Northwest Indigenous author’s new essay collection highlights her Coast Salish identity

Northwest author Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe’s newest book is called Thunder Song. It’s a collection of essays examining the intersection of her Indigenous ancestry, Coast Salish history, queerdom and punk.

OPB’s Paul Marshall spoke to LaPointe about the book. The following is a transcript of the conversation.

Paul Marshall: Your great-grandmother’s presence is evident throughout the book. She’s such a powerful figure while writing this book. Did you learn anything new about her?

Sasha LaPointe: She was such a huge part of my life. She helped in raising us and educating us on our Coast Salish culture. I constantly feel like I’m learning new things about her.

A friend of the family, who was one of her former language students, wrote a really beautiful book about her life called “Where The Language Lives.” I was reading that shortly after the publication of “Red Paint” (LaPointe’s 2022 autobiography), and there were really interesting things about her younger life. I had no idea that she knew how to read tea leaves.

Throughout this book, I knew about the symphony “The Healing Heart of the First People of This Land” and how adamant she was in getting that completed. I already knew the basics of that, but digging into that story and talking to my mom a lot about it and just seeing how dedicated she was, reading the details and of course the documentary “The Healing Heart of Lushootseed,” I got to know more intimately what that meant to her. Her ambition, care and compassion. I learned more of the extent and the intensity of her commitment.

Marshall: In the book, your uncle asked the question, what kind of Indian are you? Has any part of your answer changed since writing this book?

LaPointe: No. In fact, that first Salmon Ceremony, it’s one of my favorite essays. It was one of my favorites to write.

There’s so much joy as a Native person and empowerment, this sense of pride in my identity and that took a long time to arrive at. It wasn’t until adulthood. It’s a hard thing to be proud of who you are and also in the face of settler colonial trauma. Being a survivor, sometimes it’s hard to really embrace that part of your identity.

Marshall: You start to find your footing in the punk space. But you know that you had to be punk first, then Native person second and you’ve touched on it. How did you reconcile your identity in the space?

LaPointe: It took a long time, to be honest. There are a lot of incredible things that I experienced, and the punk community was such an important part of my life. I think for any folks who are feeling misfit or a sense of displacement, we seek friends and family, we seek community, and the punk scene provided that for a while. I both love and have a massive critique of it. I think both can exist, but it was really hard.

As I continue to grow as a human and want to have these conversations about Indigenous issues. I over time started discovering that it wasn’t the right space or community to have these conversations.

I started to feel more lonely. I can’t talk to a white anarchist about settler colonial trauma to the extent that they’re really going to get where I’m coming from and see me as a person. I started having these ideas and really wanting to process them and work them out as an artist, a person, a weirdo in the punk scene and realizing there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for connection and to do that.

Going to the Institute of American Indian Arts really opened up my world. I can be in a room with other indigenous artists, writers, poets, painters, filmmakers and I feel less alone. I’m in a space where we can have these conversations back and forth.

I think that making those connections and meeting my Native art community made me realize just how othered and different I felt in some of those spaces.

Marshall: You’re a woman who comes from salmon people and there was even a point where you denied your salmon privilege. What helped to repair that relationship over time?

LaPointe: I really couldn’t shake that memory of my uncle. When he passed I felt an immense amount of grief — our family felt that loss.

I remember sitting in the driveway on that wintry, icy, snowy night and him dropping that massive king salmon in my arms and when I said, “Uncle I’m a vegetarian,” the look on his face. It’s one of those memories that is so concrete and stays with me. What kind of Indian are you? I couldn’t shake it.

That speaks to younger teenage Sasha and wanting to fit into these punk spaces in this community where everyone was vegan and everyone was an animal rights activist. But in doing that, I was denying this very, very deep part of myself.

It’s not simply about food. Food is nurturing, but salmon is a sacred resource. So much of our culture is built around the salmon returning. It’s just such a huge part of my Coast Salish identity that I can’t believe I spent years denying that simply to try to fit in.

When I thought about my uncle asking me that question, I’m like, “Wait a minute. As a Coast Salish woman, I’m not the problem. The overfished oceans are not because of Coast Salish people.” That was a long journey, a long learning lesson, to arrive at this place. “Why are you denying this sacred resource that’s part of your culture?” I will never deny myself salmon again. It is a gift that we have salmon returning that haven’t left us.

Marshall: You wrote “The first time I ever heard the term two-spirit. I felt a sense of relief wash over me.” Why? And where did that shame you felt growing up queer come from?

