1장
A Journey Through Ancestral Wounds and Healing Waters
In Sasha LaPointe's "Red Paint," the past and present intertwine like salmon swimming upstream. This raw memoir has garnered praise from Indigenous literary circles and mainstream critics alike for its unflinching exploration of intergenerational trauma and healing. When Phoebe Bridgers mentioned it as "the book that made me cry on three separate flights" in a 2022 interview, it catapulted onto bestseller lists. LaPointe's work stands alongside celebrated Indigenous authors like Tommy Orange and Terese Marie Mailhot, offering a distinctly Pacific Northwest perspective on what it means to reclaim cultural identity in a colonized world. The book's poetic exploration of trauma has made it required reading in university courses on Indigenous literature and psychology of healing, with readers describing it as "a ceremony in book form."
2장
From Aunt Susie's Salmon Song to Personal Awakening
The memoir opens with a transcribed song from Violet taqwsblu Hilbert that tells of spiritual illness during salmon season. This ancestral story establishes a framework for understanding the Coast Salish concept of spirit sickness-when your spirit becomes distressed and leaves your body, causing you to lose consciousness, interest in life, and body heat until you eventually lie down and never wake. This concept becomes a metaphor for LaPointe's own journey through trauma and healing.
The Coast Salish were a nomadic hunter-gatherer society who lived along coasts and rivers, following fish and gathering resources. They wove cedar garments, built cedar plank houses, and participated in winter ceremonies involving gathering in longhouses where people danced to drums on dirt floors until dawn. When missionaries arrived, they banned these spiritual practices, forcing ceremonies underground until treaties eventually returned these rights. These winter dances, where ancestors wore red paint, connect directly to the healing journey LaPointe explores throughout her narrative.
The word "hdiw" meaning "come in" hangs by LaPointe's parents' door-a welcome sign but also a reminder that she never learned her tribe's language. This linguistic disconnect symbolizes the broader cultural disconnection caused by colonization, exemplified even in the renaming of Mount Tahoma to Rainier. LaPointe's childhood home on reservation land uses the security code 1492-the year Columbus arrived-an ironic acknowledgment of colonization's impact. The house, though renovated, remains filled with ancestral objects and stories that "linger like ghosts," particularly in the laundry room that was once Aunt Susie's bedroom.
When LaPointe cautiously asks permission to wear the red paint-requesting access to something sacred-her mother silently rises and disappears downstairs. This moment marks the beginning of LaPointe's journey to reclaim her cultural heritage and heal from personal and intergenerational trauma.
3장
Names, Identity, and the Search for Belonging
Names carry profound significance throughout LaPointe's memoir, serving as anchors of identity and bridges to ancestral heritage. Her own English name, Sasha, comes from a special-ordered olive-skinned "Sasha Doll" that her parents treasured - a connection to her mixed heritage that would shape her understanding of belonging. More significantly, her great-grandmother Violet taqwsblu Hilbert gifted her with her Skagit name at a traditional naming ceremony when she was three years old. In vivid photos from that day, LaPointe appears "wild at heart," dancing uninhibited by a boombox as relatives passed her around saying "taqwsblu number two," their words weighted with expectation about the "hard shoes to fill."
The bestowal of her Skagit name carries deeper meaning than typical Western naming traditions. Unlike a fairy tale where a godmother might bestow enchanted slippers or promise a prince's love, LaPointe's great-grandmother gave her something far more powerful - a name that emerges from deep within: taqwsblu. This name connects her to her ancestral lineage through generations of strong Indigenous women, carrying with it both profound responsibility and spiritual power. It becomes a touchstone throughout her life, reminding her of who she is and where she comes from, even in her darkest moments.
The significance of names extends beyond personal identity to encompass the very landscape itself. LaPointe carefully documents how colonization systematically renamed sacred places, pointing to how Mount Tahoma became Mount Rainier - an act that attempted to erase Indigenous presence and history from the land. Throughout the memoir, she deliberately reclaims these places by acknowledging their original names and deeper significance to her people, showing how language and naming are acts of resistance and preservation.
