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Title details for Red Paint by Sasha LaPointe - Wait list

Red Paint

The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk

by Sasha LaPointe
Sasha LaPointe
Audiobook
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Sasha LaPointe has always longed for a sense of home. When she was a child, her family moved around frequently, often staying in barely habitable church attics and trailers, dangerous places for young Sasha. With little more to guide her than a passion for the thriving punk scene of the Pacific Northwest and a desire to live up to the responsibility of being the namesake of her beloved great-grandmother-a linguist who helped preserve her Indigenous language of Lushootseed-Sasha throws herself headlong into the world, determined to build a better future for herself and her people. Set against a backdrop of the breathtaking beauty of Coast Salish ancestral land and imbued with the universal spirit of punk, Red Paint is ultimately a story of the ways we learn to find our true selves while fighting for our right to claim a place of our own. Examining what it means to be vulnerable in love and in art, Sasha offers up an unblinking reckoning with personal traumas amplified by the collective historical traumas of colonialism and genocide that continue to haunt native peoples. Red Paint is an intersectional autobiography of lineage, resilience, and, above all, the ability to heal.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 17, 2022

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781696608015
      • File size: 135633 KB
      • Duration: 04:42:34

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Sasha LaPointe is an Indigenous artist--a descendant of the Upper Skagit and Nooksack Indian tribes--as well as a poet and now an author/narrator. She voices her coming-of-age memoir in soft, melodic tones while recounting a nomadic childhood full of identity conflict. LaPointe is an engaging storyteller who shares her various journeys, which range from expanding her grandmother's work to preserve her native language to discovering a love of punk music. Eventually, LaPointe celebrates being able to blend the two while living in the Pacific Northwest. This is a unique memoir, told in warm, intimate tones that will have listeners rooting all the harder for a young woman to find her place in the world. M.R. © AudioFile 2022, Portland, Maine
    • Library Journal

      September 1, 2022

      Poet and lyricist LaPointe pens her powerful debut book about struggling into adulthood with the baggage of childhood trauma. She was born into the Coast Salish peoples of the Pacific Northwest, in one of the most beautiful places on earth, and her memoir interweaves the legends, struggles, and traditions of her ancestors on the land that she now occupies. LaPointe narrates the audiobook herself, and the audio could have been more tightly edited, but the authenticity of LaPointe's telling her own story more than validates the recording. Parts are heartbreaking, yet she rises out of instability, out of being a person without housing, and out of childhood trauma, to find her way using Coast Salish healing techniques and her love of punk music. Often, LaPointe's voice rises in indignation as she points out the hypocrisy of the white society that displaced Coast Salish peoples. The author is young, and her full life is yet to play out; listeners of this audiobook will want to know more as she finds her way in the literary world. VERDICT This quick listener will leave one feeling hopeful for the world.--Laura Trombley

      Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 6, 2021
      LaPointe, a Coast Salish poet and artist, sifts through her family’s lineage to reckon with the meaning of home in this stirring debut. A descendant of the Nooksack and Upper Skagit Indian tribe in Washington State, LaPointe writes in lucid vignettes that alternate between past and present as she reflects on her ancestors, Salish medicine workers who “faced violence, disease, and genocide”; her nomadic upbringing with her parents in the 1980s; and her romantic relationships in her 30s. Amid shifting landscapes—from the Swinomish Reservation to homelessness in her teens—she discovered punk music, which became a lifelong fascination (“To hear... a shrieking, guttural scream felt like being in the presence of power”) and the conduit to meeting her two love interests: her childhood boyfriend and her husband. While LaPointe’s prose falls flat when charting the love triangle that ensued between the three of them (“Being with him felt like picking up where we left off”), her writing radiates elsewhere—including in a story of her ancestor Comptia, one of the only Chinook Indians to survive a smallpox epidemic. She also displays immense vulnerability when discussing her sexual assaults, and how, through her “own ritual of healing,” she resisted being defined by them. LaPointe’s fresh and urgent perspective on Indigenous culture is enthralling. Agent: Duvall Osteen, Aragi, Inc.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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