Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of White Magic, My Body Is a Book of Rules, and Starvation Mode. With Theresa Warburton, she is co-editor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She’s a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient, a Creative Capital awardee, and an assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University.
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I am a literary nonfiction writer whose work uses form as a container for memory, research, cultural criticism, and insight. I test hypotheses of self by approaching the personal essay as a test site where I work on answering questions, all of which seem to lead back to those I’ve still barely begun to resolve: Who am I? Why am I this way? Specifically, I write about my experiences as a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a Cascade descendent living in a colonized land and as a woman who has experienced violence stemming from colonially-cultivated ways of relating.
I think of my essays as exquisite vessels. A basket’s shape is determined by what it should hold: berries, water, camas. Clams without water or sand. An essay, too, is a beautiful and useful container. For me, this is not a metaphor, but a shared lineage. Ways of knowing and being shape relationships between beauty, meaning, utility, and purpose. The work of Native writers is so often valued by non-Natives primarily for the lives and struggles it documents, but when we write, we care about craft. We have always been innovators. A book is like a basket, its form carefully crafted to hold a story.
While my own experiences and identities are the core drivers of my narratives, I have accomplished my deep explorations by reaching far outside myself into the lives of Britney Spears and Kurt Cobain, the two-dimensional prairie of The Oregon Trail II game for PC, astrological charts for ex-boyfriends, diet ads that joined anorexia warnings in the pages of late-nineties teen magazines, and other sites and sources. My current fascinations include video games’ fictional doomsday cults, virology articles, treaties, and movies about the 2008 financial crisis.
Through essays, I’m building a theory of living, shaped by my lineage through my earliest lessons in how to understand this beautiful, disrupted, often violent world. The very act of writing is resistance, because simply self-defining serves to reject entrenched American beliefs about who Native people are and why we matter, but I want more than resistance: I want to stray as far as I please from settler expectations, to cut the tether, to step into the unknown and find, in seas of feeling, something that has surged and receded within us forever.
I was born in New Jersey in 1984. I live in Ohio. I lived in Seattle for ten years prior. I am an enrolled member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, from the Skloutwout family, and I’m also a Cascade descendant. I’m currently working on a book about money and glitches in the simulation. I did deactivate my Twitter but I will probably be back before too long.