LaPointe's search for belonging is further complicated by her experiences of generational trauma and physical instability. Growing up, she inherited a legacy of impermanence - her great-grandmother's stories of traveling the Skagit River with her parents, carrying rolled-up linoleum to create home wherever they stayed, spoke to an adaptability born of necessity. LaPointe's own childhood echoed this pattern as her family moved constantly between cramped apartments, borrowed basements, and eventually a trailer on the Swinomish Reservation. This physical displacement mirrors her emotional and spiritual journey as she navigates the aftermath of childhood trauma, searching for solid ground between her Indigenous heritage and contemporary reality.
The power of names becomes both burden and blessing throughout her story - they connect her to family and tradition while also carrying expectations and responsibilities that sometimes feel overwhelming. Her two names - Sasha and taqwsblu - represent the dual worlds she inhabits and her ongoing struggle to find authentic belonging in both.
4장
Trauma, Spirit Sickness, and the Path to Healing
LaPointe's engagement to Brandon initially seems like a path to stability and healing. He appears to be her "Agent Cooper"-a reference to the intuitive, mystic character from "Twin Peaks" who solves mysteries and brings order to chaos. However, their relationship becomes another site of trauma when Brandon betrays her trust by secretly using their honeymoon money to buy only his ticket to Australia.
This betrayal echoes earlier traumas in LaPointe's life. As a child, she experienced sexual abuse from a man her family trusted as an "uncle." This led her to run away repeatedly, sleeping in bowling alleys, on couches, and even in an empty Petco under construction. At fifteen, she "traded her body for shelter" with an older boy in a hotel room. These experiences created a pattern of seeking safety and permanence in relationships that ultimately couldn't provide it.
While studying at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, LaPointe begins writing about her trauma for the first time. This creative process unlocks painful memories and triggers what her tribe would call "spirit sickness." She experiences dissociation, flashbacks, and nightmares that worsen over time. During intimate moments with Brandon, she suddenly finds herself "transported back to teenage assault," a terrifying experience that had also happened with her first love, Richard, years earlier.
LaPointe's healing journey involves reconnecting with her cultural heritage and ancestral wisdom. She dreams of Aunt Susie, her great-grandmother's aunt and a tribal medicine worker, who speaks to her in their traditional language. This dream differs from her usual nightmares of being chased or hurt-it offers guidance rather than fear.
The concept of spirit sickness becomes a framework for understanding her PTSD symptoms. Just as the narrator in Aunt Susie's salmon song becomes supernaturally ill and must journey to recover their spirit, LaPointe must undertake her own healing journey to reclaim parts of herself lost to trauma.
5장
Ancestral Echoes: Comptia's Story
Throughout the memoir, LaPointe weaves in the haunting story of her ancestor Comptia Koholowish, who was merely nine years old when smallpox devastated her Coast Salish community. Comptia watched helplessly as the disease ravaged her village with merciless efficiency - fever burning through bodies, painful mouth sores preventing eating, and angry rashes erupting into disfiguring boils. The air filled with the sounds of suffering and the smoke from funeral pyres. To survive, she fled alone into the dense Pacific Northwest forests, drawing upon generations of inherited knowledge about traditional trails, seasonal camps, and waterways to navigate her escape from the epidemic that was decimating Native populations across the region.
By her twentieth year, Comptia had witnessed the systematic transformation of her ancestral territories. The "Pastads" (derived from "Boston"), as Coast Salish people called the white settlers, arrived in increasing numbers, establishing permanent settlements that irreversibly altered the landscape. Trading posts appeared along the shoreline where her people had gathered shellfish for millennia. Military forts rose on sacred grounds, and missionary churches dotted the hills where traditional longhouses once stood. The settlers brought not only their structures but also their laws, customs, and expectations of proper civilization.
