Chris La Tray didn’t grow up understanding that he was Indigenous. In fact, his father actively avoided the story. But as he got older, La Tray began to uncover the roots of his Indigenous identity. His book, “Becoming Little Shell,” follows his journey to understanding his place as a Métis storyteller, a descendent of the Pembina Band of the mighty Red River of the North, and an enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians.
Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe grew up surrounded by her Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian Tribe relatives. Her latest book, “Thunder Songs,” explores what it means to grow up in mixed heritage, and draws inspiration from her coastal heritage as well as her life in the city.
LaPointe and La Tray spoke with OPB “Weekend Edition” host Lillian Karabaic at the 2024 Portland Book Festival.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Chris La Tray didn’t grow up knowing that he was Indigenous. In fact, his father actively avoided the topic. But as La Tray got older, he began to uncover the roots of his Indigenous identity. His book, “Becoming Little Shell,” follows his journey to understanding his place as a Métis storyteller, a descendant of the Pembina Band of the mighty Red River of the North, and an enrolled member of Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians.
Meanwhile, Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe grew up surrounded by her Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian Tribe relatives. But she also fell in love with punk rock in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s, and she was often the only Indigenous person in very white punk spaces. LaPointe’s latest book, “Thunder Song,” explores what it means to grow up mixed-heritage and draws inspiration from all of these cultures.
OPB’s Lillian Karabaic spoke with Chris La Tray and Sasha LaPointe at the 2024 Portland Book Festival. She started with a question for LaPointe.
Lillian Karabaic: I feel like you really took us on a throughline through all of these, where you started with your great grandmother and current politics, and every element from that essay was reflected in every essay throughout. And it kind of also ended with your great grandmother and current politics, which is tough – both of those topics, I feel like are kind of tough. How did you think about the structure when you were putting together all of those essays?
Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe: [Speaks in Lushootseed language] Hello. Welcome everyone. It’s an honor to be here with you. My name is Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe. I’m from Nooksack and Upper Skagit.
And yeah, to answer your question, I think that I love that you brought up this idea of the throughline that exists from start to finish in “Thunder Song” because really, what it comes down to in thinking about structure, for me, was it always began with my great grandmother – my namesake – her vision. “Thunder Song,” like the title essay, was absolutely inspired by her. And it was a way for me to try and honor her work and what she was doing. And I think that having that as a jumping off point just carried me through the rest of the essays. I thank you for pointing that out because I feel like in every essay, whether it’s about decolonizing my diet, Indigenous Queer identity, whatever it is, at the heart of it is her vision.
Karabaic: I think one of the things that’s very interesting about your great grandmother and the reflection of the work that she was doing with Lushootseed language revitalization is that it seems like you spend a lot of the later part of the book unpacking what your purpose is. You saw that she came to that kind of later in life; she was already an elder when she started working on language revitalization. Do you feel like you’ve figured out what your purpose is, what you’ve inherited from her?
LaPointe: One hundred percent, no. It’s something I engage in every day. And that’s an honest answer. I think that she guides me, she’s such an inspiration. But no, I haven’t figured out that part of it. And my family likes to joke that Grandma gave us assignments – and she still does. She gives us homework, even from the spirit realm. She’s like, “You have a job to do.” And I think that is part of my job, is trying to honor her legacy and her strength, wisdom, resilience every day.
Karabaic: So, Chris, I feel like this kind of “coming to your purpose later on” was an element in your book. So your book does an excellent job of it. It’s not really any one thing. It’s your personal memoir, but you’ve also sprinkled it with history and there’s even some primary sources in there. I mean, it’s really a whole experience. I felt like I was going to a very cool professor’s lecture the whole time.
Chris La Tray: How dare you.
Karabaic: [Laughs] How do you feel about the purpose? Because I feel like you also spent a lot of the book searching for the purpose and unpacking some of the complexities that come with rediscovering your Indigenous heritage later in life, where you’re like, “Am I enough? Am I doing enough? Should I take up space in this place?” How do you think about your interaction with that kind of question?
