Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk

I read it in under 24 hours. I don’t have the words to express how this book made me feel but it is powerful and leaves you raw in the best way. It’s a journey of healing and growth and discovery and I felt it in my core. Cannot recommend enough!

I never read a book twice. That is until “Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk.” As a an older straight white man, I especially benefited by reading the story of an indigenous woman. Sasha LaPointe allowed me in her world and I’m better for it. It is an excellent and important read — insightful, deeply personal and written with poetic economy. I can’t recommend it enough!

Every white person needs to read this book. I am a white woman with a small amount of Native blood and I had no idea about the real experience of the modern Native American. I thought I knew my "his"tory. I didn't. This book is so real, raw, beautiful, and brutally honest about what it is to feel less than, other, invisible, colonized, woman, human, and robbed of culture, land, identity, and innocence. This work is painful, essential and, I hope, the beginning of a reclaiming.

this book arrived very fast and in great condition.

We’re moving into a new era of Native literature: all the folks who grew up with next to no representation but loved culture and their Native people anyway, are now cranking out one beautiful book after another and it’s all only going to keep growing and growing. Sasha LaPointe’s story is so recognizable, powerful, intimate, and deeply felt. She grew up in Washington and Seattle, came from a strong line of Coast Salish women, suffered different kinds of abuse that’re too present in the lives of many of us, gripped hard onto the radical power of punk rock, carried a Twin Peaks tattoo on her soul, and found healing through her art and the potent threads of her people’s ways. That’s kind of what this book, her memoir, is about. I read it in a little over a day, seeing myself on page after page, feeling all the rockiness and realness of her journey, and ultimately loving how her story is one of hope for all of us Native people who’re trying to find our way out of the shadows of the past while still holding onto every precious thing our ancestors sent forward to us for our spirits and well-being. My girlfriend and I read the last 3 chapters aloud, as the book unexpectedly climaxed with her coming to Astoria (where we live) and Ilwaco (about 15 miles away) to see the home where one of her Coast Salish ancestors lived with her sea captain husband after her own people were wiped out by smallpox. It was, like the rest of the book itself, a storytelling spell that filled the room and transported us right into the heart of everything that still dwells upon this land, that still speaks in a language some part of us will never/can’t ever forget. If you’ve never read a Native memoir and are wondering what that young Native child in your kid’s class is living with or what that quiet Native at the coffee shop is going through, then RED PAINT would be a good one for you to pick up and experience, to be with and listen to. I saw myself in Sasha LaPointe’s book and I know many, many other Natives will see themselves in there too. Chances are, you’re in there as well.