Julian Brave Noisecat

He is, yes.

So he began his career as a fine art printmaker, but he could never really suffer a boss.

So he ended up becoming an artist.

And when he was in Vancouver in the 80s, it was a really interesting place to be for Native art.

There was kind of a renaissance happening there.

in the art of the Northwest Coastal Native peoples.

Your listeners might be familiar with like totem poles and masks and those sorts of artworks.

Well, that was really what was coming back in Vancouver in the 1980s.

So he got to see some of the greats of that era, guys like

Bo Dick and Bill Reed, who did a piece that was on the Canadian $20 bill for many years, he got to see them actually work.

And he had been building houses when he was in his 20s.

And his father was really good with his hands.

And he watched them do it.

And he was like, you know what, I think I could do that.

And so he embarked on his own artistic career wherein he started carving and he got really good at it.

I guess I just feel like I'm here trying to help you when you don't really fully recognize the thing that we share.

Your story is someone who was...

abandoned, but also who abandoned.

No, no, definitely no regrets.

You know, I think that part of what made it possible for us to go on that road trip and to have, you know, intense conversations like that confrontation that you see in Sugarcane was that I moved in with my dad, actually, and lived with him for two years while we worked on Sugarcane and while I wrote my first book, We Survived the Night.