La Tray: First: [Speaks in Anishinaabemowin and Michif] That is, “Hello, all of my relatives. My name is Chris La Tray,” in Anishinaabemowin, which is the language of the Little Shell People. Anishinaabemowin, Ojibwemowin, Chippewa, Ojibwe: all different words for the same thing. And then I said, “You can call me Chris,” in Michif, which is the other language of my people, the language of the Métis people, which is a cultural Indigenous group recognized in Canada but not the United States – we didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us.
I like to remind people that that’s part of that, is reconnecting to a people who’s been erased in this country that we allegedly are citizens of. And I would say that was one of the things I did not expect – writing the book – is the role that my ancestors who have passed would play in helping me finish it. The first draft and then the whole throughline, I wrote mine like a collection of essays, or news, like magazine articles, because that was the only way I could get my head around the whole story, is to divide it up into pieces. And then I’m sure we had a very similar task in trying to thread a narrative through then, and that was the memoir part.
And the first book – I’m a history nerd, and I loved all the minutia, and all the details, and all of those things. A lot of that ended up on the cutting room floor to make room for the personal story. That is when I feel like my ancestors kind of stepped in. And put their hand on my back and said, just, “We’re here with you. You’re the one we’ve chosen to tell this story that nobody has told before and we are counting on you to undo generation upon generation of erasure.” And I still struggle with, what does that look like? What is my life? What does that mean in my life as someone who’s still here?
Absolutely, I don’t think you can overestimate the importance of recognizing that we are not alone in like this temporal existence, that all of our people … and that is how we lived as Indigenous people for thousands of years. And we’ve chosen to not live that way for just this tiny little blip of time, in the time that we’ve been here on this world together. I think it’s wonderful that more of us, as Indigenous writers, storytellers, whatever our medium is – whether it’s television, or movies, or music, or visual art, or any of it – that is being stirred back up in the world by this opportunity for us to tell our stories ourselves.
Karabaic: Something that I found in both of your books was that this is the moment when we need Indigenous wisdom to solve the really big problems we’re facing as a human race, right? No matter which group you’re part of, we’re all facing really big problems and a lot of those problems have come from settler colonization. But is there any point where you were like, this has to be done. Someone needs to do this history right now. Someone needs to be telling the story right now because of … was there any event that triggered that for you?
LaPointe: What brought me to the page was anxiety. Also, that moment of anxiety, I remember my partner and I, it was election night. I was having a legit panic attack and also coming through … Let me back up. Gemini, ADHD, it’s fun. [Laughter]
When I finished the work of “Red Paint,” where I was looking so deeply inward – it’s a memoir, it’s a story of my experiences, the experiences of the Coast Salish women that came before me, it was so deeply inward – I felt like I had just been spit out of the ocean. Not to be dramatic, but I was like, “Oh! I’m here and now I wanna turn my gaze outward, and I wanna observe, and I wanna write about what’s around me.” It just so happens that that aligned during the pandemic, during the protests, during Black, and Brown, and trans bodies being murdered. And I was like, “Oh, I wanted to observe the world and the world is on fire.” Like, literally, things were burning.
I think that it occurred to me that what inspired me, what soothed me, was my great grandmother’s work with “The Healing Heart of Lushootseed,” that symphony. I really just tethered myself to that idea and being like, “Oh, that Indigenous way of knowing and being in a good relation, being a good ancestor, the whole world needs this.” The issues I’m talking about in “Thunder Song” are not site-specific. It’s not just Coast Salish problems; it’s problems all over the globe, obviously.
La Tray: I write a newsletter called “An Irritable Métis,” and it’s “irritable” for a reason because I’m always irritated. [Laughter] So that kind of, “stick it to the man.” I was into punk rock and metal. That’s been part of who I was for as long as I’ve been around.
But I think when it really struck me is when my first book came out – “One-Sentence Journal,” which came out in 2018. And I was doing interviews and things. And a number of times, people would say, “Well, you don’t talk much about being an Indian in this book.” And like, every [beep] word on the page is about being an Indian. I mean, I don’t have to write about feathers, and ceremony, and all that stuff to be Indian. And that just rubbed me the wrong way. But I was already engaged with the effort of writing “Becoming Little Shell,” though I think I signed the contract for it like in 2019.
