Native Woman Looks Back to Move Forward https://ift.tt/yzOnHcL
Endings are what the title of Thinning Blood by Leah Myers points toward. But, just like the totem of her family, her story considers what lies beyond her own crest crowning the pole: a future as wide open and potentially empty as the sky. To traverse this unknown space, Myers uses this memoir to explore a lost past and re-create myths to carry her forward.
The most striking aspect of this book, now available in paperback, is its structure. Myers uses an imagined totem pole, complete with animal representatives for the women of her bloodline three generations back, to create a generational/mythological view of her existence. Great-grandmother bear, grandmother salmon, mother hummingbird and Myer’s own raven personify their qualities. She retells the myths of these creatures to fit her own experience of being in the world, especially as a Native American S’Klallam woman. The epochs each of her ancestors inhabits allow her exploration of what each dealt with – personally and sociologically – just to exist.
Extinction hangs in the balance throughout the book. Blood quantum laws deem that if Myers were to have children with someone not of her people of origin, they would not be considered part of the tribe. In addition, the S’Klallam traditions and language were not passed to her due to various experiences of her ancestors (the largest of which being racism). Myers explores this thoroughly, from her own mixed feelings on quantum laws, as well as some grief she feels about deciding not to have children.
In the custom of making choices with the next seven generations in mind, Myers writes a letter to her descendant in 2168 detailing what she wishes she could pass down while recognizing what is happening as their culture thins: “I cannot imagine you would be raised in our culture – even if I know my own children would be – because I only have the framework for how I was raised.”
Myers’ treatment of what being Native “enough” means is thoughtful, raw and painful. Her experience in an Arizona hospital waiting room was full of cringe-worthy looks and conversations, from both white and Native folk could easily populate an anxious nightmare. During her attempts to learn Klallam language, Myers brings to light her perfectionism around wanting to get the language right on the first try to prove her Native-ness. It only served to stymy her attempts to learn it.
Scariest of all was her explanation of violence against Native American women, using statistics. She adds to this with a very descriptive passage about her own experience of violence, including how she was afraid she would die from it. Reading her experience of watching Disney’s Pocahontas as an adult, juxtaposed against the excitement she felt at representation in the media as a child, brought the fear of erasure to an intimate and truly vulnerable place. Now an adult, Myers could hear blatantly racist comments and tropes in the movie. She had a difficult time realizing there was a line about wiping Native Americans off the earth completely: “I wondered if I just didn’t hear when I was younger because of the welling music, or if I blocked it out so that I could still enjoy one of the of few movies that had people like me on screen.”
In this memoir, Myers appears to be in her late twenties. Especially given the violence toward Native American women she witnessed, which has separately been documented, I can see why she would feel pressure to put her story in the world as a proof of her existence before extinction. However, throughout the book, I found myself wondering what it would read like in five, ten or twenty years.
Personifying the raven, she is the collector of knowledge and the trickster. In many ways, she inhabits her stories through her imagination. If she continues to build her pole, ground herself in her culture and pass that knowledge along, whether the next totem is a descendant from her body or not, would that shed more light on where this epoch stands – where she stands? If anything, this could be a testament to how her blood is thinning. The way forward is shrouded in mystery even when she is the key to the next crest animal on the pole.
However, something tells me Myers will figure this out. The myths of her totem pole are adaptations of their originals. This is the true power of her blood. It contains the boons of her people and the ability to create something new from them. The myth of the raven has the corvid stealing light from a Salish man. That light is fumbled, a piece of it breaking, but the rest is brought to the sky to illuminate everything. Because of this Myers says of her raven, “she has always been Native enough. So am I.”
NONFICTION Thinning Blood By Leah Myers
W. W. Norton and Company
Published May 15, 2024
Paperback release: July 2, 2024
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