.]

In a warm, encyclopedic tribute to her family Wednesday night, as she formally accepted the vice-presidential nomination, Senator Kamala Harris skimmed past any discussion of her father, Donald J. Harris, a Jamaican-born professor of economics at .

The reason is common to many of Ms. Harris’s generation: She is a child of divorce, raised by a single mother who became her most profound influence.

As Ms. Harris has stepped into the national spotlight, Dr. Harris, now 81 and long retired from teaching, has remained mostly silent. His only recent comments about her, published on a Jamaican website run by an acquaintance, express a combination of pride in his daughter and bitterness over their estrangement.

He scolded her in a letter, which has since been removed from the site, for joking in an interview that, growing up in a Jamaican family, it was natural that she had smoked marijuana. “Speaking for myself and my immediate Jamaican family, we wish to categorically dissociate ourselves from this travesty,” he wrote.

Dr. Harris did not respond to requests for comment for this article. Despite his low profile in the election cycle, Dr. Harris is not an obscure figure. He was the first Black scholar to receive tenure in Stanford’s economics department, and a prominent critic of mainstream economic theory from the left. The Stanford Daily, reporting in 1976, described him as a “Marxist scholar,” and said there was some opposition to granting him tenure because he was “too charismatic, a pied piper leading students astray from neo-Classical economics.” One of his former students at Stanford, Robert A. Blecker, now a professor of economics at American University, said Dr. Harris’s work questioned orthodox assumptions about growth — for instance that lower wages would increase employment rates, or that lower interest rates always result in increased investment. “He was certainly very outspoken and prominent in the profession at one time, but not in a public way,” Dr. Blecker said. “He was certainly not shy. When I saw Kamala grill Judge Kavanaugh at his hearing,” during his confirmation for the U.S. Supreme Court, “I saw echoes of her father grilling someone in a seminar.”

Dr. Harris was raised in a landowning family on the north coast of Jamaica by a paternal grandmother whom he described as “reserved and stern in look, firm with ‘the strap,’ but capable of the most endearing and genuine acts of love, affection and care.” Reserved and highly intelligent, he was more cut out for academia than activism, contemporaries said.

He arrived at the University of California, Berkeley, as a graduate student in 1961. There, he met Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian graduate student his age, who was pursuing a Ph.D. in nutrition and endocrinology.

Ms. Harris, their elder daughter, has written that the two “fell in love at Berkeley while participating in the civil rights movement,” and described learning about protests from a “stroller’s-eye view.” When the children were very young, Dr. Harris got a series of teaching jobs at colleges in Illinois and Wisconsin, moving the family repeatedly. The couple separated in 1969, when Ms. Harris was 5, and divorced two years later.

In “The Truths We Hold,” her 2018 memoir, Ms. Harris wrote that “had they been a little older, a little more emotionally mature, maybe the marriage could have survived. But they were so young. My father was my mother’s first boyfriend.”

The divorce was bitter. Ms. Harris recalls inviting both her parents to her high school graduation, “even though I knew they wouldn’t speak to each other,” and initially fearing that her mother would not show up. (She did, in a “very bright red dress and heels,” Ms. Harris wrote.)

Dr. Harris, in his 2018 essay, said his early, close contact with his daughters “came to an abrupt halt” after a contentious custody battle. He said the divorce settlement had been “based on the false assumption by the State of California that fathers cannot handle parenting (especially in the case of this father, ‘a neegroe from da eyelans,’ was the Yankee stereotype, who might just end up eating his children for breakfast!) Nevertheless I persisted, never giving up on my love for my children.”

This friction did not slow Dr. Harris’s professional rise, and he was granted tenure first at the University of Wisconsin and then at Stanford University. Dr. Harris’s 1978 book, “Capital Accumulation and Income Distribution,” is dedicated “to Kamala and Maya.”

His work was followed closely in Jamaica, said Renee Anne Shirley, who was an adviser to Jamaica’s prime minister in the early 2000s, a period when Dr. Harris served as an economic consultant to the government.

She recalled reading Dr. Harris’s dispatches from the United States as far back as 1965, when he published a lengthy article about Malcolm X in The Sunday Gleaner.

“In three years, he got tenure — think about it, a Black man — and then he left and went to go to Stanford? He is a big thing for us,” Ms. Shirley said. “He pushed the boundaries. He was way ahead of his time.”

Students described him as an attentive mentor. Lisa Cook, now a professor of economics and international relations at Michigan State University, recalled visiting him at Stanford in the 1980s, when she was weighing whether to pursue a doctorate in economics.

She said he treated her with unusual deference, inviting her to join him for a meal in the faculty club.

“I went to each one of the top 10 programs in the country, and nobody else took me to the faculty club,” Dr. Cook said.

Dr. Harris also stood out because he had deep knowledge of the historically Black college she had attended. Perhaps, she said, this was because his daughter Kamala had enrolled at Howard University, studying economics.

“Everybody wants the best for their children,” she said. “I’m sure he was hoping someone at Howard was taking Kamala under their wing.”

Ellen Barry is The Times's New England bureau chief. She has previously served as The Times's Russia and South Asia bureau chief and was part of a team that won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. @EllenBarryNYT

A version of this article appears in print on Aug. 21, 2020, Section A, Page 13 of the New York edition with the headline: A Prominent Economist Watches His Daughter’s Rise, From a Distance. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Correction: Aug. 20, 2020 An earlier version of this article misspelled the last name of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. It is Kavanaugh, not Kavanagh.