And if you’re paying attention, which is the root of poetry, how can you not know what is going on in the world, and how can you not at least question your own levels of privilege and how that relates to what other people are suffering. I think that’s what art needs to do. It just happens to be that I’m a Native artist, so it goes through the lens of being a person who was enrolled with a tribe who was known as the landless Indians for more than 150 years. And you have to ask yourself: what kind of culture, what society are we in when anybody is landless, anybody doesn’t have a place to be a citizen of or a home to live? That kind of thing. What is that a reflection of? And that is kind of like the burning atomic core of everything I do now.
Karabaic: One thing that I see a lot with other people that have mixed heritage is the struggle of not being Indian enough and this kind of feeling that you’re not allowed to take up space, because you should leave that to people that have grown up on the rez, or have a higher blood quantum.
I think that one thing that was really heartening to me was it seemed like you’re like, “What I’m writing is Indian. I am Indian.” Despite the fact that you enrolled later, you kind of confirmed what your grandmother had always said much later in life.
What’s heartening about it is sometimes it’s just about being willing to put in the work and talk to the elders, start learning and working on learning the language. Did you ever have a moment of imposter syndrome, of like, “I’m not Native enough,” or “I don’t have the right lived experience to do this work”?
La Tray: I think the biggest challenge with any of that is the lateral violence that exists in Indian communities ourselves. So, we are the more likely ones to really be mean about how dark your skin is, or whether you are rez or whether you’re not. But I don’t have a rez and I’m never going to have a rez. I didn’t have anything. I already was 10 years old with a stack of Kiss records before I had anything I could enroll with, at least as far as the Little Shell Tribe is concerned. We were still, no one who could be enrolled because technically we didn’t exist.
So all of those things, when I would initially get involved in intertribal discussions … like, I’m involved with a couple groups who are working with Yellowstone and a goal to to re-Indigenize Yellowstone Park, kind of their next big mandate post their 100 or 150 year anniversary, or whatever it was. And in those environments, I used to really take a backseat to people who are elders, or are enrolled with other tribes, or whatever. And then, some of those people can be [beep] in the ways that I’m talking about.
Then I realized, you know what … When they established who qualified as an elder, they called me and said, “How old are you? Because we wanna make sure you qualify to be an elder.” So, I’m an elder in my community. I know as much about my people and my culture as anyone in just about any other people, just because so much has been lost from all of our communities.
And when I realized that, that is when the impostor syndrome as to whether or not I deserved to sit at that table changed. Now, I observe the protocols. But they’re not gonna push around the Pembina Chippewa, they’re not gonna push around the Little Shell. And as long as I’m there, we are as legit. Any reason that you have to consider we’re not legit is because you’ve been colonized into thinking what the world was trying to tell the world about us, and I will not stand for that.
Karabaic: Do you have any advice to give to someone else that is kind of struggling with that? They’re like, “I do wanna work on this, but I feel like it’s hard to get in those spaces.” Like you said, a lot of them can be intimidating and some of the people are not the nicest in Indian spaces. Do you have any advice for someone that might be in a similar situation as you? They’re an IT dork, former hard rocker, who is like, “I now wanna be a poet laureate and work on language revitalization.”
La Tray: I will put that in the context of people who talk to me about being a Little Shell and feeling that way, who have imposter system because of the things that people say to them. And what I tell them is, remember that all the other Indians are just off-brand Indians – to us. Sorry; present company excluded! [Laughter] And we are the greatest buffalo hunters the world has ever known.
I tell people that because I want them to be as proud of who we are as I am. And I wish my father would have had that opportunity, cause he deserved to be proud in the same way that I am. I want all of my people to be proud. I want all of Sasha’s people to be proud. And I’m sure there are people struggling in her community just like the ones in mine. Just in every tribal community, we should all be so proud of who we are and that we are just here at all anymore.
