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“You don't have the right to define my identity.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“anyone who doesn't speak "the way we do" is, to some extent, labeled a foreigner.”
― Annie Ernaux, Shame

“I met other Native people in each place I lived. We crossed paths in student organizations, work environments, or hospitals. There still wasn't a connection. I had different experiences than them; I had grown up removed from my culture. I had never lived on a reservation or experienced life exactly as they had. It was enough that I was different, other. I didn't belong.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“Throughout my years in the desert, people confused me for other races, but at least they weren't surprised when I corrected them. Most White people saw me as Hispanic, and people of other races often thought I was the same as them. After a while I realized it was comforting for people to think they weren't alone in their cultural identity. I still couldn't keep myself from correcting them, even if it meant the distance between us grew a little.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“I grew up in Carrollton, Georgia, right on the Alabama line. No other Native American kids that I knew of were in my school, and no one knew what to make of me. One girl told me once that I was mixed. She didn't ask; she declared. I tried to correct her, letting her know I was Native American. She told me that Indians didn't exist anymore.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“My grandmother, Vivian, and her siblings were the first Native American children in the Port Angeles school system. It was not an easy integration. They were bullied and beaten daily by the other children, having stones and slurs hurled at them with no one stepping in. When Lillian went to the White principal about this, it was clear he didn't see it as severe. I wonder if he dared to utter the words "kids will be kids" in front of an angry Bear Mother trying to protect her cubs. When he finally agreed to act, his generous solution was to release the siblings ten minutes earlier than everyone else, to give them a head start on their run home.
It didn't always work.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“In the beginning, it felt like coming home, even though I'd never lived there and rarely visited. My family members were welcoming, and the water and forest calmed the fluttering darkness deep within me.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“We drove for three days into the mountains in a car that struggled to go uphill. Still, we made it and I was finally back in my tribal homeland. In the beginning, it felt like coming home, even though I'd never lived there and rarely visited. My family members were welcoming, and the water and forest calmed the fluttering darkness deep within me.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“The anxiety in me grew, as this place that had always felt like home in my mind began to shed the rose-colored visions I had coated it in.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“The anxiety in me grew, as this place that had always felt like home in my mind began to shed the rose-colored visions I had coated it in. It wasn't quite right. I was welcomed by many, but I didn't belong. It wasn't quite home anymore.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“They had to lie about their race to find work, to find homes. Denying half of their heritage probably hurt and ached. It caused irreparable damage that could be seen long after these hard years had passed.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“The new owners of the South Valley Street house, who described themselves online as people who "love dancing, practicing selfrealization, meditation, freedom, and investing," turned the Kardonsky-Cook home into an Airbnb. They named it "A Creek Runs Through It Olympic Mountain Retreat." It was one of the four properties they had purchased to rent around the Olympic Peninsula. The listing described the house as a "historic luxury two-story farmhouse" and charged guests $190 a night to sleep in the rooms where my family once lived.

A big selling point for their property was the creek that my grandmother and her siblings played in, that my mother explored before picking salmonberries from the bushes on its bank. They marketed the home as being close to the waterfront that my great-grandfather walked to every day for work. He was a longshoreman and worked at the docks the entire time he lived there. His cat met him halfway home after every shift.

One review read, "It doesn't feel like someone fixed up a house and is renting it, it feels like someone's home.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“It was a place where it wasn't bad or dangerous to be Native, and so she no longer hid her heritage. She told people that she was Native American. I imagine there was a spark of pride in being able to say it out loud after a lifetime of being ashamed or secretive about it.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“It was a place where it wasn't bad or dangerous to be Native, and so she no longer hid her heritage. She told people that she was Native American. I imagine there was a spark of pride in being able to say it out loud after a lifetime of being ashamed or secretive about it.

