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 memoir, Myers excavates the stories of four generations of women in order to leave a record of her family.
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 ... With remarkable concision, Myers evokes the awful progression of their relationship, in scenes so vivid they left me gasping for air. The statistics she invokes — on domestic violence and missing and murdered Native women — feel anything but abstract.
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.
