Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

by Leah Myers Narrated by Kimberly Woods

Overview

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by The Millions



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. 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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

"Finely crafted…Thinning Blood is slender and poetic but also wide-ranging, moving with ease from memoir to Native history to myth and back again, yielding a blend that transcends genre."— Maud Newton New York Times Book Review

"[A] beautifully-rendered memoir…This is a quietly powerful book, and I can’t wait to see what Myers writes next."— Jaime Herndon Book Riot

"[A] searing debut…Myers's fierce testimony is both record and reclamation of [family] history, told beautifully and simply. Any family would be lucky to have their story handled with this much care."— Publishers Weekly

"A quietly elegiac memoir that could serve as an enduring historical document."— Kirkus Reviews

"This powerful, memorable debut runs hot with Leah Myers’s fierce intelligence. She admirably interrogates her relationship to identity, her place in her family’s history, and the future of her people—and demands a long-delayed justice."— Matt Bell, author of Appleseed

"Thinning Blood is a powerful testament to the power of storytelling. It is both personal and historical, factual and deeply imaginative. Leah Myers is an honest and passionate witness to the culture and people that produced her. Her essays pay tribute to the complexity of memory, and the tenacity of experience."— Emily Bernard, author of Black Is the Body

"In this powerful debut, Leah Myers reveals with unvarnished honesty something that so often remains unspoken: what it feels like to teeter on the edge of identity, to face down the specter of erasure and a dwindling sense of self. By reconstructing family history and myth, she uncovers old foundations and builds a new home atop them, throwing its doors open, miraculously, to all of us."— Francisco Cantú, author of The Line Becomes a River

Kirkus Reviews

2023-02-11
A Native American writer reflects on her ties to her dwindling tribe.

Georgia native Myers was 12 when she first traveled to the tribal homelands of the S’Klallam people in Washington state. Even though she was not raised to fully embrace her heritage, she knew that her soul had found its rightful home. In this four-part collection of essays, the author excavates the history of the women in her S’Klallam bloodline and reflects on how she may be the last person in her family who will ever carry “the title of tribal member according to our blood quantum laws.” She organizes the text like an imaginary totem pole, with each of the four family members she discusses represented through an animal spirit story and essays that intertwine their lives—and Myers’ own—with S’Klallam history and culture. Her full-blooded great-grandmother Lillian occupies the bottom of the pole. Lillian was Bear, a woman who protected those she loved, including the mother who scorned her for marrying a White man and bearing half-blood children. Next is the author’s grandmother Vivian, whom Myers envisions as Salmon. Feisty and independent, Vivian swam against the current by falling in love with a White man, running her own business, and beating breast cancer twice. Sitting atop Salmon is Hummingbird, the animal Myers associates with her mother, a kind and energetic woman always seeking to help others where she lives in Alabama. At the very top of the pole is Myers’ animal, Raven, a creature she chose for its cunning and creativity. As Myers reminds readers—through musings on the forced sterilization of Native women and the death of the S’Klallam language—her fate and the long-term fate of her tribe are one and the same. One day, her people may be “as much a myth as the sea-wolf or the thunderbird.” Thankfully, we have this record to remember.

A quietly elegiac memoir that could serve as an enduring historical document.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940159717351
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	06/13/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

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