Understanding that physical survival increasingly required cultural compromise, Comptia made the calculated decision to marry Scottish sea captain James Johnson when he proposed. This choice, while ensuring her immediate safety and status in the changing world, came at the devastating cost of her identity - Comptia Koholowish was transformed into Mrs. Jane Johnson, expected to abandon her traditional ways and embrace European customs. She learned to speak English, wore corseted dresses, and attended church services, performing the role of a proper settler's wife.
Yet beneath this imposed identity, Comptia maintained secret acts of resistance and cultural preservation. She continued the traditional practice of tattooing, using blackberry juice and charcoal carefully pressed into her skin with needles, creating the sacred designs that connected her to generations of Coast Salish women before her. She performed these rituals in secret, hiding the marks beneath her long-sleeved Victorian dresses. The ultimate indignity came when her husband constructed a grand European-style house on her own ancestral lands - land where her family had lived for countless generations - and she was forbidden to enter it because of racist policies against "Indians." Instead, she was relegated to a crude shed with four rough walls and a dirt floor, physically marginalized on the very land that was her birthright.
Comptia's story serves as a powerful mirror to LaPointe's own contemporary experiences of cultural displacement and necessary adaptation. Both women navigate worlds that actively seek to erase their Indigenous identity, finding small but significant ways to maintain their connection to their cultural heritage. Their parallel struggles - separated by generations but united in theme - highlight the ongoing nature of Indigenous resistance and survival. Both women's stories demonstrate how the loss of home and belonging continues to echo through generations, while also showing the remarkable resilience required to create new forms of cultural survival in environments designed to suppress Native identity and traditions.
6장
Cutting the Blanket: Marriage and Loss
LaPointe's marriage to Brandon begins with a traditional Coast Salish blanket-wrapping ceremony, but she feels "crippling anxiety" during the ritual. Something is missing. At the reception, she finds herself sitting barefoot in the meadow with Richard, her wedding dress fanning across the grass, asking, "Do you think I'm doing the right thing?" His only response: "I really like Brandon."
The marriage quickly unravels after Brandon's betrayal regarding their honeymoon. When a Coast Salish marriage ends, it's called "cutting the blanket." LaPointe lies wrapped in her wedding blanket alone on the couch, "thinking of my great-grandmother watching her parents' house burn, looking around the room, unable to find whatever it was I needed to burn."
After separating from Brandon, LaPointe experiences a period of homelessness reminiscent of her teenage years, though this time she has "friends with stability" who offer temporary shelter. She reconnects with Richard, her first love, and imagines "a small house in Skagit Valley, making art and writing." But Brandon's words haunt her: "The women in your family are sick..." She wonders if this is true and if she'll ever heal.
LaPointe's journey takes a painful turn when she discovers she's pregnant. The rose quartz pendant she's been wearing as a healing talisman shatters on the pavement-"a bad omen that left me deeply unsettled." Soon after, she learns she's pregnant, seeing those "same rose quartz lines" on the pregnancy test.
Though initially terrified, LaPointe realizes she wants this baby and wants to be a mom. She and Brandon agree to co-parent while maintaining their separation. However, at eight weeks, LaPointe miscarries. The loss is devastating: "On my daughter's birth day, I buried her beneath a cedar tree. No gifts, no ceremonies-just her father and me."
7장
The River's Healing Power
In her grief, LaPointe turns to ancestral healing practices. She steps naked into the freezing Skagit River, immersing herself in its icy current as part of a "resuscitation ritual." While her worried friends search for rope to secure her, she floats the remnants of her altar downstream-candles, cedar, prenatal vitamins-watching them disappear into the rushing water.
Waist-deep in the freezing river, she surrenders to the current, clutching a root from the bank as the water pulls at her. Suspended beneath the surface, she feels "the river tear away my darkness and grief." In this moment, she thinks about disappearance-how her mother had tried to go missing through drugs and alcohol, how she had tried to make herself vanish, how the baby girl growing inside her had disappeared.
She chose this spot on the Skagit deliberately-her great-grandmother had lived along this river, and Aunt Susie, the first woman Indian doctor in their tribe, had trained here as a medicine worker. At ten years old, Aunt Susie had stood barefoot on these freezing pebbles as part of her healing training. Her words come to LaPointe: "Out in the stream I floated in the pitch-black night... That is how I found this particular power, which always helps me... The power sustains me, it tells me it shall be my strength."
This river ritual marks a turning point in LaPointe's healing journey. She resurfaces "gasping for air" and runs to shore where her friends wrap her in a Pendleton blanket. Though Richard looks worried, she assures him she will be okay. She realizes she can't bear the weight of his pain and needs to leave her childhood love behind to continue her own healing.
8장
Finding Home in Ancestral Connection
LaPointe's healing journey leads her to Ilwaco, the Chinook region where her ancestor Comptia was born. Crossing the fog-shrouded Astoria Bridge, she's on her own "treasure hunt-not for gold, but for answers." She studies family histories and letters, burning sage as she gazes at the "charged landscape" beyond her window.
In Ilwaco, she visits heritage sites that barely acknowledge her people's existence-just thirteen words at Fort Columbia: "Here was the home of the Chinook Indians and their great chief, Comcomly." That single word-"was"-catches in her throat, emphasizing how colonial narratives relegate Indigenous peoples to the past.
At 124 Lake Street, LaPointe finds the modest white house where Comptia had lived with her husband. A man emerges and proudly points to what he calls "the carriage house"-the shed where her ancestor had been forced to live. Standing before the small white shed, LaPointe sees a woman in the window's reflection-herself, but also Comptia. She realizes Comptia hasn't called her there for LaPointe to release her; she is releasing LaPointe. Looking through the glass, she sees her "own prison walls fall." Comptia Koholowish gives her "permission to leave, to finally walk away."
Before leaving, LaPointe kneels and places red clay on the wet earth, feeling "a small gratitude bloom within me." She realizes she might never be a wife or mother, but she has "the strength to walk toward something else, toward whatever I wanted." In her car, she notices "a streak of red paint along my cheekbone in the rearview mirror-and smiled, leaving it there."
9장
Red Paint: Reclaiming Ancestral Power
With one week before departing on a cross-country tour with her band, LaPointe sits at her parents' table seeking permission to wear the red paint. Her mother returns with cedar shavings and a small chunk of red clay, her eyes wet as she sets them before her: "I've been waiting a long time to give this to you."
LaPointe recalls how the longhouse had frightened her as a child, where she'd obediently avoided looking dancers in the eye. The pounding drums, songs, orange flames and smoke had enveloped her in a "dream-like state." When she'd once asked about the red paint, her mother explained: "The red paint is for the healers."
LaPointe comes from a line of dancers who wore red paint-healers and medicine workers. Now, rolling the chunk of red clay between her fingers, watching it dust them pink, she closes her fist around "this fragile power of healing." She reflects: "Strength feels strange when it's new, like something that can crumble. I held mine soft and delicate, and welcomed it."
Before leaving on tour with her band Medusa Stare, LaPointe performs one final ritual-a ceremonial burning on her unborn child's due date. She gathers everything she'd collected for her baby and burns it in a cedarwood fire, weeping as the flames consume "the only meal I'd ever cook for her." As the fire diminishes to embers, she feels the spirit world draw close and sees her uncle at the water's edge in his longhouse regalia, face covered in red paint, with other dancers behind him. He has come to take her daughter's spirit. Waves crash "like ceremonial drums, and all around me was a song."
On tour, LaPointe carries her red paint in a small woven bag, along with cedar shavings from the Maiden of Deception Pass carving. These become her talismans for strength. With her parents' permission, she wears red paint when performing-her own healing ceremony honoring ancestors and wounds carried through generations.
At their first show in Minneapolis, LaPointe prepares in a graffiti-covered bathroom, placing the red paint and cedar on the counter "like an altar." Staring at her reflection-"a face marked by grief, trauma, loss and generations of violence"-she sees Comptia, her mother, her grandmother, and all the women before her. Stepping onstage, she grips the microphone and begins to speak her poem about ancestry, sickness, and the strength of the women she comes from.
The red paint becomes a symbol of reclamation and healing. By wearing it, LaPointe honors her ancestors and acknowledges her place in a lineage of healers. She transforms from "a victim ruled by trauma" to someone "descended from women who knew how to heal." The memoir ends not with resolution but with continuation-LaPointe finding her voice and sharing her story, carrying forward ancestral wisdom while creating her own path.
10장
The Healing Power of Story and Song
Throughout "Red Paint," LaPointe demonstrates how storytelling itself becomes a form of healing. By weaving together her personal experiences with ancestral narratives, she creates continuity between past and present, showing how patterns of trauma and resilience echo across generations.
Music plays a significant role in this healing process. From the traditional songs of her ancestors to the punk music she performs with her band, sound becomes a vehicle for expressing pain and finding connection. At a PJ Harvey concert after her miscarriage, LaPointe is overwhelmed when the singer performs "Down by the Water" with its haunting refrain: "Little fish, big fish swimming in the water / Come back here and give me my daughter." Though devastating in the moment, this musical connection helps LaPointe process her grief.
Similarly, performing with her band Medusa Stare becomes a form of ceremony. By wearing red paint on stage and sharing her poems about ancestry and trauma, LaPointe transforms personal pain into communal experience. Her audience-"punks with mohawks, suicide chains, and shirts declaring 'THE FUTURE IS FEMME' and 'YOU'RE ON STOLEN LAND'"-becomes witnesses to her healing journey.
LaPointe's memoir ends not with neat resolution but with continued becoming. She emerges from ritual baths "wrapped in a towel with bergamot and rose petals clinging to my skin," facing her reflection as it urges her to "shape-shift" and "shake this off." This ongoing transformation acknowledges that healing is not a destination but a process-one that connects her to ancestral wisdom while allowing her to forge her own path forward.
11장
Reclaiming Indigenous Identity in a Colonized World
At its core, "Red Paint" explores what it means to reclaim Indigenous identity in a world shaped by colonization. LaPointe confronts questions about her identity, declaring that her Indigeneity lives not on her skin but in her blood, her DNA containing "a catalog of heirlooms" and ancestral history.
Throughout the memoir, she navigates spaces that have erased or commodified Indigenous presence. In Astoria, she finds a "Native American Medicine Cards" deck created by non-natives featuring stereotypical spirit animals. In Ilwaco, heritage sites barely acknowledge her people's existence. Even in The Goonies, a film set on Chinook land, there isn't "a single Chinook character."
LaPointe resists being defined by colonial narratives that frame Indigenous peoples as victims or relics of the past. She is tired of being called "brave," "victim," or "survivor"-tired of names white people have given her people. She wants to be called "writer, Coast Salish, poet-anything but resilient."
By reclaiming traditional practices like wearing red paint and performing ceremonial burnings, LaPointe asserts her right to cultural continuity. By writing her story and sharing it with the world, she challenges narratives that relegate Indigenous peoples to history. Her memoir becomes an act of resistance and reclamation-a declaration that Coast Salish culture is not something that "was" but something that continues to evolve and thrive through her and future generations.
In the end, LaPointe's journey is not about returning to an idealized past but about creating a future that honors ancestral wisdom while acknowledging present realities. She carries her red paint and cedar as she tours with her punk band, blending traditional and contemporary expressions of identity. This synthesis represents the living, breathing nature of Indigenous culture-not a museum artifact but a dynamic force that continues to adapt and survive.
