Red Paint: The Indigenous Art of Resistance

Summary of Red Paint

1. 1

   When the Spirit Leaves the Body

   

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   What happens when your spirit becomes so distressed it simply leaves? The Coast Salish people have a name for this: spirit sickness. You lose consciousness, interest in life drains away, body heat vanishes, and eventually you lie down and never rise again. This isn't metaphor-it's a precise diagnosis passed down through generations, sung in ancestral songs about salmon season and supernatural illness. For Sasha LaPointe, a Coast Salish writer navigating the wreckage of personal trauma and colonial violence, this ancient understanding becomes the key to her survival. Her memoir "Red Paint" doesn't just chronicle pain; it maps the geography of healing, tracing a path from childhood sexual abuse through miscarriage and cultural disconnection toward something fiercer: reclamation. Standing at her parents' table with one week before departing on tour, she asks the question that will change everything-may I wear the red paint of our healers?

2. 2

   The Weight of Names and Displacement

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   At three, LaPointe received her Skagit name at a traditional ceremony: taqwsblu, after her great-grandmother Violet taqwsblu Hilbert. In photographs, she dances wild by a boombox while relatives pass her around saying "taqwsblu number two" - words heavy with expectation. Her great-grandmother gave something profound: a name emerging from deep within, connecting her through generations of Indigenous women. Not a gift but a responsibility, a spiritual anchor she would cling to through darkness. Yet she also carries "Sasha," named after a special-ordered olive-skinned doll - a connection to mixed heritage that complicates belonging. She never learned her tribe's language; "hdiw" (come in) hangs by her parents' door as both welcome and reminder of colonization's theft. Her family moved constantly between cramped apartments and borrowed basements, finally landing in a trailer on the Swinomish Reservation where her parents ironically set the security code to 1492. Living between two names, two worlds, she searches for solid ground in a geography designed to keep Indigenous people displaced.

3. 3

   Trauma Patterns and Broken Promises

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   LaPointe thought she'd found stability when she got engaged to Brandon-her "Agent Cooper," referencing Twin Peaks' intuitive detective who brings order to chaos. Instead, he secretly used their honeymoon money to buy only his ticket to Australia, echoing earlier betrayals. As a child, a man her family trusted as "uncle" sexually abused her. She ran away repeatedly, sleeping in bowling alleys, on couches, in an empty Petco under construction. At fifteen, she traded her body for shelter with an older boy. These experiences created a pattern: seeking safety in relationships that couldn't provide it. While studying at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, she began writing about her trauma. This unlocked what her tribe would call spirit sickness-dissociation, flashbacks, nightmares that worsened over time. During intimate moments with Brandon, she suddenly found herself transported back to teenage assault. Her PTSD symptoms mapped perfectly onto the ancient diagnosis: her spirit had become so distressed it was leaving her body. Where Western psychology saw disorder, her ancestral wisdom saw spiritual illness requiring spiritual healing. She dreamed of Aunt Susie, her great-grandmother's aunt and tribal medicine worker, who spoke in their traditional language. The framework for understanding her suffering had been waiting in ancestral memory.

4. Chapter 4

   Comptia's Shadow, Jane's Cage

   Woven throughout LaPointe's story runs the haunting narrative of her ancestor Comptia Koholowish, who at nine watched smallpox devastate her Coast Salish community. Fever burned through bodies, painful sores prevented eating, rashes erupted into disfiguring boils. To survive, she fled alone into dense Pacific Northwest forests, drawing on generations of inherited knowledge. By twenty, she witnessed systematic transformation of her ancestral territories. The "Pastads" (from "Boston") arrived - trading posts replaced shellfish gathering sites, military forts rose on sacred grounds, missionary churches supplanted longhouses. Understanding survival required compromise, Comptia married Scottish sea captain James Johnson. This choice ensured her safety but cost her identity - Comptia Koholowish became Mrs. Jane Johnson, expected to abandon traditional ways. Yet beneath this imposed identity, she maintained secret resistance: traditional tattooing using blackberry juice and charcoal, creating sacred designs connecting her to generations of Coast Salish women, hidden beneath Victorian dresses. The ultimate indignity came when her husband constructed a grand European house on her own ancestral lands and forbade her entry because of racist policies against "Indians." She was relegated to a crude shed - physically marginalized on land that was her birthright.

