Thinning Blood
An Indigenous Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by The Millions
“Slender and poetic…mov[es] with ease from memoir to Native history to myth and back again.” —Maud Newton, New York Times Book Review
A vibrant new voice blends Native folklore and the search for identity in a fierce debut work of personal history.
Leah Myers may be the last member of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe in her family line, due to her tribe’s strict blood quantum laws. In this unflinching and intimate memoir, Myers excavates the stories of four generations of women in order to leave a record of her family. Beginning with her great-grandmother, the last full-blooded Native member in their lineage, she connects each woman with her totem to construct her family’s totem pole: protective Bear, defiant Salmon, compassionate Hummingbird, and perched on top, Raven.
As she pieces together their stories, Myers weaves in tribal folktales, the history of the Native genocide, and Native mythology. Throughout, she tells the larger story of how, as she puts it, her “culture is being bleached out,” offering sharp vignettes of her own life between White and Native worlds: her naïve childhood love for Pocahontas, her struggles with the Klallam language, the violence she faced at the hands of a close White friend as a teenager.
Crisp and powerful, Thinning Blood is at once a bold reclamation of one woman’s identity and a searingly honest meditation on heritage, family, and what it means to belong.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A Native American woman searches for meaning and a true sense of home in this beautiful, gut-wrenching memoir. As the last one in her family who meets the official bloodline requirements for membership in the S’Klallam tribe, author Leah Myers sets out to tell the stories of four generations of her matriarchal lineage. Along the way, she takes inspiration from S’Klallam mythology, constructing a metaphorical totem pole from her great-grandmother—the mighty bear holding up the bottom—to herself, who’s like the raven, perched atop their lineage. Myers deftly blends personal anecdotes with historical accounts of indigenous genocide and boarding-school indoctrination. Her beautifully fluid and bitingly funny voice creates a patchwork of pain and hope. Thinning Blood is a book that will stay with us for a long time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this searing debut, Myers—the last member of the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe in her family line—explores what it means to be "a Native woman at the end of a culture." "No one taught me to be Native American," she begins. As a child, Myers yearned to see herself in mainstream media, but found only offensive stereotypes. As an adult, she began to learn the S'Klallam language and folklore, and here adapts the Pacific Northwest tradition of totem storytelling to chart the impacts of an "extinction happening in real time" on her own lineage. She represents her great-grandmother, whose children with a Russian Jewish immigrant alienated her from both Native and white communities, as a bear; her grandmother, who reconnected with her heritage late in life, as the determined salmon; and her mother as the restless hummingbird. Myers, meanwhile, is the creative raven, tasked with keeping their family history alive. Myers's fierce testimony is both record and reclamation of that history, told simply and beautifully. Any family would be lucky to have their story handled with this much care.