[Applause]
Karabaic: Sasha, this really connects to something I felt. I felt this throughline in all of “Thunder Song” of feeling like you were toeing a line of like, “I’m not enough, but I’m too much” in a lot of spaces. And sometimes it was like, “I’m not Native enough,” “I’m too Native.” I think especially in very white spaces like the Pacific Northwest punk scene, which we’ve all experienced the whiteness of that space if you’ve gone to a punk show. Like, you’re Native enough to check the box for the progressive white people that want you to check the box, but then you feel like you’re toeing that line of, “Am I doing enough? Am I taking up enough space? Do I have the right background?” I don’t know. I really identified with that.
LaPointe: I do think what comes up for me around this kind of conversation though is also something that I’ve struggled with my entire life. I feel like I grew up really privileged. I lived in a trailer with no running water and power, and had to go to the bathroom in a bucket. But when I say privileged, I mean, because I grew up within my community, I had my grandmother, my great grandmother, community around me. To me, that feels very privileged. My upbringing and experience I feel was a gift, to be around the language, to be around the stories. And I don’t wanna dismiss that.
But I think something that I’ve worked really hard all throughout my adult life in this writer’s journey is conversations like this make me think of erasure. Like this idea of, are you Indian enough? Are you Native enough? Like to me, that’s just like conversations around blood quantum and the conversations around being a light-skinned Native girl. It, to me, is another form of erasure. So I actively fight against that and I think that is a throughline in “Thunder Song.”
Karabaic: You both kind of talked about community with other indigenous writers. And Sasha, you even thanked your particular community of Indigenous writers. Can you tell me more about what it means to be in community with other writers with a Native background?
LaPointe: I feel like the way to answer this is the feeling I had being in a classroom of all Indigenous writers. I am someone who really struggled through [and] dropped out of alternative high school – not even regular high school, alternative high school. Like, who does that? I really struggled with academia. I didn’t feel like moving through academic spaces was my jam. It was hard.
When I made my way to the Institute of American Indian Arts and was in a classroom with other Native folks, all of a sudden it felt – I guess to answer that, like what being in community with other Indigenous writers, artists is for me – like I could relax. And I didn’t have to explain anything and I didn’t have to go “Oh, well this means …” It was just like this sigh of relief. That’s what it feels like, and it’s so necessary and so important.
Karabaic: How do you view your work as poet laureate as connected to your activism for the Little Shell Tribe?
La Tray: Well, first of all, I never really set out to be a poet. I didn’t really embrace it until my first book came out and people started calling me one. And that’s one of those things …
Karabaic: What did you want to be known [for] when you published a book of poetry?
La Tray: Well, I figured there’d be like 50 copies of it in the world and 40 of them would be in a closet in my mom’s house. [Laughter] And when I severed all ties with the gainfully employed world and just wanted to go all in as a writer, my goal … because I admire people, like Joy Harjo writes whatever the hell she wants to write. She gets identified as a poet and I’m sure she’s happy with that. But she plays music, she writes nonfiction, she does all of these things and doesn’t allow herself to be pigeonholed. And that’s what I wanted to do, is just do whatever I wanted to do.
And what I enjoy most about poet laureate – first of all, I spent a lot of time going around and talking to kids, which I absolutely love, all over the state of Montana. The one thing that I would take away from that experience, that I’m sure applies everywhere, is that the quality of your education should not be based on how much money your freaking parents make. [Audience applause] Because there are communities in Montana that [have] so much opportunities for the kids. And then another community I’ll go to and like 20% of the shelves in the library have books on them. The discrepancy is vast and just an example, again, of how our society just has chosen to not take care of ourselves, to take care of each other.
The other thing I really love about it is I get asked to do things because I’m poet laureate, and they have this expectation of what it means for a poet laureate to do something. Like they wanna pull a string on my back and poetry will emerge from my mouth. [Laughter] And depending on the room, sometimes people need to hear some [beep]. And I’m there to do it, because I think the most important part of art is to speak truth to power. And if you are not doing that, then why are you doing art? Because art is literally the thing that moves ourselves, moves our cultures, preserves our languages. It’s through art, and through storytelling, and all of these things.
