I drove past my childhood home last week. Someone painted it beige. The oak tree I climbed is gone. I felt something twist in my chest, a kind of grief I couldn’t name. So I picked up Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe’s Thunder Song, hoping it might tell me what that feeling was.
It did. But not in the way I expected.
LaPointe is a Coast Salish writer, and this essay collection isn’t a memoir about roots. It’s a book about what happens when those roots get torn up, burned, or buried. She writes about her grandmother’s songs, about the loss of tribal languages, about the quiet violence of displacement. But she also writes about punk shows and diner coffee and late-night drives. The question at the center of Thunder Song is this: How do you belong to a place when the place itself has been stolen from you?
How the protagonist embodies the question
LaPointe doesn’t pretend to have a clean answer. She moves through the world like someone who knows she’s carrying something precious and broken at the same time. In one essay, she describes sitting in a recording booth, trying to sing a song her grandmother taught her. Her voice cracks. She stops. She starts again. That image stayed with me.
She is not a character who triumphs over her history. She is someone who lives inside its contradictions. She loves the Pacific Northwest, the rivers and cedar trees, but she knows those same waters carried her ancestors in canoes and then, later, carried their bodies in chains. She finds comfort in punk music, in the raw noise of it, because it matches something inside her. The core conflict, really, is between memory and survival. How do you honor what was lost without drowning in the loss?
I won’t tell you how it ends. But I’ll say this: LaPointe doesn’t resolve the conflict. She sits with it. She lets it breathe. And that, honestly, felt more honest than any neat conclusion.
Theme and imagery: What the author’s craft reveals
The core theme here is survival as an act of love. Not the Hallmark kind. The kind that requires you to keep your eyes open when everything in you wants to look away. LaPointe writes about her grandmother’s hands, how they knew how to weave baskets and gut fish and hold children. She writes about the sound of thunder, which in her tradition is not a warning but a song. A reminder that the earth is still speaking.
The key imagery is water. Rivers, rain, ocean, tears. Water connects everything in this book. It carries stories, it erases footprints, it returns. LaPointe describes the Duwamish River as “a scar that still flows.” That line hit me hard. Because isn’t that what heritage is? A scar that still flows. It doesn’t heal completely. But it keeps moving.
What I found most moving was how she refuses to make her culture exotic or sacred for the reader. She doesn’t explain everything. Some words she leaves untranslated. Some ceremonies she doesn’t describe. She trusts you to sit in the not-knowing. That, to me, is the mark of a writer who has stopped performing for an outside audience.
Why this book matters now
I think about the beige house and the missing oak tree. I think about how my own family stopped speaking our language two generations ago. I think about how easy it is to feel unmoored, like a boat that slipped its rope.
Thunder Song doesn’t tell you to go find your roots. It tells you something harder. It tells you that the roots are not in the ground. They are in the people who stayed. The grandmother who sang. The friend who drives you to the river at 2 a.m. The stranger at the punk show who nods at you like you belong.
LaPointe writes: “We carry our ancestors in the way we move through the world. We do not need to find them. They are already here.”
Maybe that is what home really is. Not a place you return to. But a song you keep singing, even when your voice cracks.
