In her latest literary venture, Thunder Song (Counterpoint, 2024), Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe engages the essay form to challenge stereotypes of all stripes: Indigenous identity, the ethos of punk, the commodification of “traditional” Native cuisine, and more. Invoking notable figures including Chief Seattle, Kathleen Hanna, and her own family, LaPointe pays tribute to the cultural, musical, and familial ancestors who have shaped the transgressive sensibilities that have always propelled her work.
Building on similar themes of her first two books, her memoir Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk (Counterpoint, 2022) and her poetry collection Rose Quartz (Milkweed, 2023), Thunder Song summons both the spiritual and existential to question what it means to find belonging. In a world dominated by rigid, often exclusionary politics, LaPointe questions how, through intentional resistance, we might discover a future of transformative possibility and freedom.
In particular, thoughtful meditations on music throughout the collection fuel her battle cry. The book’s dedication is a testament to this, as LaPointe cites perhaps her most important influence: “Vi taqʷšəblu Hilbert believed in the healing power of music. She believed in our ancestors’ Coast Salish spirit songs. My great grandmother wanted to share that medicine with the world, in the hopes it might teach us something.”
Indeed, the collection’s restorative might will continue ringing long after its end. I spoke with LaPointe via Zoom about her latest addition to an already diverse oeuvre, growing up in a “very, very queer household,” the process of reclaiming language, and how poems and prose begin to percolate and develop into promising projects.
***
The Rumpus: For this suite of essays, were they already written and then arranged? Or did you start with arc in mind and distinct pieces you intended to generate to serve that larger mission?
Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe: With this collection, I had a couple of the essays already written. I think I wrote the title essay, “Thunder Song,” first and it appeared in Vogue, and I knew that I wanted to write more. It was really just my way of processing what was going on in the world around me. The essays came out of wrestling with things that felt really out of my control as an Indigenous woman. Coming out of the process of writing Red Paint, which was so self-reflective, made me feel really excited to turn my gaze outward and tell stories about things outside of myself. It just so happens that when that lined up, the Pacific Northwest was on fire and Covid was raging. Black, brown, and trans bodies were being murdered—I felt a lot of anger and confusion—a sense of powerlessness. I just wrote and wrote and wrote, and then, all of a sudden, I had a collection of essays.
For me, not structuring it like a memoir was really freeing. In the early days of putting it together, I was trying to consider it as a mixtape with an A side and B side. It was fun to reorder [the essays]. The only thing I knew was that I wanted “Orations” to be threaded throughout. I had written it as one continuous piece, and I wanted to honor [Chief Seattle’s] words and who he was. It’s really an essay about me—you know, I can’t necessarily live in his namesake city without considering him. There definitely came a point where I knew I had to write that essay. Figuring out where to place those was probably the most significant structural guide I had.
Rumpus: I love the way you use the concept of the mixtape in relation to your collection. Music becomes synonymous with prayer, healing, rage—it encompasses all these forms of expression. How does this collection relate music to your writing?
LaPointe: The collection certainly aims to examine music and what it’s meant to me over the course of my life thus far. In my younger years, I was really drawn to the world of punk activism and performance. As a teenager, seeking out [my] chosen family, that world really embraced me when I needed it. But as I grew older, I became super aware of the ways I wasn’t looking at the other facets of music in my life. Growing up Coast Salish, with our smokehouse ceremonies and prayers and songs, it occurred to me that I hadn’t examined all that. When you grow up with such strength and beauty—both in our language and storytelling songs—when you’re young, you think that that’s just a given. But it’s really such a privilege. I feel extremely privileged for having grown up close to my culture. There came a point in my life where I was like, “Oh, I can’t just look at this one side of music in my life.” I come from close Salish dancers, I come from this very rich culture. So really, this collection was about celebrating the duality of that relationship and improving both parts of me to feel whole. Music is massively important, and it’s layered in this book. It’s Bikini Kill. It’s Nirvana. But it’s also our spirit songs.
Rumpus: In “Reservation Riot Grrrl,” you seem to wrestle with the feminist-punk Riot Grrrl movement, especially its whiteness and more exclusionary characteristics. How does your sense of community change when you realize that movements like these might not be serving you?
LaPointe: Riot grrrl means a lot to me. In my formative years, it opened up a lot of opportunities for me to grow and be like, “Oh wait, I’m allowed to be angry about sexual violence.” When I was young, on the reservation, I hadn’t seen or heard anything like that in my life. That was really, really empowering. But I think you’re also allowed to question [a movement]. Yes, I have this gratitude for that moment in my life, but those movements are not without flaws and absolutely fair game for critique. I think of my younger self, kind of just surviving and existing in these spaces and slowly realizing—looking around the room—just how white it was [and] not seeing other Coast Salish or Native folks at all. We’re allowed to challenge these spaces to be better. I think that that is happening. We have amazing Native art and movies and television shows. Things are changing, and that’s really great.
