Leah Myers > Quotes

“My home is in Georgia, but my soul is at home here.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“You don't have the right to define my identity.”
― 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

“No one taught me to be Native American. My mother taught me that I was, but she did not have the context for what that heritage meant. My grandmother mentioned it very little, even though it was visible in her features. Yet from my earliest memories, being Native has always been an integral part of my identity. Even though I was raised far from my tribe, far from any tribe, I heard the drumbeat of our traditions in my heart. My name is Leah Kallen Myers. I am the last member of the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe in my family line.”
― 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

“The bear is a symbol of motherly love and familial strength in the fiercest way. A mother bear will not allow her children to come to harm, but she will not coddle them either. No one dares come between the mother and her cubs, but still her cubs must keep up with her and learn to be strong themselves.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“I was working towards my bachelor's degree in creative writing at Arizona State University when videos, pictures, and stories from these protests started blooming across my Facebook feed. I saw Native people holding their ground and being ground down by the opposing police force. I saw them bitten by dogs and hosed down and maimed by rubber bullets hitting their faces and bodies, all while bright white words scrolled across the bottom of the video, explaining the situation and giving statistics.”
― 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

“I sat to take in the view. The wind blew just hard enough to push my heavy, unkept hair back. I filled my lungs with the cool air and felt roots begin to take hold. I had always been a restless person, even at this early point in life, and this was a new experience: peace. I felt as though the trees and earth of the mountain reached up into my soul and curled around it, making it whole. The inky blackness I had yet to name, the dark pit that buzzed just below my surface and corroded my thoughts, was quieted. For a moment, it was like I didn't feel it at all.

When my mom asked me what was wrong, I told her exactly how I felt as best I could.

"My home is in Georgia, but my soul is at home here.”
― 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

“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

“We're on our way to the Grand Canyon!" the woman said. She used big gestures and smiled too wide in her "I Heart Albuquerque" tank top. She was clearly a morning person.
"Oh, that's cool!" Miranda said, equally as cheery. "We're from Arizona. You're going to love it; it's beautiful there."
"That's what we've heard!" She leaned down, pressing both of her hands into the table. "And we paid for the tour into the Canyon. We're going to go down into it and see real, live Indians!"
Miranda immediately began to laugh. She bent over her plate of muffins, body shaking and eyes squeezed shut. The woman's face was blank, then slowly morphed into offended confusion. Her hands were still pressed into the table, and she turned her full attention toward me; now her posture looked more like a cop conducting an interrogation. She said nothing but her face shouted, 'What's so funny?'
"She's laughing because I'm actually Native American," I said. I resisted the urge to do jazz hands at this woman, and instead offered up whatever a fake smile looks like at too-damn-early in the morning.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“Indian boarding schools began in 1860, with the first school being established on the Yakima Indian Reservation in Washington State. These schools were designed to take Native American youths and mold them into members of "civilized society"; to make them White. The schools taught the basics of education, such as arithmetic, but also taught the students to practice Christianity and that the political structures of the United States were ideal for everyone. The actual goal was to eradicate every ounce of Native cultures.”
― 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

“Everything was an excuse. The felt so concrete, so real at the time. Now they are wispy, pathetic. I was terrified. If I participated in the world I moved closer to, then I would have to stomach the chance that I might fail at every task I tackled.
I didn't want to fail at being Native. Being Native to me then meant not only having the experience of all of these cultural things, but also being decent at them. I wanted to feel a peace in myself that cultural things brought me, but I had never felt so out of my depth. Failure felt imminent.
But I couldn't fail at something I never had the chance to try. So the excuses continued to pour from me, sweetly apologetic to hide the stench of the rotting fear that created them.”
― 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

“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

“Up to 95 percent of the original Native American population, estimated at roughly twenty million people, disappeared after the invasion of European colonizers.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“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 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

“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

“Up to 95 percent of the original Native American population, estimated at roughly twenty million people, disappeared after the invasion of European colonizers. While there was direct violence toward Native Americans, many of these deaths can be attributed to the introduction of smallpox. Smallpox is a virus that is spread when one comes into contact with infected bodily fluids or contaminated objects such as clothing or blankets. The virus then finds its way into a person's lymphatic system. Within days of infection, large, painful pustules begin to erupt over the victim's skin.

In school curriculums, this has often been taught as an unfortunate tragedy, an accidental side effect of trade, and therefore a reason to claim that the Europeans did not commit genocide. However, in recent years, many historians have recognized that the spreading of smallpox was an early form of biological warfare, one which was understood and used without mercy from at least the mid-1700s. Noted conversations among army officials include letters discussing the idea of "sending the Small Pox among those disaffected tribes" and using "every stratagem to reduce them." Another official, Henry Bouquet, wrote a letter that told his subordinates to "try to Innoculate [sic] the Indians, by means of Blankets, as well as to Try Every other Method, that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race." They followed through on their plan, giving two blankets and a handkerchief from a Smallpox Hospital alongside other gifts to seal an agreement of friendship between the local Native tribes and the men at Fort Pitt, located in what is now western Pennsylvania.”
― 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

“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

“Many jokes were about colonizers who claim to be Native because of some distant person in their family's history. The most common joke, and one I have told, is about someone being one-sixteenth Cherokee since their great-great-grandmother was a Cherokee princess.
I laugh at these jokes even as I worry that they would make that joke about me since I am one-eighth. I cackle and like the videos, and feel the flicker of pain in the back of my mind that screams that, if I ever had children, these videos would be about them.”
― Leah Myers, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity

“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

“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

“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

“I wanted to devour this woman's dignity. Congratulations for what exactly? For having a family who made it through genocide? For being part of the slim population of surviving Native Americans post-colonization? An anger simmered in my throat, begging to be let loose on this stupid woman who was there to simply enjoy her vacation. How dare she remain blissfully unaware of the modern existence of Native Americans when all she had seen were movies making us look like history? As mad as I was, I knew it wasn't her fault and I couldn't muster up the energy to boil my anger into a response.”
― 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