THUNDER SONG

A Coast Salish woman explores contemporary Indigeneity.

This collection of deeply personal and yet insistently political essays ranges across a series of intertwined topics of acute relevance to Indigenous America. Extending some of the discussions she began in her first book, Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk, LaPointe explores the importance of sustaining ancestral relations, the difficulty of balancing the imperatives of opposed cultural worlds, the toxic biases of the mainstream media, and the injustices and lethal prejudices of the severely flawed American health care system. Among the most vivid of the author’s thematic emphases is the therapeutic and liberatory potential of music. The story of LaPointe’s octogenarian great-grandmother’s collaboration on a symphony—“the first to be based on Coast Salish spirit songs with lyrics in Lushootseed, the traditional language”—provides a memorable model of creative possibilities realized in the face of daunting barriers. With sensitivity and bracing frankness, the author describes her own attraction to the punk subculture and her evolving negotiation of its deep-rooted exclusions. Readers gain an intriguing perspective on how modern Western and traditional Indigenous lifeways might coexist in new cultural forms, along with insights into the challenges of attempting such blending. Also incisive is LaPointe’s commentary on how her assertion of a Two-Spirit identity has made loving relationships possible in defiance of Western norms: “I say I love you to my partner in the traditional way, in a way that reaches beyond the colonizer’s language. I do this in memory of my ancestors and all the ways they had to fight for their kind of love. A love that comes without resources and ownership.” These passionate essays, adamant in their activist pleas, reflect hard-won wisdom, as well as the representative significance of the author’s experiences.

Probing and poignant reflections on Indigenous America.