Coast Salish. Punk.
Those descriptors aren’t often associated with each other. But then, that’s the point, says Sasha taq?s??blu LaPointe, the Tacoma author of “Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish punk”.
The 2022 memoir began as a mirror for other Native American youth, living in two cultures, to see themselves.
“If I could have had a book like this when I was 14 … how would that have helped me,” she said Tuesday in an interview with The News Tribune. Later that day, The Washington Center for the Book named “Red Paint” a 2023 Washington State Book Award winner.
The center is an affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book and administered by Washington State Library. “Red Paint” won in the Creative Nonfiction/Memoir category.
“Red Paint” is a coming-of-age story set both on Native lands and in Seattle’s punk scene of the 1990s and 2000s. It carves out its unique form with flashbacks to LaPointe’s female ancestors and the trauma she and her family have experienced, both personal and cultural. She intersperses the narrative with occasional poetry.
LaPointe, 40, grew up in Swinomish. She’s a member of the Nooksack and Upper Skagit Indian tribes and teaches creative writing in the Native Pathways Program at The Evergreen State College.
In 2016, she moved into her grandmother’s home on the Puyallup Tribe of Indians’ reservation on Tacoma’s Eastside. Her parents live nearby.
A memoir
“Red Paint” began as a personal recollection of LaPointe’s youth as both a performer and acolyte of the punk scene as well as her upbringing in Native America. It’s also about representation.
“I was so enamored with pop culture at that time in the ‘90s,” she said. “I loved punk and grunge. But the things that I loved, like the books and music … things I would see on TV or whatever … I never saw myself reflected back.”
As she wrote the autobiography, it eventually explored both her own healing from sexual-violence trauma and the generational trauma in her female ancestors’ lineage.
“As I got deeper and deeper into it, I became more wrapped up in learning about the women I come from,” LaPointe said.
At one point in the narrative, LaPointe visits the 1800s Ilwaco home of her ancestor, Comptia Koholowish. The woman, who was forced to live in a shed behind the home of her Scottish sea captain husband, was later given the name Jane.
Words on paper
“I hate the word ‘brave.’ Like I hate ‘victim,’ ‘survivor’ or ‘squaw,’ “ LaPointe writes in “Red Paint.”
“I was tired of the names white people had given us. Jane was my ancestor’s English name. Did she forget her Chinook name? Her Indian name?
“I was tired of being brave. I would rather be something else. Carefree? An aging millennial. Someone who enjoys listening to the Cranberries and Cyndi Lauper on road trips down the coast. Call me a writer. Call me a riot grrrl. Call me Coast Salish or poet. Call me a girl who loves Nick Cave, and night swimming, and ramen, and old Bikini Kill records. I no longer wish to be called resilient. Call me reckless, impatient, and emotional. Even Indigenous. Call me anything other than survivor. I am so many more things than brave.”
Reaction
Since the book came out, it’s been called “absorbing” by Time magazine, and NPR named it a Best Book of the Year. LaPointe’s favorite review was in the feminist lifestyle magazine, Bust.
“I’ve been reading it forever,” she says of Bust. “When I saw that I got reviewed really generously, it was like a dream come true. I ripped it out and put it on the fridge.”
Her next book, “Thunder Songs,” is a collection of essays. It comes out in March from Counterpoint Press.
What: “Red Paint” — The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk
Author: Sasha taq?s??blu LaPointe
Details: Published 2022; 225 pages; $16.95 paperback; Counterpoint Press
Where: Local bookstores and Amazon
