“When your spirit is angry, or distressed, it can leave you. “My tribe believes in a kind of spirit sickness,” LaPointe explains. To survive the assault, she absents herself from her body, focusing instead on a line of imaginary little boats sailing along the yellowed ceiling, rising and dipping with the rippling bed beneath her.
Asleep on a waterbed in a family friend’s doublewide trailer on the Swinomish Reservation in her native Washington State, she is startled awake by the smell of “Uncle’s” sour beer breath on her neck. The first time LaPointe goes missing from her life, she is 10 years old. In writing this book, LaPointe has given her audience a precious gift: a searing, fine-grained portrait of how centuries of cumulative historical trauma and neglect conspire to make it easy for indigenous girls to, quite simply, vanish into thin air. Yet in a new memoir, Red Paint: The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk, LaPointe recounts the story of her own life as similarly marked by displacement and homelessness, both physical and spiritual. Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe, a Tacoma-based writer descended from the Nooksack and Upper Skagit Indian nations, is not among her community’s literal missing. The thing about being part of a population that the government spent nearly four centuries murdering, fleecing, sickening, relocating, kidnapping, and reeducating is that, when you go missing, that same government is unlikely to register your absence: you don’t count as missing if you weren’t supposed to be there in the first place. Everyone thinks we died out and that is what the government wanted us to do.” Elizabeth Cook, senior staff attorney for the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi, reflected, “We’re a lost population of people and we’re invisible because nobody knows we really exist. The Urban Indian Health Institute estimated that while the National Crime Information Center recorded 5,712 reports of missing Native American women in 2016, the US Department of Justice’s federal missing persons database for that same period recorded only 116. Murder is the third leading cause of death for Native American girls and women, yet those missing-and-presumed murdered among this population rarely make it into official crime statistics. The news grabbed national headlines both in Canada and the United States, but it came as little surprise to indigenous women activists, for whom the grim discovery merely confirmed what had always been abundantly clear: indigenous people, and in particular indigenous women and girls, go missing or murdered at near-epidemic rates. IN MAY 2021, the bodies of 215 long-missing indigenous children were discovered in a mass grave at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, one of Canada’s forced boarding schools for native children that operated between the 1890s and 1970s.
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