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Leah Myers Biography

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“Pratt created the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and his motto was "kill the Indian, save the man." At this school, and others that would open and follow in its wake, tens of thousands of Native children faced abuse and neglect. They were often forcibly removed from their homes and taken to these schools that were sometimes across the country from their original lives. When they arrived, the children were forced to cut their hair and change their names. They were made to become White in look and label, stripped of any semblance of Native heritage. The children were not allowed to speak their Native tongues, some of them not knowing anything else. They were prohibited from acting in any way that might reflect the only culture they had ever known. At Pratt's Carlisle Indian Industrial School alone, the numbers revealed the truth of what this treatment did. Of the ten thousand children from 141 different tribes across the country, only a small fraction of them ever graduated. According to the Carlisle Indian School Project, there are 180 marked graves of Native children who died while attending. There were even more children who died while held captive at the Carlisle school and others across the county. Their bodies are only being discovered in modern times, exhumed by the army and people doing surveys of the land who are finding unmarked burial sites. An autograph book from one of the schools was found in the historical records with one child's message to a friend, "Please remember me when I'm in the grave." The US Bureau of Indian Affairs seemed to think Pratt had the right idea and made his school the model for more. There ended up being more than 350 government-funded boarding schools for Natives in the United States. Most of them followed the same ideology: Never let the children be themselves. Beat their language out of them. Punish them for practicing their cultures. Pratt and his followers certainly killed plenty of Indians, but they didn't save a damn thing.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“The phrase "low man on the totem pole" was coined by a White man in the 1940s to mean a person with no respect, status, or power. He clearly did not consult the Natives who carve the poles. They honor the figures they represent by immortalizing them in precious old-grown red cedar. Each member of the totem pole is significant, but the one on the bottom is often given the most reverence. They are the one who holds up everyone else; they are the one who starts the story.”

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“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.”

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“The salmon is a symbol of prosperity and determination to the Coast Salish tribes, the band of tribes in the Pacific Northwest of which the Jamestown S'Klallam Tribe is a part. She defies nature, swimming upstream to provide for the people of the land. Yet she must sacrifice herself to give that abundance to others. Her determination comes at a deep personal cost.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“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.”

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“The first wave of guilt came with images of the protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. The pipeline was constructed to transport crude oil through the Dakotas into Illinois. It was voted on and decided by White men and given permission not through voluntary easements, as was originally required, but instead through forced condemnations and evictions. The Standing Rock Sioux disagreed with the pipeline, as it was likely to destroy their ancestral burial grounds and taint their water supply with viscous, black poison. Their voices went unheard.”

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“When the construction was announced to continue as planned, the tribe and their allies came together. People from across two hundred tribes and beyond to other communities came together to try and protect their water, their lives. They were met with forces from the National Guard and seventy-five other law enforcement agencies across the country. These forces used concussion grenades and automatic rifles against civilians. They spent hours shooting them with water cannons in subfreezing temperatures to try and make them give in.”

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“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.”

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