Thinning Blood

A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

By: Leah Myers

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Paperback | 14 August 2024 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
192 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.0 x 14.0 x 1.5

Paperback

RRP $26.95

$25.75

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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 naive 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.

Industry Reviews

"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 - The New York Times Book Review
"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

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