You know, just two weeks ago my publisher asked me to do the keynote address at their big fundraiser for a very important program that they do. And I think they might have been a little nervous, because they’ve taken some heat about not being particularly upright in whatever their position might be with the situation in Gaza. We were in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where in 1862, the Dakota rose up because they were not getting what they’d been promised to survive with. And the guy in charge – not the Indian agent, but the guy who was in charge of the commodities they’re supposed to get – was keeping them and selling them for themselves. When they protested, he said, “Well let them eat grass.” When they found his mutilated body, his mouth had been stuffed with grass. I think that is a magnificent piece of Indigenous resistance. Because when you grind someone into the ground, the way that they’re gonna respond sometimes is violently. Because what other opportunity do they have?
So we’re on this land in Minnesota, where technically still no more than three Indians are supposed to be allowed to gather and it’s technically still illegal for Dakota people to even own property there. Now, they don’t enforce that anymore, but they leave it on the books for cultural purposes. But how can we sit there and have these comfortable conversations from comfortable homes that are under no threat at all, other than perhaps climate change, and pretend that our situation is any different than what we’re allowing to happen somewhere else?
I didn’t read a single poem at that event. And I never intended to. But that, I feel, is the role of an artist, or as a poet, or whoever it is, to go into these places that we never get asked to go unless it’s nice, and shake the [beep] cage a little bit.
[Applause]
Karabaic: OK, I wanna make sure you both get an opportunity to read. So I want to know if you would read us your passage first, Chris?
La Tray: OK, this is Chapter 18: 2021 in Missoula, Montana.
[Chris La Tray reading an excerpt from his book, “Becoming Little Shell.”]
“I’m driving westbound after dark on Broadway in Missoula, in the days following Christmas, just after the winter solstice when the night finds its darkest. There are clouds and no stars. It’s cold and getting colder.
“Silhouetted against the orange glow of street lights is a bulky shape also headed west, lumbers along the sidewalk. The outer edge of my headlights can barely make a sketch. I see a person in an oversized coat, a thick bag of some kind, like a stuffed sack or duffel, clutched in the left hand while the right holds an undefinable lump over their back and shoulders. As I pass, it looks like a white comforter similar to the one on my bed at home.
“Not a block farther along is another figure, blanket wrapped in shuffling, heading east. I wonder if the two will greet each other when they pass. I wonder where they plan to sleep. Living on the street, on the fringes, I suppose you learn the better places if you survive long enough. The best doorways, the best covered parking areas.
“If these two plan to join their fellows at the outdoor camp off Reserve Street, at times occupied by well over 100 people, one has a long way to go and the other is headed in the wrong direction. It’s probably too late to find a space in the homeless shelter or anywhere else the city offers authorized space to take cover from the cold. If they’re lucky, maybe they have a car or RV parked on a side street that they can hunker down in for the night. If they’re very lucky, maybe there’s a person they can call who will offer a spare couch or stretch of floor to sleep on. There remain many hours until morning.
“There are a heartbreaking number of houseless people in Missoula, but it’s nothing like other Northwest cities. My last visit to Portland, Oregon, for example, I was stunned by the number of camps in the city, on the slopes along the network of highways and interstates that connect north to south and west to east. It’s a problem, the public cries, but not in the way the loudest voices portray it. They see vagrants, addicts, and deranged and irredeemable souls that need to go somewhere their plight is less visible. Not me. When I see these people, no less beautiful in their humanity than anyone else, I see echoes of mine, the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians during those unfortunate years as landless Indians.”
[Applause]
Karabaic: Thank you.
La Tray: I will also say that that scene in Missoula now has gotten worse in the years since I observed that. And right now, Missoula is in the process of making it illegal to be homeless, moving the camps and forcing people out of the town. And they’ve just doubled down on the draconian measures that were there to begin with.
Karabaic: Do you think that there’s anything we can take from the experience of being shuttled around, losing your land and losing your federal recognition for so long that we can apply to how, currently, people are being treated when they have to live on the streets?
La Tray: There’s such an overwhelming amount of wealth in the world that we could solve all of these problems like that [snaps fingers] if we really wanted to. What I say about the Little Shell is that we’re proof that the long game works, because we tried, and we tried, and we tried, and we had setback, after setback, after setback, and we kept doing it. Social change takes a long time. And we live in a society where we have an idea on Thursday and if we aren’t able to pull it off by Sunday, it’s like, well that’s not gonna work; let’s try something else.