Rumpus: In the collection, queerness becomes this sort of structural mode through which to break binaries and disrupt various systems of harmful homogeneity, like whiteness, Eurocentrism, heteronormativity, monogamy, etcetera. How does your Native culture, including the exploration of the two-spirit identity and queerness, inform your art?
LaPointe: One of my favorite essays in the collection is “ʔuʔušəbicid čəd: An Indigenous Queer Love Story.” Growing up with these examples [in my family] of love being inherently queer, and not realizing until later that people were looking at that like it was wrong, was really confusing for me as a young person. I think of my ancestors in the days of pre-contact, pre-missionaries, and how there were multiple spouses in a household—to me, that’s inherently queer. Then, in post-contact, we had these missionaries coming over and forcing their puritanical ideals on Native people who weren’t necessarily interested in subscribing to that system—that’s heartbreaking to me. So the fact that I grew up in a household that was very, very queer felt important to me. It was a really loving, safe, and beautiful environment, but then going out into the world and discovering that that wasn’t the case for everybody was shocking.
I remember being a young person, maybe like fourteen or fifteen, and I had just gotten broken up with for the first time. My friend’s mother had picked me up. I just thought she was offering me a ride to the reservation, but when I get in and click my seat belt, she just screams at me: “Sasha Louise, are you a lesbian?” And just smacked me. And I thought,“Oh my God. . . .” She had heard, you know, that her daughter and I had been romantic. It was one of the earliest times when I realized that was “wrong”—that my way of loving was wrong.
Rumpus: That moment seems like an inflection point in your life and definitely seems tied to your ideas about norms, which you’d envisioned being much more expansive and less rigid. A little more fluid.
LaPointe: It’s something that I continue to deeply explore in my poetry and writing. Just this past week, I was out at a writing residency in Port Townsend, and I discovered this historical plaque dedicated to one of the Chiefs of that area. His two wives were commemorated in these massive carvings—these giant pillars—and I felt like this was proof of celebration. So I’m sure there’s going to be a poem or essay percolating about that.
Rumpus: You freely incorporate one of the languages of the Coast Salish people—Lushootseed. Did you give yourself creative license to use it when you felt like you needed to? How did you navigate diving in and out of Lushootseed and English?
LaPointe: Language has been really tricky. As a Coast Salish person, I come from a generation that did not grow up speaking our language. My mom speaks it fluently. Obviously, my grandma spoke it fluently and taught it, and now the younger generation, like my nieces and nephews, has full immersion programs in [their] schools now. They’ll come up and just start yapping at me—and it’s so great, so beautiful—but personally, language has been a challenge for me.
In my thirties, I really started getting serious about trying to learn at least some phrases. Anytime I bring Lushootseed into a poem or essay, it’s like an act of reclamation for me. There are other Coast Salish folks who are fluent and doing a lot of awesome language work. I’m really grateful to have my mom as a resource. She is the head of Lushootseed Research, the nonprofit that my great-grandmother started. Engaging with my culture is so important, but it is a struggle each time. I remember one of the first times I had a few lines of a poem in Lushootseed, I was at an Indigenous women’s reading. I was preparing to read and saw a bunch of elders in the front row, and I was like, “I can’t do this.” I told my mom, “I’m going to say this wrong. My pronunciation won’t be right.” And she was like, “No, the fact that you are trying is enough.” And that’s important to remember. I was terrified, but I got up there and squeaked the words out. And people approached me afterward and gave me a hug and said, “It’s really beautiful that you’re learning the language. It’s never too late.” And that always stuck with me.Keeping these languages alive is an act against erasure, and so that’s why I push myself to do it, even if it’s not perfect, even if it’s clunky—it’s all worthwhile.
Rumpus: You’ve published a poetry collection and two books of nonfiction. What’s next for you?
LaPointe: It’s always really exciting as a writer to talk about what I’m obsessing over. I have two projects kind of in the works. One is a collection—I’m in my orca era. I keep dreaming about them. I keep seeing them. They keep coming to me. I’m writing a ton of orca poems, doing a lot of research. I didn’t realize, until I was out at this residency, that it’s damn near finished. They’re not all about orcas, but orcas have been my massive obsession. I have a journal just filled with orca stuff.
The second big project I’m working on is a fictionalized retelling of Little Boats, that first failed memoir that I kind of put away. A while ago, I took it off the shelf and wrote a version of it as a novel, which feels wild. It still needs some work, but as soon as I’m on summer vacation, I’m going to wrap it up and hopefully have a novel.
***
Author photograph by Bridget McGee Hutchins
