A Story Of Indigenous Survival & Resurgence
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross.
What is the significance of Julian Brave Noisecat's father's origin story?
Minutes after being born, Ed Archie Noisecat was thrown away, literally. The infant was discovered with the garbage ready to be burned at St. Joseph's Mission School for Indigenous Canadians. He was rescued from incineration by the night watchman. St. Joseph's was one of the 139 missionary boarding schools that Indigenous children were required to attend, as mandated by the Canadian government in 1894, to help solve the, quote, Indian problem through assimilation. There were 100 such schools in the U.S. The last one closed in 1997. An investigation that was opened in 2021 in Canada revealed that rape and infanticide were not uncommon in these schools. My guest is Noiscat's son, Julian Brave Noiscat.
Julian's father is from a reservation in British Columbia. He left the reservation and moved to the U.S. and married a white woman. Julian is their son, and he grew up in Oakland. His parents divorced when he was six, but his mother was determined to find ways to connect Julian with Native culture. She succeeded. She made sure he spent a lot of time on his paternal family's reservation and with a Native group in California. He became a champion powwow dancer, a journalist covering indigenous-related issues, and an activist. Last year, he co-directed a documentary called Sugarcane about the investigation into the mission schools, their often brutal treatment of children, and the infanticide. Julian and his father are among the people who appear in the film.
The documentary also explores Julian's relationship with his father. Sugarcane is the name of a reservation near St. Joseph's. The documentary won the directing award at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, won Best Documentary from the National Board of Review, and was nominated for a Peabody and an Oscar. Now Julian Brave Noisecat has written a new book called We Survived the Night. It's part memoir, part indigenous history, and part coyote stories. Coyote is the shape-shifting trickster who was regarded by many Native tribes as the ancestor sent by the creator to finish creating the indigenous world. Julian Brave Noisecat, welcome to Fresh Air. I enjoyed the book and I also learned a lot, which I appreciate.
Thank you so much. It's an honor to be on Fresh Air. This is honestly a dream come true for me, Terry.
I really am honored to hear you say that. So the investigation into St. Joseph's Mission found that infanticide was common there. Students were sometimes raped by the priests or other staff, and when a student was pregnant, the baby was often aborted or disposed of. But rape wasn't your father's backstory. Tell us, to the best of your knowledge, what his story is.
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.
And it was written down long before your father was born. So they didn't know his backstory.
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 is not talking about there's also an element of that silence that has been internalized by native families like my own so you're saying that you didn't know your father's origin story until you started doing the book in the documentary
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:02
2
What is the significance of Julian Brave Noisecat's father's origin story?
0:02–5:18
3
How did Julian Brave Noisecat's upbringing influence his connection to Indigenous culture?
5:18–9:16
4
What themes are explored in Julian's documentary 'Sugarcane'?
9:16–13:44
5
How does Julian Brave Noisecat define the concept of survival in Indigenous culture?
13:44–14:49
6
What role does storytelling play in Julian's new book 'We Survived the Night'?
14:49–15:35
7
How has the residential school system impacted Indigenous families?
15:35–17:25
8
What traditions does Julian Brave Noisecat practice as part of his cultural identity?
17:25–43:41
Speakers
5 identifiedMore from Fresh Air
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