So that’s what I tell people, that I’m not really a hope guy, but if you want to have hope, you can look at the Little Shell as an example of the long game working. And now we are doing great things, so if we just keep at it and not let the setbacks overwhelm us, if we have people who can step into the breach when some of us flag a little bit, we can make these things happen. I believe we can, sometime in the future, figure out a way to actually want to care about each other.
Karabaic: In the Willamette Valley, we have a tribe that, for 120 years, has been fighting for federal recognition: the Chinook. And how has – I like to call it restoration …
La Tray: That’s what we call it.
Karabaic: Yeah, so restoration, rather than recognition. How has that changed things for the Little Shell? Because it’s new, you haven’t had it very long. How has that restoration changed things?
La Tray: What changed for us is we went from having no money at all, like nothing. Volunteer tribal council and people would spend their own money to go to D.C. to lobby for our own work. Our lawyer, who is essential to us succeeding in our efforts, was work pro bono the whole time. So there was no money.
What helped us, amazingly, we get federal restoration in December of 2019. Well, what happens in March of 2020? COVID happens. And in May, Congress passes the CARES Act. And as a result of the CARES Act, something like $8 [billion] or $9 billion gets allocated to tribal communities across the country – the largest investment in Indian country in the history of this country.
We went from nothing to $25 million in the bank. And since then, we’ve done a bunch of stuff. We built this state of the art health facility – not just for our own people; anybody can go there. And we’ve got vehicles to deliver food and medicine out to our elders and folks like that. Just all these programs that we’ve been able to launch off that investment in Indigenous communities and investment that could happen in every community. So that has been the big thing. And we’ve used that as a springboard for other things as well.
So it was a big deal for us. And this is bittersweet because we lost elders, we lost so many people, we lost our last first-language-Ojibwe speaker in Montana, died during COVID. So we suffered great losses. But COVID also provided great opportunity for us.
Karabaic: So it wasn’t just more money, less problems, sounds like.
La Tray: No, no.
Karabaic: I wanna make sure that you get an opportunity to read as well. It was very hard for me to pick a passage for this, but I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about salmon, because we are in salmon land and you are salmon people. So I really wanted you to read this passage about reconciling your punk life with what is Indigenous to your diet.
LaPointe: Thank you. I also wanna say I just was really moved when you read that passage. I live on the east side of Tacoma, on the Puyallup Reservation. Even just the other day, I came home from running an errand, like going to the gas station or something, and came home in tears. [I] was like, I can’t just go run an errand or go to the corner store without confronting this issue of houselessness. And I don’t know, I just wanted to thank you for that reading because I feel it when I leave my house all the time. I don’t know, something about being Indigenous, being on a reservation, it hits harder, right?
La Tray: Yeah, I mean, we comprise, what, like 2% of the population in the United States but like 30% of the houseless population, depending on where you are. All of these things that we show up in greater numbers than we should.
Karabaic: Despite having all of the land originally.
LaPointe: So, on that light note, thank you for asking me to read a passage about salmon. I do come from salmon people. It is such a sacred resource for us. I think in “Thunder Song,” a lot of this sort of celebration of Indigenous wisdom, Indigenous knowledge is just at the core of this and truly has helped me. So, in writing the “First Salmon Ceremony,” I felt, like, just stoked. So I’ll just stop there.
La Tray: I wanna interject one thing, too. If I may relate it to … I mean you’re a salmon people, we’re a buffalo people. Last month, I did another keynote for another organization of wealthy donors. And the main entree, you could choose between salmon and buffalo. And I just saw these are two of our relatives, that are culturally significant, that were all but eliminated by the very industries that all of these people profited from – and continue to profit from. So that to me was one of those juxtapositions. I’m grateful that you brought up.
Karabaic: Sounds like there’s a poem in that.
LaPointe: Also, last thing I’ll say is I’m so stoked that we both wore our beaded roses. We didn’t plan this. We didn’t plan this.