LaPointe: I want to start by saying two-spirit can mean different things. I know it’s been kind of adopted as this kind of pan-Indian identity, but it means different things depending on the tribe or the community.

The way that it was explained to me, I was young, my mom had just come back from a two-spirit gathering in Montana and she was telling me about it and sharing photos and all of a sudden I felt this massive relief. For me, growing up with a sense of pressure to have to decide: Are you queer? Are you straight? What are your relationships like? There was this shame built up around that.

When my mom approached me with two-spirit, explaining that a two-spirit person can have both a masculine and feminine spirit, all of a sudden, I felt this kind of relief wash over me where I felt understood.

Having partners throughout my life ask: “Are you gay? Are you straight? Are you bisexual?” None of these labels seem to fit. Falling in love with people based on their gender identity has never occurred to me. I felt really conflicted. Certain partners would be angry or confused by my identity as a queer woman and if I didn’t fit into the way that they wanted to see me, or their idea, it was a disappointment or this point of frustration or conflict.

For a long time that really just built up a lot of shame in me. It’s not an easy thing to want to fit into someone’s idea of who they want you to be. The idea of embracing myself instead of these two halves of me. It’s this kind of journey of loving yourself and accepting yourself and really celebrating yourself. As a queer Coast Salish woman, there is nothing wrong with me and I am allowed to embrace all of that and be proud of that.

Marshall: The relationship between you and your parents, it’s complicated as you describe it, they’re your heroes and you draw strength from them. But then you also see that there are ways where they’re dealing with their own issues. What helped you to understand that duality more over time?

LaPointe: There’s a point in most people’s lives where you realize that your parents are human. For me, it was this moment of incredible compassion and care for them. I think I spent a lot of my teen years being really angry and that wasn’t necessarily fair to them. When you stop and sort of reach this point of adulthood where you see your parents, not as either superheroes or supervillains in your life, you see them as just people who are also struggling. They were young Indigenous parents trying to make it with five kids living in a trailer. I was really angry and had a lot of unresolved anger and frustration towards them. Looking back now having this realization of how hard they were trying to make it work.

Even without having five kids and trying to make it work, it is a difficult thing to navigate this world as Indigenous people. They already had a lot on their plate and realizing that they did the best that they could.

Marshall: There was something in the earlier part of the book, you wrote all these white people on Pinterest are baking loaves of sourdough and I am trying to time travel. On one front it was funny but also a little tricky because that’s your history.

LaPointe: It’s interesting whenever I read that part of the essay the audience laughs. It is kind of sassy but also a very serious thing. That was deeply emotional and sad and lonely feeling. As a descendant of survivors of smallpox, The pandemic hit a little different for me. There was a sense of anxiety and sort of this generational trauma. This fear coded deep in my DNA to feel unsafe. The idea of losing our elders to this illness was terrifying to me.

I’m not gonna lie, the pandemic was hard for all of us. We have this kind of collective trauma in lockdown. It was a really strange and alienating thing for me to see people saying ‘I’m watching Great British Baking and baking tons of cakes. I’m looking around the reservation from my roof, terrified that the elder next door is going to pass. What does that mean for me as a Coast Salish person?

It is strange when people laugh, I’m also not mad at them for laughing, because it is a little snarky, but also it hits on such a deeper fear and a deeper sense of loss and fear of erasure. There is this split. It’s snarky but this is a little serious for me. You’re the only person who’s asked me about it in this way and I deeply appreciate it.

Marshall: You wrote that songs have the power to heal and can be medicine. The book title is Thunder Song. What does the title mean to you?

LaPointe: It comes from the title essay ‘Thunder Song’ which is sort of an homage to my great-grandmother. It’s a kind of a love letter to all that she did in her life and all that she was. Choosing to title the collection after that was important to me because in recognizing that 20 years ago, she had this vision.

She felt called to do this work to commission a symphony because she believed very deeply in our Coast Salish culture and our ways: the fact that our songs are medicine and she wanted to share that. It’s as true as it was 20 years ago as it is today, if not more.

I imagine if my great-grandmother was with us today, looking around the state of the world she would be deeply disturbed and concerned. Her whole goal with that symphony was to remind people to be kind to one another to take care of one another which is a very basic part of our Coast Salish ways of being.

She just wanted to share that. The issues in my book aren’t site-specific. They’re not simply Coast Salish problems. These are problems all over the world. Titling it “Thunder Song” was a way to honor her and to also say the world still needs this medicine.