SASHA taqʷšəblu LAPOINTE seems like kind of a badass. She is an indigenous author, poet and artist from the Upper Skagit and Nooksak Indian Tribe, native to the Pacific Northwest. She’s got a new book of essays out called ‘Thunder Song.’ Her last book ‘Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk’ won the Pacific Northwest Book Award in 2023. It’s noted as coining a new kind of memoir through that concept of an ‘ancestral autobiography.’ The book weaves her story with that of her mother, grandmother and great-grandmothers as she traces her native lineage back through the generations, and through her own life, unearthing past trauma and finding resilience in that heritage. It’s blunt. It’s honest. It’s painful. It’s personal. It’s strong. It’s beautiful. It’s a reminder of how important it can be to write things down. Both for the reader and the writer. Serendipitously, LaPointe’s book came across my desk just as I’d finished Timothy Egan’s 2013 book ‘Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher’ which chronicles the agonizing opus of turn-of-the-20th-century photographer Edward Curtis who made it his life’s work to document the culture and history, recording the languages and rituals, of tribes of Native American Indians disappearing across the country at the hands of New American colonialism. Curtis’ 20-volume project ‘The North American Indian’ was a near complete flop and failure during his lifetime but would become one of history’s most important works in the generations that followed. // JAMES MUNK
Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe w/ New Zealand indigenous Mãori poet Tayi Tibble, 7 p.m., April 15, all ages, $12 hosted by BIMA and Eagle Harbor Books at the Buxton Auditorium, Bainbridge. Tickets at biartmuseum.org and more at eagleharborbooks.com
