Summary

Red Paint opens with an prosaic description of Coastal Salish life pre-colonization. The author is ambiguous about the time she is describing, but notes that her people lived in tune with the natural world, and communally. The author goes on to describe the sensations previous Coastal Salish people would have felt, such as the twirling of dancing and the burning of campfire in their lungs. At this point, the author pivots to the arrival of white settlers, and subsequent colonization of her people, and the erasure of their culture. The writer then returns to modernity, writing that a Coastal Salish cultural revival, under very different terms than the past, is taking place. She informs the reader that this is not a book about the longhouses or Coastal Salish culture, but rather about her lived experiences as a twenty-first century Coastal Salish woman...