One day when she is ten years old, the author of this memoir, Coast Salish writer Sasha LaPointe, is enviously watching other kids having fun on a homemade version of a "Slip 'n Slide" constructed out of plastic garbage bags lined with garden hoses by a man she knows as Uncle. She desperately wants to join in on the fun but does not have a swimsuit and is too embarrassed to play in just her underwear. Uncle heads off to run some errands and returns with soda, Doritos, and, quite unexpectedly, a lime-green bikini for an overjoyed Sasha. To the accompaniment of the hiss of a beer can being opened, she would slide across the plastic bags hearing Uncle laugh while commenting about her "little bubble butt." Later that night, she babysits his younger daughter and as The Little Mermaid flickers on the television screen, Uncle drunkenly stumbles into the bedroom and proceeds to sexually assault her. For the rest of her life, the smell of beer on the breath of a man will make her physically ill as she relives the trauma.
That sexual assault becomes the central event of her life, coloring every aspect of her existence afterward. Sasha grows up to become a teenage girl enthralled by other images flickering on another TV screen. For the first time in life, she sees the region of the country she calls home represented on a must-see television series titled Twin Peaks. Sasha strongly identifies with two characters in particular. Special Agent Dale Cooper of the FBI is a handsome and honorable man who has come to her own part of the world to investigate the mysterious murder of a high school girl who will turn out to have been sexually abused by a close member of her own family. Agent Cooper becomes the ideal manifestation of what a man should be as he rejects the sexual attention of another teenage girl dealing with her own close-call with incest. Audrey Horne is young and beautiful and clever and becomes a figure of female empowerment for Sasha.
When she is twenty-one, she meets a tall, brown-eyed, black-haired guy named Brandon and instantly thinks she has met her own real-life Agent Cooper. Eventually, they will marry, and Sasha will experience the unique pleasure of the first time she sees one of her poems published in print. Then one night she listens to a record by a band called Bikini Kill and is overcome by the force of nature of the band's lead singer, Kathleen Hanna, as she screams out the lyrics to "Star Bellied Boy." It is a song about date rape. Like many young women at the time, especially in the Pacific Northwest, Sasha is overwhelmed by the empowerment of the Riot Grrrl punk rock subgenre. She is drawn further into the musical underground which will eventually give rise to the subtitle of her memoir: "The Ancestral Autobiography of a Coast Salish Punk." Brandon gets the opportunity to go to Australia and promises her that she will come with him. Then he surprises her by telling her he could not make it work out that way. She accuses him of knowing all along he wouldn't be taking her and lying about it. When he returns to America, she goes on the road with his band as a roadie and experiences further traumatic events as a result of misogyny and ingrained patriarchal thinking.
Sasha's own story is juxtaposed against a parallel biography of a Chinook ancestor named Comptia Koholowish who manages to survive a smallpox outbreak in the early 1800s and eventually marries a ship captain employed by the Hudson Bay Trading Company. Upon marriage, he renames her Mrs. Jane Johnson and that authoritarian mandate characterizes their relationship. Eventually, he will steal her allotment of land and build a nice house for himself while relegating her to a small shack with a dirt floor. The twin narrative threads form the basis for the fundamental thematic exploration embodied by the larger historical record of the treatment of indigenous tribal people by European settler. Comptia's story of victimization and nomadic displacement is threaded through a series of generational stories of women being attacked, degraded, dismissed, and traumatized which leads directly to the author's tale.
Sasha shares her story of trying to overcome PTSD brought on by not just the childhood sexual molestation, but the rape by a trust close friend. She eventually learns the meaning of red paint on the faces of the people of her tribe. It is an honor which can only be bestowed upon someone who has come to be recognized as a healer. Ultimately, Sasha herself reaches the point where she has managed to become a healer of own personal trauma while also helping others. The narrative is punctuated by examples of her poetry which reflect the empowering confessional lyrics of the suicidal punk legends which have influenced her so profoundly such as Ian Curtis of Joy Division and Kurt Cobain of Nirvana. It is the survivors like Kathleen Hanna and Nick Cave, however, who best represent the punk ethos which links to her own story of not just dealing with the trauma of the past but using artistic expression as way of thriving. The book concludes with a long poem expressing the power of denying and rejecting a curse pronounced upon one by others.
