Thinning Blood

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.

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.

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.