Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Sam Brigger. Today, Julian Brave Noisecat. He co-directed an Oscar-nominated documentary of personal and historical import. It's about the Canadian missionary boarding schools that Indigenous children, including members of his family, were required to go to get assimilated.
Chapter 2: What is the main topic of Julian Brave NoiseCat's documentary Sugarcane?
many children were physically and sexually abused. While making the film and writing his new memoir, We Survived the Night, Noisecat learned why, minutes after his father was born, he was abandoned in a boarding school trash incinerator room. Also, Grammy-winning Icelandic musician Leve plays guitar and sings some songs for us.
All I did was wonder how Your arms would be And it happened to me That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.
This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Sam Brigger. Terry has our first interview today. Here she is.
Chapter 3: What traumatic experiences did Indigenous children face in boarding schools?
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.
Chapter 4: How did Julian Brave NoiseCat learn about his father's origins?
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.
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Chapter 5: What themes are explored in Julian's memoir We Survived the Night?
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. 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.
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Chapter 6: How does Julian's relationship with his father impact his work?
He went to Vancouver where he attended art school, which was a complete accident. He actually was intending to take classes to become a P.E. 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.
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... that he was abandoned by his mother, and you felt like, and then he abandoned you.
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Chapter 7: What insights does Julian Brave NoiseCat share about colonization and family history?
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, I thank you so much for talking with us. It's really been a pleasure.
Cook's Jam, Terry, it's been a dream come true for me. Julian Brave Noisecat's new book is called We Survived the Night. He spoke with Terry Gross. John Candy, the comic actor who rose to fame in Second City TV and in such films as Stripes, Splash, and Spaceballs, died at the age of 43 in 1994.
Now 31 years later, a new documentary pays tribute to Candy and does so in a very intimate and affectionate way. It's called John Candy, I Like Me, and it's now streaming on Prime Video. Our TV critic, David Bianculli, has this review.
This new movie-length documentary about John Candy is subtitled I Like Me for a Reason. That's the line that Candy says to Steve Martin partway through their film Planes, Trains, and Automobiles after Martin's character has bombarded Candy's character with a string of increasingly mean insults.
By the end of that movie, the vulnerability and likability of Candy's character has won Martin's character over. This documentary has the same effect, even if you know little about John Candy. By the time this film is over, you'll miss him a lot. John Candy, I Like Me, takes a chronological approach to its subject, but not a typical one.
It's more than 20 minutes into the movie before we see any real samples of Candy the performer. We first learn about the type of person he was growing up in Canada. He listened to Fireside Theatre comedy records and played football, until he injured his knee and had his kneecap removed. Not replaced, removed.
We hear from his widow, his now-adult children, his friends and other relatives, and also from a ridiculously long list of colleagues, co-stars, and fellow celebrities, all of whom seem all too happy to share the most personal of stories. One of them is Bill Murray, who joined Toronto's Second City Improv Stage Group when Candy did.
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