Red Paint
The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk
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5.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award
Winner of the Washington State Book Award for Creative Nonfiction/Memoir
An Indigenous artist blends the aesthetics of punk rock with the traditional spiritual practices of the women in her lineage in this bold, contemporary journey to reclaim her heritage and unleash her power and voice while searching for a permanent home
Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe has always longed for a sense of home. When she was a child, her family moved around frequently, often staying in barely habitable church attics and trailers, dangerous places for young Sasha.
With little more to guide her than a passion for the thriving punk scene of the Pacific Northwest and a desire to live up to the responsibility of being the namesake of her beloved great-grandmother—a linguist who helped preserve her Indigenous language of Lushootseed—Sasha throws herself headlong into the world, determined to build a better future for herself and her people.
Set against a backdrop of the breathtaking beauty of Coast Salish ancestral land and imbued with the universal spirit of punk, Red Paint is ultimately a story of the ways we learn to find our true selves while fighting for our right to claim a place of our own.
Examining what it means to be vulnerable in love and in art, Sasha offers up an unblinking reckoning with personal traumas amplified by the collective historical traumas of colonialism and genocide that continue to haunt native peoples. Red Paint is an intersectional autobiography of lineage, resilience, and, above all, the ability to heal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
LaPointe, a Coast Salish poet and artist, sifts through her family's lineage to reckon with the meaning of home in this stirring debut. A descendant of the Nooksack and Upper Skagit Indian tribe in Washington State, LaPointe writes in lucid vignettes that alternate between past and present as she reflects on her ancestors, Salish medicine workers who "faced violence, disease, and genocide"; her nomadic upbringing with her parents in the 1980s; and her romantic relationships in her 30s. Amid shifting landscapes—from the Swinomish Reservation to homelessness in her teens—she discovered punk music, which became a lifelong fascination ("To hear... a shrieking, guttural scream felt like being in the presence of power") and the conduit to meeting her two love interests: her childhood boyfriend and her husband. While LaPointe's prose falls flat when charting the love triangle that ensued between the three of them ("Being with him felt like picking up where we left off"), her writing radiates elsewhere—including in a story of her ancestor Comptia, one of the only Chinook Indians to survive a smallpox epidemic. She also displays immense vulnerability when discussing her sexual assaults, and how, through her "own ritual of healing," she resisted being defined by them. LaPointe's fresh and urgent perspective on Indigenous culture is enthralling.
