Julian Brave Noisecat

Thank you so much.

It's an honor to be on Fresh Air.

This is honestly a dream come true for me, Terry.

So my father was discovered in the trash incinerator at St.

Joseph's Mission on the night of August 16, 1959.

The night watchman, Tony Stoop, described his cries for life as sounding like the noise of a cat, which I only bring up because my last name is Noisecat, which is kind of unbelievable to me because it only became Noisecat, my last name, after it was written down wrong by those same missionaries who came to our land to turn us into Catholics.

Yes.

So it was a story and a name that really found its meaning in his survival, which is, you know, there are subjects in the book that I think get at.

questions of the presence of ancestors and forces greater than human ones in our present life.

And I didn't know the story of my father's birth until I set out to write this book and to make Sugarcane.

And so there's also an element of telling these stories that is about

touching the family histories that even your own family is too scared to tell.

And so while there's a piece of this story that, of course, the church and the government, you know, is not talking about, there's also an element of that silence that has been internalized by Native families like my own.

No, he did not either.

All that he knew was that he had been born somewhere near Williams Lake and found not long after in a dumpster, and it was kind of a hazy story other than that.

We didn't really know that there was much involving the residential school, and we really didn't know the circumstances around all of it until the documentary and the book.

Well, you know, I think that this is part of the history of colonization that has often been remarked on by scholars of colonialism.

You know, Frantz Fanon, for example, talked about the way that the colonized subject sometimes internalizes the oppression of colonialism.

And I think it makes discussing these subjects that much more difficult for the very people who sometimes survived them.

You know, the truth of the matter is, is that at these schools, children were abused, and sometimes those children grew up to themselves become abusers.