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Critics' Opinion:
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First Published:
Mar 2022, 208 pages
Paperback:
Mar 2023, 240 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Elisabeth Cook
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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.
The publisher is unable to provide an excerpt from this book.
Through a nomadic and place-sensitive gaze on the Pacific Northwest, LaPointe presents a separation between land and state that throws into sharp relief the strangeness of settler-colonial fictions and values. The subjects she combines do not fit together simply because she blends them well (although she does) but rather because, as she shows us, trauma does not exist in a vacuum — or in any one place. Neither, necessarily, does the concept of home. Through the fluidity of her writing, LaPointe honors the movement and exploration crucial for healing...continued
Full Review
(732 words).
(Reviewed by Elisabeth Cook).
Elissa Washuta, author of White Magic
Red Paint is a miraculous book. Sasha LaPointe walks us through the sites of her evisceration while rebuilding a home within her body using sturdy materials: rose quartz, cedar bark, red clay, and the words of her ancestors. With each potent sentence, she shows us what access to power looks like. She shows us how to become whole. Melissa Febos, author of Girlhood
Red Paint is an ode to healing and to healers, told by someone who intimately knows both. Steeped in punk music and poetry, it is an ode to indigenous inheritance, and to the work and wisdom necessary to recover from the legacies of trauma. It is the truest kind of love story: one in which every lover is a MacGuffin, propelling its narrator toward the person who matters most—herself. Rene Denfeld, bestselling author of The Child Finder
As luminous as the morning sun over the fir forests, Red Paint is a story of where strength takes us. Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe goes looking to the past to help heal from terrible traumas, finding inspiration in her ancestors, the Salish people. This is a book destined to be a classic. Read it.
Sasha LaPointe, the author of Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk, is an established musician, poet and writer of nonfiction who holds an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts. According to her website, she draws inspiration from her Indigenous background (from the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian tribes) and "writes with a focus on trauma and resilience, ranging topics from PTSD, sexual violence, the work her great grandmother did for the Lushootseed language revitalization, to loud basement punk shows and what it means to grow up mixed heritage." As is apparent from reading Red Paint, her nonfiction writing is informed by the other forms of art she practices.
In her book, LaPointe recounts her ...
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