On Thunder Song

This was an illuminating collection of essays from a young, queer, indigenous woman raised on a reservation near Tacoma. There are a lot of interesting stories, and most of the essays have the character of memoir — they aren’t about abstract intellectual experience; instead, Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe spends the bulk of the book grappling with her own lived experience. At first glance it might be an easy instinct to call her childhood “troubled”: her youth was full of economic precarity and racial liminality, as a mixed-race woman, she’d dealt with sexual assault, and she left home at fourteen, and we hear a lot about her fights with her mother. But her reflections are sincere and complex. She knows her mom tried her best, she worked hard once she was on her own, and she looks back incorporating what her childhood taught her about her own identity. It’s good, meaningful work, and today she loves and is loved.

The best chapters are about the complexity of identity. Her veganism, for instance: for a long time — maybe still — she characterized herself as vegan, yet salmon has always held a special place for her, given its role among the Coast Salish peoples, and she sometimes gives in, which for a long time was a point of shame in the punk community where she locates her sense of home; in the end she pushes through it and goes on honoring the importance of salmon. Another essay deals with her place in Seattle’s mostly white grunge and punk scene, and there’s an illuminating moment when she performs at a gig in Chicago and two white women criticize her for cultural appropriation, not realizing she’s indigenous. The punk scene grew up around a white monoculture, so expressions of indigeneity were read not as indigenous but as appropriative, and in trying to “protect” indigenous people from appropriation, these two punks risk silencing the very indigenous voices they mean to protect. It’s worth unpacking: we might reach for the white-savior complex, but I share LaPointe’s sense that the deeper problem is a lack of curiosity about why she sought to express her heritage in the first place. It might be appropriation if it were commodified by predatory people or institutions out to make money, but the why is what matters most in deciding whether something is appropriation, and these punks hadn’t taken a moment to think that far. Altogether it’s an excellent collection, interrogating racial discrimination, gender and sexual violence, and generational trauma while honoring her family’s matriarchs. I hadn’t read anything quite like it, and I’m glad I did.