Thunder Song: Essays
by Sasha LaPointe
Counterpoint | 2024 | Purchase Book
About the Book
From the publisher:
The author of the award-winning memoir Red Paint returns with a razor-sharp, clear-eyed collection of essays on what it means to be a proudly queer Indigenous woman in the United States today
Drawing on a rich family archive as well as the anthropological work of her late great-grandmother, Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe explores themes ranging from Indigenous identity and stereotypes to cultural displacement and environmental degradation to understand what our experiences teach us about the power of community, commitment, and conscientious honesty.
Unapologetically punk, the essays in Thunder Song traverse the miraculous and the mundane, from the spiritual to the physical, as they examine the role of art—in particular music—and community in helping a new generation of Indigenous people claim the strength of their heritage while defining their own path in the contemporary world.
About the Author:
Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe is a Coast Salish author from the Nooksack and Upper Skagit Indian tribes. She is the author of Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk, winner of a Pacific Northwest Book Award, the Washington State Book Award for Creative Nonfiction/Memoir, and an NPR Best Book of the Year, and the poetry collection Rose Quartz. She received a double MFA in creative nonfiction and poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She lives in Tacoma, Washington.