Thinning Blood is a personal, vulnerable, open examination of identity and belonging from Leah Myers, who will likely be the last person in her family line to be a member of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe due to the blood quantum restrictions for tribal membership. She explores this concept of “thinning blood” by sharing the stories of the women who came before her, and had a higher percentage of S’Klallam blood than her: her mother, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother. Beautifully represented through the visual of a totem pole, she shares the animals she believes to represent them: Raven for herself, Hummingbird for her mother, Salmon for her grandmother, and Bear for her great-grandmother. The language was absolutely beautiful. Reading this book felt like a spiritual experience, though not always a pleasant road. I would highly recommend for anyone looking to read a firsthand Indigenous memoir or exploration of belonging that is digestible, heartfelt, and reflective.

Selfishly, I was glad to read more about a local-to-me tribe, as the S’Klallam are situated in the Olympic Peninsula, just a couple hours drive from me. Though I think that resident schools and the atrocities there are becoming more public, I had no idea that the first one was in Washington State.

Myers writes a compelling and captivating memoir that draws the reader in right from the start. She examines her place in family, culture, and identity via the effective metaphor of the totems of the past four generations of women in her family, going back to her "full-blood" great-grandmother. Myers writes directly of the struggles and harm blood quantum has created for her and her family, making an issue that seems obscure and irrelevant to most Americans into a vivid and emotive discussion. I will absolutely be following Myers's work beyond this, and I can't wait to read more of her future writings.

I went into this book expecting a mirror of my experience as a modern Native American. The author and I are both 1/8 Native American and I was interested to see if her feelings were similar to mine. I was surprised to find that our experiences were very different. I appreciated the author's attempts to reclaim the culture that she felt had been buried in her family. Although this book wasn't what I was expecting, it was nice to be reminded of the diversity that still exists among Native Americans.

Leah Myers’ work combines Native American folklore, family history, and her personal story to tell the story of four generations of women in her family. She begins with her great-grandmother who was the last full-blooded Native member in her family, then her grandmother, then her mother, then herself.

The work is divided into sections based on the totem animal and the family member it represents. The sections start with the myth/legend surrounding that animal. The author included the generally accepted telling of the myth but also tells it in a way that is more tailored to the family member it represents. This was excellently done, and I quite enjoyed how personalized this made the mythology. The rest of the section consists of memories from the author’s own life and personal history of the relative she’s discussing interspersed with relevant history and facts surrounding Native Americans. While this seems like it could feel disjointed, it never did, instead flowing quite smoothly and making for an engaging and informative read.

The author also tackles heavy topics relating to Native American identity struggles. I thought it was fascinating to learn about the blood quantum rules that are present within tribes and how that can affect a descendant’s sense of belonging and cultural ties. Much of the work was about the author feeling like she had to prove herself to everyone – white friends, other minorities in the U.S., other Native Americans, and especially to herself. Her exploration of not feeling native enough but then also feeling like an imposter when she tried to reconnect with more traditional things was moving and heartbreaking.

This poignant memoir was a touching and emotional look at a Native American woman’s life and identity and was deeply insightful. Many thanks to NetGalley and W.W. Norton and Company for allowing me to read this work. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are my own.

I loved this book! It was a quick read, poignant, so well written and enthralling. There were so many moments when I felt myself pause and think, or even do a quick google search for more depth. Myers voice is so personal, it felt like I was sitting down for a conversation with a friend.

Towards the end it started to feel a little more like a series of essays as opposed to a coherent book, and I soon realized that was actually the case for many pieces.

This is a book that will stick with me for a long time. I will probably revisit sections of it as well.

A beautiful, thought-provoking memoir. I appreciate the overall structure, which looked at each animal making up the author's totem pole. Within those chapters, the content was full of digressions and vignettes that provide a kaleidoscopic view of what it is to be Indigenous. There's a lot of heartbreak, with violence in the author's past, the way blood quantum is ushering in an end for her people, as well as the sadness of having relied on Disney's Pocahontas as a cultural touchpoint. Still, there is resilience, imagination, and profound connection that thread the story with hope.

This book was written by a woman who is very likely to be the last member of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe in her family line, due to her tribe’s strict blood quantum laws. Her great-grandmother chose to marry outside of the tribe, and that is where Myers begins sharing her family story with us, weaving together native folklore, personal reflections, and filling in the blanks where her family history isn’t clear.

And for a moment I’m going to make this about me. Because I need you to understand my perspective and why I felt so much deep love and appreciation for this book. For a while now, I’ve understood that I have native ancestors. And long before that, I often questioned it, and so did people around me sometimes. But here’s something I only recently learned. My great-grandfather, who I met only once, when I was in middle school, spoke not Spanish, but Lowland Chontal as his first language.

The thing about the word “Chontal” is that the internet tells me it’s the Nahuatl word for “stranger.” When the Spaniards arrived, they asked someone who spoke that language about those people on the mountain, and they were like, “we don’t know,” and now it’s the main word used by my family to describe our language.
It was in school that my great-grandfather learned to feel shame about that language, the only one he’d ever spoken at home, when, anytime he spoke in that tongue to his classmates, the teacher would physically reprimand him, telling him to only speak Spanish. And so he was very intentional about making sure that none of his children picked up on the language, even sending them away from the room when his siblings came over and spoke Chontal together.

Back to the book. To read about a native woman who knows that unless the rules change, even if she has kids, they will not be considered native but rather white? And for her to wrestle with the loss of identity, culture, and language that stemmed from her great-grandmother choosing to marry a white man instead of marrying within the tribe? That hit close to home. We might have grown up in different contexts and in what are now even considered different countries, but this author and I have so much in common.