   Chapter 5

   Cutting the Blanket, Losing the Baby

   LaPointe's marriage to Brandon began with a traditional Coast Salish blanket-wrapping ceremony, though she felt crippling anxiety during the ritual. At the reception, she sat barefoot with Richard, asking: "Do you think I'm doing the right thing?" His only response: "I really like Brandon." When Brandon's betrayal ended the marriage-called cutting the blanket in Coast Salish tradition-she lay wrapped in her wedding blanket alone, thinking of her great-grandmother watching her parents' house burn. After separating, LaPointe experienced homelessness again, reconnecting with Richard and imagining a small house in Skagit Valley. But Brandon's words haunted her: "The women in your family are sick..." Then her rose quartz healing pendant shattered-a bad omen. Soon after, she discovered she was pregnant. Though initially terrified, LaPointe wanted this baby. At eight weeks, she miscarried. The loss was devastating: "On my daughter's birth day, I buried her beneath a cedar tree. No gifts, no ceremonies-just her father and me." In grief, she turned to ancestral healing, stepping naked into the freezing Skagit River where her great-grandmother had lived and Aunt Susie had trained as a medicine worker. Waist-deep, she surrendered to the current, clutching a root as water pulled at her. She resurfaced gasping, wrapped in a Pendleton blanket by worried friends, knowing she would be okay but also that she needed to leave Richard behind to continue her healing.

   Chapter 6

   Permission to Wear the Red Paint

   LaPointe's healing journey led her to Ilwaco, where Comptia was born. At Fort Columbia, she found only thirteen words acknowledging her people: "Here was the home of the Chinook Indians and their great chief, Comcomly." That single word-"was"-caught in her throat, relegating Indigenous peoples to the past. At 124 Lake Street, she found Comptia's modest white house. A man pointed to what he called "the carriage house"-the shed where her ancestor had been forced to live. Standing before it, LaPointe saw a woman in the window's reflection-herself, but also Comptia. She realized Comptia hadn't called her there for LaPointe to release her; Comptia was releasing LaPointe. Looking through the glass, she saw her own prison walls fall. Before departing, LaPointe knelt and placed red clay on wet earth. In her car, she noticed a streak of red paint along her cheekbone-and smiled, leaving it there. Back at her parents' table with one week before tour, her mother returned with cedar shavings and a chunk of red clay, eyes wet: "I've been waiting a long time to give this to you." LaPointe comes from a line of dancers who wore red paint-healers and medicine workers. Rolling the chunk between her fingers, watching it dust them pink, she closed her fist around this fragile power of healing.

   Chapter 7

   The Ceremony Continues

   Before touring with Medusa Stare, LaPointe performed one final ritual on her daughter's due date - burning everything she'd collected for her baby in cedarwood fire. As flames consumed the only meal she'd ever cook for her child, the spirit world drew close. She saw her uncle at the water's edge in longhouse regalia, face painted red, with dancers behind him. He had come to take her daughter's spirit. On tour, LaPointe carried red paint and cedar shavings from the Maiden of Deception Pass carving. With her parents' permission, she wore red paint when performing - her own healing ceremony honoring ancestors and wounds carried through generations. At their first Minneapolis show, she prepared in a graffiti-covered bathroom, transforming the counter into an altar with red paint and cedar. In her reflection, she saw Comptia, her mother, her grandmother, and all the women before her. In a world that erases Indigenous presence, LaPointe chooses continuation. She carries ancestral wisdom into punk venues, blending traditional ceremony with contemporary expression. The red paint becomes both remembrance and revolution. Your wounds don't have to be your ending. Sometimes the most powerful resistance is simply continuing - carrying forward what they tried to burn, speaking what they tried to silence, becoming what they said was impossible.

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