Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross.
Chapter 2: 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.
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Chapter 3: How did Julian Brave Noisecat's upbringing influence his connection to Indigenous culture?
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. That at these schools...
Native children were separated from their parents and therefore did not necessarily know how to parent. So when it was their turn to do that, they turned around and abandoned their own. And I think that the story with my father is one where, you know, my grandmother at the time was a very young unwed mother. My grandfather was a bit of a womanizer, as I write in the book.
And there was this process at the residential school wherein unwed mothers with unwanted babies had a certain set of protocols, it appears, that they might be able to follow if they wanted to get rid of that unwanted native child, which mirrored really in a sense what was happening to native children more broadly in society because we were of course considered an Indian problem and our way of life, if not our people as a whole, were supposed to die.
Your grandmother tried to keep this a secret all her life.
Yeah, we actually learned through the research in We Survived the Night and the documentary Sugarcane that she's the only person who was ever punished for the pattern of infanticide at St. Joseph's Mission, even though she was just a 20-year-old child.
mother at the time and as the local paper itself commented back when this happened in 1959 there's no way that she could have delivered the baby and put it into the incinerator minutes later without someone else's help and that of course That pattern also raises questions about, in the words of the paper back then, quote unquote, routine procedure at St. Joseph's mission.
But, you know, I think that there's also a lot of, understandably, a lot of guilt and pain and shame associated with having done something like that. And so to this day, her and my father have never really been able to have a full conversation about that circumstance of his birth.
Was she devastated when she found out that you knew and that he knew, your father knew?
Well, the curious thing about it is that it was kind of an open secret in a sense. So on the one hand, my family never talked about it and my father didn't really know the specifics around what happened when he was born and how he was found. On the other hand, when I was a teenager, I had heard what I assumed at the time were ghost stories about babies being born at St.
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Chapter 4: What themes are explored in Julian's documentary 'Sugarcane'?
And you hear her break open. She cries. And, you know, she says that she still struggles to talk about it and that it's something that hurts her, you know, to this day.
I'm assuming that just about everyone or everyone on the reservation was forced to go to one of these, you know, missionary boarding schools where part of the goal was to convert Native people into Catholicism. Does the old religion or, you know, lore still get followed or are people like genuinely Catholic on the reservation now?
It's a big mix. Our way of life really did nearly die out until recent decades, it started to finally come back. But my cat, for example, still goes to church. I go to Christmas mass with her. I could...
do the hymns in our indigenous language one of them goes oh you know we we do the whole thing in in our own way and at the same time you know we have our own belief systems our own way of worship of prayer we have our own way of telling stories and accounting for the creation of the world and those were nearly lost because of schools like saint joseph's mission you know for example i had never heard
Anyone other than a single uncle tell a coyote story except for once in my entire life. And so, you know, we really did almost lose so much of our way, of our culture, and our language is almost gone now. But it is starting to come back, which is a really beautiful thing.
What's an example of a custom that still remains, for instance, surrounding death?
Well, that's one of the most interesting things about our culture, I would say, is that despite the fact that we've lost so many different parts of what it is to be Sekwepemc, what it is to be a Shuswap person, we still bury our dead in a way that remains true to our customs and practices.
Which I think is because our people want to make sure that when we send our own to the afterlife, that they remain a part of us. And there are some mixtures in of Catholic rites and things like that.
But ultimately, the way that we do it, which includes playing the gambling game, how late at night, singing a crossover song for the person as they go to the other side, giving away their their goods and materials, abstaining from certain things for an entire year. Those are practices that go back generations, maybe even thousands of years.
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Chapter 5: How does Julian Brave Noisecat define the concept of survival in Indigenous culture?
There's a lot of different versions of La Howe songs. So this is kind of a mix between a La Howe song and a protest song. So it goes like this.
Hey-ya-ho, hey-ya-hey-yo-ho, hey-ya-ho, hey-ya-hey-yo-ho-ya, hey-ya-ha, hey-ya-hey-ya-ho-ya, hey-ya-ho, hey-ya-ho. Canada is all Indian land. Canada is all Indian land. Oh, Canada is all Indian land.
I see what you mean by protest song.
Sometimes they do sing that for La Jolla, so that counts.
Okay. Your father left the reservation when he was in his teens or 20s. How old was he?
He was in his 20s, early 20s.
Why was he anxious to leave?
Well, when you were called the garbage can kid when you were growing up, you know, there's a lot of stuff to run from.
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Chapter 6: What role does storytelling play in Julian's new book 'We Survived the Night'?
And that was just the beginning of his story. You know, he had a very troubling childhood. It was a dysfunctional time to be an Indian anywhere in North America and particularly on the Canem Lake Res where... our people were really messed up by what happened at St. Joseph's Mission. People were dying left and right. There was all kinds of abuse. Alcoholism was rampant.
I mean, it was a pretty dark era. So he got out essentially as soon as he could. He went to Vancouver where he attended art school, which was a complete accident. He actually was intending to take... classes to become a PE teacher, and then the campus that was closest to where he lived, they didn't actually have those classes, so they just enrolled him in some art classes.
And he ended up getting really good at this technique of printmaking called stone lithography.
Chapter 7: How has the residential school system impacted Indigenous families?
So he went on to Emily Carr College and then found his way into a job at a printmaking, fine art print press in New York called Tyler Graphics. which is actually where he moved and then met my mother in a bar outside the city.
I should mention here that he has work in the Smithsonian.
He does, yes, in the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian.
And he's also a wood sculptor.
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.
Yeah, so your father is a very gifted artist, but he also became an alcoholic. He became irresponsible after he married your mother. And your parents divorced when you were six, and you felt abandoned. You really loved your father and really looked up to him. And later on, you realized...
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Chapter 8: What traditions does Julian Brave Noisecat practice as part of his cultural identity?
that he was abandoned by his mother, and you felt like, and then he abandoned you. And I want to play a scene from the Sugarcane documentary in which you're talking to your father, and you're basically confronting him about this.
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.
You're looking for some kind of acknowledgement from me. No, I just feel like... Actually, yeah. Well, tell me what you want. I'll write it. Whatever you want. You know, it's just like... I didn't leave you, son. Yeah, you did. What was I supposed to do? And I was lost and a f***ing drunk. Just going like a madman. At the time that I told your mom, I don't know what the hell is wrong.
I'm crying my eyes out every day, and I don't know why. That's what I said to her. Doing a scene like that on camera and including it in a movie, did it make it easier to have a conversation or make it more difficult with both of you being kind of self-conscious, having this groundbreaking confrontation? Your father in tears and he wasn't the kind of guy who cried a whole lot.
Sometimes I can't believe I did it. Yeah. Do you have any regrets about it?
no no definitely no regrets um 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 and so you know after not living together for 22 years i mean he left when i was about six years old
suddenly we were living across the hallway from each other and he'd spend his days out in the carving shed you know in the in the garage and I'd be working on my book and working on sugarcane and then at night we'd hang out And we got to know each other a lot better. I'd turn on my recorder and he'd tell me stories from his life that I'd never heard before.
He learned a little bit more about mine. And we really did become like best friends. And so I think that that relationship that was really rebuilt because I did make the choice to move back in with him to create some opportunity for reconciliation also made it possible for us to have real and hard conversations like the one that you see in the film.
Well, let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Julian Brave Noiscat, and his new book is called We Survive the Night. We'll be back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air. So you're half Native Canadian, half white American. After your parents divorced, your mother wanted you to maintain some kind of connection to Native people.
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