All right, I’ll just read the opening section of “First Salmon Ceremony.” And for those of you who don’t know, in our tribe, we celebrate the first salmon by having a big feast, and storytelling, and songs, and we really honor that first salmon, and it’s a big deal.
[Sasha LaPointe reading her essay, “First Salmon Ceremony” from “Thunder Song.”]
“’What kind of Indian are you?’ my uncle asked, as he dropped a 30-pound fish into my arms. It was Christmas Eve. I was 17. He had instructed my cousins and me to join him in the driveway, and we dutifully lined up alongside his car on the icy pavement. Our gifts, he told us, were in the trunk.
“One by one, he presented each of us with a massive salmon, straight from the trunk of his car, frozen and unwrapped. We exchanged nervous glances, bit down on our lips to keep from smirking or erupting into laughter. We probably wanted discmans or gift certificates to the skate shop. We wanted something from the mall. We were teenagers.
“But instead, we held in our outstretched arms king salmon. I stood there, snow lightly falling on my blue hair, breath puffing from my black lips in cold clouds, and said quietly, ‘Uncle, I’m a vegetarian.’ The statement is what prompted his question. He shook his head and turned around, asking once more before lumbering back up the driveway and into the house, ‘What kind of Indian are you?’
“My uncle was an artist, a carver, a painter. He danced in the long house. He had an art studio in Pioneer Square. His voice boomed when he spoke, and he wasn’t afraid to yell at the kids. He called my mom Jilly Bean, and though he was often so stoic, he was almost unapproachable. There was a softness about him, a deep care for us. He was ridiculously handsome, too. A white woman once said he looked like ‘a real Hollywood Indian.’
“From a young age, I’d been driven by an insatiable need to impress my cool but terrifying uncle. I drew him pictures. I wanted to be an artist like him, I’d say, before presenting him with stacks of what I thought passed for art. Once I even traced every page from my ‘Beauty and the Beast’ coloring book, a small lie to impress my artist uncle.
“As I stood there in the snow, holding the salmon, I felt shame swell up in me. I wondered, what kind of Indian am I?”
[Applause]
Karabaic: Thank you. We have some time for questions, so if anybody has questions.
Audience member: You mentioned earlier about Indigenous film and television. Are there any films or television that you’ve seen lately that you’re particularly excited about that you think people should totally be watching?
La Tray: Well, “Reservation Dogs,” of course. I mean, all the ones everybody knows about. When you were talking about the … did you see the horror movie, “Blood Quantum”?
LaPointe: I love “Blood Quantum.” Spooky season has just ended or whatever, but “Blood Quantum” is such an important … it’s Native written, directed, acted, so yeah.
La Tray: And the fish don’t die.
[Laughter]
Audience member: I was curious – each of you have a traditional language. What ideas, that you are learning about your traditional languages, do you think would be really cool if it was brought into English somehow? Or, what relations do you see between your traditional language and how English is spoken, if any?
LaPointe: I don’t know if I’ll totally answer this right, but I love a question about language. My mom is like my language teacher. I text her and blow her up all the time, where I’m like, “how do you say this?” Shout out to Jill LaPointe; she’s always telling me, teaching me.
But one thing that I get really excited about is the different meanings, where my mom was explaining to me that we have this phrase in Lushootseed that there’s no direct English translation. [Speaks in Lushootseed.] It’s like a form of I love you, but also I have compassion for you. It’s so layered and complex that the English I love you doesn’t match. I don’t even know if that answers your question, I just wanted to say that, and I got excited that you asked about language. So, thank you.
La Tray: Yeah, I think you know English has been on this continent for 30 seconds compared to the thousands of years that are other languages. So there are pieces of the Anishinaabemowin language that were spoken by people who hunted mastodons. So that’s thousands, and thousands, and thousands of years old.
I get irritated when it’s usually some overly earnest white dude who says something like, “We don’t have the language to describe what we’re going through.” And it’s like, you don’t; we do. Because our languages survived those things. And there’s a depth … and I’m thanking you for answering this question, asking this question because the greatest interview response I’ve ever given in my entire life was about language. I told them that trying to connect culture and people to the land in English versus Anishinaabemowin is like trying to eat a delicious bison roast with a straw. You’re gonna suck up some delicious juices, but you’re never gonna get to the meat of it. [Clapping] I expected a roar. That’s why I’m poet laureate, let me tell you that. [Laughter]
Karabaic: You’re in a room full of people at the Portland Book Fest. That is a roar.
