This week, Christine Yunn-Yu Sun reviews Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk, by author, poet and musician Sasha LaPointe, which is recommended to our readers by Seattle UNESCO City of Literature.
Winner of the 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Award, Red Paint tells the heart-wrenching story of an Indigenous artist struggling to reclaim her heritage. Sasha’s narrative is both honest and intimate: “I have always wanted a permanent home, a place to feel safe… I wanted some place I could truly call mine.”.
When Sasha was a child, her parents had to work long hours wherever they could find jobs.
The family moved around a lot, often staying in barely habitable church attics and trailers, dangerous places for a young girl.
Having been raped at the age of ten, Sasha learntto run away. Years after her teenage homelessness, she learnt how to look after herself, to work and pay bills, and to study. When her boyfriend proposed marriage on her 30th birthday, she said yes.
However, when Sasha was studying creative nonfiction at the Institute of American Indian Arts, her childhood agony came back to haunt her, prompted by an assignment requiring students to write a personal essay exploring their most traumatic memory.
With that essay turning into a thesis and then a book, Sasha’s nightmares became far more intense and terrifying than those that she was used to in her younger years. She was plunged into a “spirit sickness” with life-threatening symptoms such as frequent fainting and loss of breath.
“How long are you gonna let your trauma be your entire life?” Sasha’s husband screamed at her.
“It’s like all the women in your family, your mom, your grandma, you all have the same thing, you’re all sick.”
Both before and after this confrontation, Sasha experienced some of the most profound losses that any woman could ever imagine and/or endure. Yet, it is when she started retracing the footsteps of her grandmother and great-grandmother that she slowly began to understand her entire history, her identity, and the origins of her feelings of distrust and displacement.
At one stage she offers these powerful and compelling words: “I hate the word ’brave’. Like I hate ’victim’, ’survivor,’ or ’squaw.’ I was tired of the names white people had given us… 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 wished 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.”
In Sasha’s culture, the red paint, made by rolling chunks of red clay around in one’s fingertips, is only for the healers. When she finally got to wear the red paint, it was a reminder of where she came from, with the power of healing already in her veins, like it had belonged to the generations of women before her.