There is so much I could say about this book. The writing style is beautiful. The way the writer thinks about her family and her tribe feel so familiar to me and make me feel so seen. Seeing a writer fill in the blanks where her family’s story has been lost was so meaningful to me. This book was so well-written, so beautifully poetic in its style and language, while also being a bit painful the entire time. This book is important and valuable and I’ll be screaming from the virtual rooftops about it for a while.

Thinning Blood is a searing memoir from Leah Myers, the last Jamestown S’Klallam tribal member in her lineage due to blood quantum laws. Myers blends retellings of her tribe’s folklore, her family history, her own experiences as a member of a dying tribe, and her meditations on what it means to be one of the last in a culture that is disappearing in a document meant to preserve the stories of her lineage even after the last S’Klallam tribal member is gone.

To do so, Myers structures her memoir around her own imagined personal family totem—the Bear, Salmon, Hummingbird, and Raven, representing the women in her family line, and ending with herself—in order to tell her family stories and associated legends.

Myers reflects with brutal honesty on her experiences, what it feels like to never feel “native enough”, feeling hopelessly disconnected from her tribe’s language and heritage even as she desperately wants to be a part of it, and on the painful realities of being part of a tribe that is likely dying out before her eyes. It is an unflinching meditation on identity and her own search to feels she belongs.

She also discusses how she and her loved ones have been touched by pervasive issues in Native communities such as genocide, boarding schools, violence against native women, forced sterilization, land theft, poverty, and medical issues such as diabetes and addiction, and how all of these experiences have left communities grappling with compounded trauma and shame.

All of this led to a beautiful and honest memoir on Native identity that touched me deeply, and that I would highly recommend to other readers interested in identity, race, culture, indigenous issues, social justice, intergenerational family stories, and memoirs.

Thinning Blood is a heartbreaking and fierce memoir about Indigenous identity in the United States, place and personhood, and grappling with generations of trauma caused by the American government and its agents. Myers is forthright, describing her family's and her own losses and trials with bravery and honesty and elan that makes me want to hear her read or speak in public. Working through her own personal and professional development as she goes, she constructs a way of thinking about the women of her line through spirits and totems, explaining how the matriarch of each generation handled her identity as Native American and what she taught her children about it--shame, pride, the need to obfuscate. Myers also addresses the role of popular culture in the understanding of Native Americans, citing her own childhood love of the very problematic Disney movie Pocahontas. This is an outstanding book, and I know book groups and high school and college classes will find it challenging and enduring.

This book is both gracefully written and interesting. Myers is a member of a native tribe based in the Olympic peninsula in Washington, but because of the rules defining who gets to be a member of the tribe, she's the last member of her family who will be. If she were to have a child with another member of the tribe, that child would have a higher percentage of tribal blood than she does, but since there are now only about 500 surviving members, she is closely related to most of them. So, because she is on the edge of not "qualifying," much of her life she has been forced to meditate upon the fact that she's not native enough for the tribe, but not white enough for white people.

I know much more about black experiences in the US than native ones, partly because I've read more about that, and partly because the pre-colonial native society was so incredibly complex. In a slim book, Myers manages to get across a lot of points of the history of the relations between tribes and government, which are the basics if you want to begin to understand. The blood quantum rules have been created to avoid tribes being basically turned into nothing because people who have almost no tribal heritage could be part of them, as well as to place limits on who the US government would have to agree was native and qualified for native "benefits," but at the same time they are contributing to the gradual disappearance of tribes, as in this case.

Organizing her four-generation story around the concept of a totem pole with spirit animals for each person, she makes the very interesting point that the entity at the base of the pole is the one that is the most powerful in the sequence, holding up the rest - which shows that whoever coined the expression "low man on the totem pole" had no idea what they were talking about.

It is hard to read a book like this and not think that the US has so much terrible karma banked up, because of all the people it enslaved and exterminated in order to exist, it's hard to imagine it won't all come due in a terrible way.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to add to their understanding of the history of the native people of the US.

Thanks to NetGalley for letting me read an advance copy of this book.

It always feels awkward to comment on someone's personal history. There is a lot of interesting content, some of which I think is very important to discuss as time moves forward. However, this work would have benefited from a much stronger editorial hand. It meanders in a way that would be appropriate for a collection of essays, but without that kind of clear structural organization it loses a lot of steam it could have otherwise had. I went to the author's website and checked the front of the galley, and lo and behold, indeed, some sections have been presented as essays in other publications. In fairness to galleys being galleys, the presentation as it stands gives the impression that a cohesive narrative is being presented via chapters and subheadings. I hope that changes.

Don’t let the relatively short length of “Thinning Blood “make you underestimate it for so much as a moment. Lisa Myers’ memoir contains US indigenous history, her own family’s history going back several generations, narrative folklore, and of course binding it all together is her own reflections upon the struggles she’s had with her identity. The bold honesty and openness in which she writes makes for an eye-opening experience for readers like myself, who not only get an intimate window into her own life but also a deeper look on what it can mean to be indigenous in the modern day, and the challenges that it can entail (blood quantum and what it means dominate center stage here, as to be expected, but it’s by no means the only one). But although the experiences that Myers shares are of course uniquely hers, I think that any reader who has wrestled with a yearning to belong or imposter syndrome will also be surprised by just how much her story is able to resonate on a personal level as well - or at least such was my own experience.

“Thinning Blood” packs a mighty and memorable punch, and I look forward to seeing if I can make this readily available on my library’s shelves.