Audience member: I wanna ask if there are any specific cultural technology you use during the writing process that helps you express … like, for example, are there any cultural creative methods, or techniques, or specific devices that helps you during your writing process, like, every day you wake up and use a certain type of thing that helps you gain more creativity? Yeah, that’s just what I’m wondering.
LaPointe: Yes. I think that every time I sit down to write, part of my practice is honoring the storytellers that I come from. I also have weird little rituals that I do that are private. I have my great grandmother’s recordings of telling our Coast Salish stories, and I will listen to them, like it’s an actual practice. Hearing her voice, hearing her orate those stories is something that will help me kick into gear to sit down and do the work.
La Tray: I think just the practice with our medicines. For us, as Plains people – and I don’t know, it’s probably similar for you – sage, sweet grass, tobacco and cedar are our traditional medicines. And I try and work with them as close to every day as I can. Now, when I’m on the road a lot, sometimes that’s more difficult than others, but I carry my tobacco and I carry my supplies to do those things. And just living in the world as an Anishinaabe person, that is the practice that’s gonna make my writing better. So that’s what I have tattooed on my arm, is my reminder of what my spiritual traditions are. This is how I should be living and to me, that’s important. What’s the use of putting something out if I’m not living right, I guess?
Audience member: Little story: I am a reconnecting Native. I’ve been on a journey now for years. And I got to go home to my mom’s village this year, wonderful experience, met many great storytellers. Because my mom’s village is in a settler, colonial Latin American country, the way that they share stories is usually through what we call in Spanish “chisme.” I was wondering, out of all the interviewing you did, relatives you spoke to, elders that you know, that you heard tell stories, what was the juiciest “chisme,” meaning the juiciest gossip?
[Laughter]
La Tray: I guess I would say that the whole thread of my book is that my father and my grandfather denied that we were Indigenous at all, to the point where they denied that we were related to any of the other La Trays in Montana – and there are many, many of us. And we all go back to the same couple, Mose and Susie La Tray, who were part of a group of families who came down out of the Red River and were living on the Milk River in the mid-1860s. The army burned them out and drove them into Central Montana to found this town called Lewistown today. Mose and Susie had something like 13 or 15 kids. That’s pretty juicy. [Laughter] There was a lot of good Catholic ardor going on for them to be the progenitors of thousands of La Trays across the state, to the degree that we are all related because of Mose and Susie’s juicy passion.
[Laughter and clapping]
LaPointe: I feel like I actually had an ancestor moment just now on stage, where they were like, “Uh uh. Mm mm.” But I will say, stuff came to mind and I was like, no, like they tapped me and were like, “Uh uh, you can’t talk about grandma that way.” So, I mean, those secrets are locked with me.
But, one thing – I remember being really moved by this story by my ancestor, Myrtle Woodcock. She wrote a poem, a story called “The Wild Blackberry,” and it stuck with me. It’s this short, tiny, little moment about where the wild blackberry comes from and where it gets its name. And it’s about thwarted love, like star-crossed lovers, right? And then I heard, as an adult, that she actually probably had … oh, see, I already feel bad! I’m like uh-oh, uh-oh. But, like this sort of, what is it called when you’re not allowed to love someone?
Karabaic: Forbidden love?
LaPointe: Forbidden love! Yeah, and it sort of exists in the story called “The Wild Blackberry,” and that is literally juicy.
La Tray: I was getting coffee for one of our elders at one of our events. She’s in her 90s and she’s maybe four-and-a-half feet tall. And I got her coffee for her, and I said, “Do you want any cream or sugar?” And she says, “No, I like my coffee the way I like my men: dark.” And I just go, “OK.”
Karabaic: And that’s the note we’re gonna end on.
[Laughter and applause]
Miller: That was Chris La Tray and Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe, talking to Lillian Karabaic at the 2024 Portland Book Festival from Literary Arts.
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