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Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: AudiobookHub Recommendation
Chapter 2: — The Totem Pole with No Room at the Top
Chapter 3: — Bear Mother and the Price of Protection
Chapter 4: — Salmon Woman and a House Sold Twice
Chapter 5: — Skinwalker in the Waiting Room
Chapter 6: — Not Native Enough
Chapter 7: — Hummingbird, Pocahontas, and a Language That Won’t Open
Chapter 8: — Unreported Violence and the Red Handprint
Chapter 9: — The Scalpel: Adoption, Sterilization, and Control of the Future
Chapter 10: — The Infrasound of Extinction
Description
Thinning Blood is Leah Myers’s braided memoir about inheriting an identity without inheriting the cultural instruction that should have come with it. Raised far from her tribe—the Jamestown S’Klallam of the Pacific Northwest—she grows up carrying an internal drumbeat but constantly confronting the outside world’s disbelief, stereotypes, and casual cruelty.
Myers structures her family history like a totem pole: Bear (her great-grandmother), Salmon (her grandmother), Hummingbird (her mother), and Raven (herself). Each section combines reimagined Coast Salish-style legends with grounded scenes—racist encounters, family fractures, language loss, violence against Native women, and the corrosive pressure of blood quantum laws. The result is a record of what survives when culture is thinned, and what it costs to reclaim it.
Who Should Listen
- Listeners interested in Indigenous identity, blood quantum, and the lived reality of being “not Native enough” in both White and Native spaces.
- Readers of lyrical memoirs that braid personal narrative with research, myth retellings, and cultural commentary.
- Anyone looking to understand contemporary Native experiences beyond stereotypes—especially around language loss, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, and structural erasure.