Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe is a Coast Salish writer and musician whose 2022 memoir recently won the Washington State Book Award.
Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe is a Coast Salish writer and musician whose 2022 memoir recently won the Washington State Book Award. Her memoir is called Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk. It travels across generations to tell a story of healing, weaving in narratives of Sasha’s ancestors with her own experiences growing up on the Swinomish reservation and getting involved in the Pacific Northwest DIY punk scene. She performs vocals for the bands Medusa Stare and Fleur du Louve.
Sasha speaks with KEXP’s Isabel Khalili on location at Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center. They discuss Sasha’s early musical influences and the impact of Kathleen Hanna’s voice, her search for a sense of permanence in a post settler colonial landscape, creating her own rituals through punk music, and the importance of storytelling as a means of preservation.
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