But people didn't believe her. They told her that it was okay to be Mexican, and that she shouldn't be ashamed. These friends, most of when White, tried to be the best allies they could. They swore they wouldn't hate her for being Mexican, and every time she claimed her true identity they dismissed it. No matter how hard she fought, people refused to believe that she was Native.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“A cliche I had never understood before was the saying, "Home is where the heart is." I understand now. I may never have full roots in a place, but I have them with him.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“I thought about how my idols growing up were not real Native women but instead cartoon caricatures that Disney made in the form of Tiger Lily and Pocahontas.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“I thought about how much other Natives disregarded me when they weren't from my tribe, as if I weren't Native at all.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“The things made then were meant to stand the test of time.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“The S'Klallam people were around long before European colonizers came to the coast. In our earliest told histories, we moved from village to village in our territory, keeping pace with the seasons. We hunted game and thrived from the fish and shellfish we harvested off of the coast. The crafters among us found strength in cedar. Strips of it were woven into baskets and hats, and the trees themselves were carved into canoes and masks. Cedar was chosen in part for its abundance but also for its connection with the spiritual world, and its longevity. The things made then were meant to stand the test of time.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“The other Natives continued to stare. Children who pointed in my direction and seemed to be asking about me were shushed by their elders. The mistrust made the air heavy. Despite my copper skin they still saw me as other, as outsider, as not like them.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“I took in his face. He was neither White nor Native, something outside the two major circles who moved in that space. He was the first person I was sure had seen me as just a person during that whole trip.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“Later, the US government went against the treaty and tried to have our tribe sent to one of the reservations they had set up in Washington, including one that was along the Elwha River. The other was in what is now called Kitsap, farther south. They offered plots of land and $80 to anyone who would move to these locations. Members who moved to Kitsap became the Port Gamble S'Klallam Tribe, and those who moved to the Elwha River became the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe. Some tribal members stayed, insisting that Jamestown Beach was where they belonged. They pooled together $500 worth of gold coin and purchased 210 acres along the water. There is where we staked our independence and became the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“I had become more interesting than whatever danced across those TV screens. I was the latest zoo exhibit, and I had to suffer this audience until I was through the hall. Part of me wanted to snarl or snap my jaws. I wanted to prove them right and turn into a beast before their eyes, one so feared and hated they wouldn't dare speak its name. I turned my eyes to the end of the hall and did not look away until I made it there.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“I never escaped the pinpoint pain of the term "White Indian." I scoffed at it. I made fun of it and refuted it. I joked about it with friends and family to prove to myself how much I didn't care.

Ever since then, though, a stem of fear sprouts in me. When I hear someone move fluently through their own tribal tongue, I flinch at their authenticity. When I watch other Natives dance in elaborate ceremonial regalia, I swallow my awe so it can instead fester into shame.

This feeling of being fake doesn't influence reality. I am still dark enough to get stopped at airport security, followed around stores, stopped by police in border states, talked down to by people paler than me, and asked racist questions about where I'm from or what kind of magic powers I have. I still get treated like a liar or a relic when I tell someone I'm Native. I still feel a rooted, thrumming connection to the beach and the ground whenever I go home to Sequim, to where my tribe is. I still keep a mental record of all the stories I have learned, either from family or from historic documents. None of it validates me enough to remove the blight of impostor syndrome.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“We are not what they paint us,
primitive, extinct.
We exist,
trapped beneath ivory
and barrier.”
― Leah Myers

“I had been terrified of Arizona cops since high school when more than one threatened to deport me during traffic stops. Being a US citizen didn't mean anything to them when my complexion wasn't light enough. I was always scared that they wouldn't bother with the paperwork and instead would take matters into their own hands to get rid of me.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“I wonder if I will ever feel Native enough.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“Through the years she learned to reject the stories and the culture that ran in her blood. It fought, surfacing in every strand of her hair and darkening her skin each summer. Still, she tried to quell it; her mother's fear of them being punished by the world had morphed into a self-hatred that latched onto her bones.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“She gave up herself and her identity for security.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“The hummingbird represents beauty and joy. She is a creature of flight, bringing her closer to the cosmos with each wingbeat. She is constantly moving and is rarely seen at rest, preferring instead to perform her aerial acrobatics. Her heart is as fast as her wings and her colors are bright and shifting; they are colors that capture the sunlight in their iridescence. She brings love wherever she passes by.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity