The Coast Salish writer’s new book of essays builds on her previous memoir.

by Agueda Pacheco Flores

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When Sasha LaPointe looks at iconic places around Puget Sound, whether it’s downtown Seattle or Elliott Bay, her first thoughts aren’t about how they’re the “birthplace” of Nirvana or Starbucks. No. She thinks of things that aren’t immediately apparent to the non-Native eye.

The Coast Salish writer, currently based out of Tacoma, has been living in a different world to the average white person here in the Seattle area. Place and belonging take center stage in most of her writing. Her 2022 memoir-style autobiography, Red Paint, explores her upbringing and how she finds harmony between her Upper Skagit and Nooksack heritage and being punk. That book received critical acclaim and won both the Pacific Northwest Book Award and a 2023 Washington State Book Award. 

Now, she’s back with her new book. Thunder Song is a culmination of more than a dozen essays. LaPointe spent all of March celebrating the release of Thunder Song and spoke with the South Seattle Emerald about her inspirations, her lineage, and making space in a world that continually strives to erase her existence. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

How is this book different from Red Paint? 

After Red Paint [and] spending so much time in this very deeply personal, vulnerable, reflective story, it felt good to climb out of that. I mean, I’m proud of the work, I love the book, but I think spending a couple of years where you’re just really looking inward, when I crawled out of that, I was really excited to turn my gaze outward. Instead of telling a story about the self, observe the world around me.

How did this book come about? 

It just so happens that when that time aligned — me crawling out of the world of Red Paint — was right when half the state was on fire, the height of the COVID pandemic, the Black Lives Matter protests were happening in the city. I wanted to observe the world and the people around me, and it just seemed like the most turbulent time. These essays were born out of that worry and anxiety. 

Like in Red Paint, you always seem to write from place. How do you approach writing with that physical connection? 

As a Coast Salish woman, it would be impossible for me to not write from place or for land not to be such a large part of it. These essays are also really part memoir. So there’s such a personal narrative in each of them and through that collection. I have a deep connection to that place. 

The land holds a lot of significance for me, a lot of story, a lot of history.

What type of research went into Thunder Song? 

My connection to lineage and my genealogy was solidified in Red Paint. So this book, I spent time researching things, but I never thought to research, like, the early settlement of Skagit Valley near Swinomish, where I grew up. It’s strange as a Native person to grow up in a place and not know the actual history of that place. So when I went to write [the essay] “Tulips,” I knew that I wanted to write about the absurdity of the Tulip Festival from a native perspective and how I felt like it was sort of rubbing settler colonial triumph in our faces. Like, I knew that the valley where the tulips happen were once tide flats and this abundant waterway, where our ancestors traveled by canoe. That took a lot of research. 

You come from a family with a lot of local cultural significance. Your namesake great-grandmother helped revitalize the Lushootseed language, and your uncle was a prominent artist in Seattle. How did that influence you?

From a young age, I recognized their strength and their creativity and their massive presence and felt really drawn and inspired by that. That still inspires me. Obviously, as creative people, sometimes things dry up or you’re not super inspired. I go through these dry spells of “well, you’re never going to write another poem again.” I let memories of my uncle and my great-grandmother push me to keep doing it. Like, “They didn’t stop, you’ll find another poem, calm down.” So for me, they’re really motivational. I get a lot of strength from them. 

What are your thoughts on belonging in the face of erasure, because despite having probably one of the strongest claims to this land, you still have to fight to belong? 

The bummer part of the answer: It gets really overwhelming to have to exist in this very white space, very colonized space. Feel despair of what was here before and how it’s gone. I think to combat that sadness and that rage, reminding myself of that sense of belonging — like, I will often go to the water, and this is a cheesy answer, but it’s true. I’ll sit on a beach, I’ll go into the woods. I just try to remember that even in the face of settler colonial trauma there are traits that are inherited and passed down and that we can access it. And if that means I have to go to the ocean and put my fingers in the water and touch it and be like, “Okay, I’m good.” I do feel very much like I belong in that way, even though that land has been taken and changed. 

How does your book add to the conversation around colonialism, genocide, and the erasure of Indigenous history? 

For me, like issues in this book, I’m approaching through an Indigenous lens, but the issues in this book are not site specific. Like, this is not just a Coast Salish problem. I think that Indigenous communities all over the world are fighting against the same oppression, the same silence, the same erasure, the same genocide, the same historical trauma. It’s my hope that if folks pick up and engage with this book, they’re thinking about not just the specific territory that I’m talking about, but they’re thinking about this on a global scale. With a lot of the things that I’m sort of despairing and raging about in the book — in the face of settler colonialism, late-stage capitalism, violence, homophobia, racism, transphobia, the destruction of the planet — I think that if we look towards Indigenous ways of knowing, Indigenous ways of being, traditional medicines, that could be looking towards hope and a future. That’s what I hope happens. When people read this book to not just consider it a Coast Salish girl’s perspective, but to consider it an Indigenous perspective in general. I think that’s the only thing that’s going to save the planet.

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Catch Sasha LaPointe with Tayi Tibble at Elliott Bay Book Company this Saturday, April 13, 7–8 p.m.

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📸 Featured Image: Author Sasha LaPointe is from the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian Tribe. (Photo: Blaine Slingerland)

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