Julian Brave NoiseCat, a writer, powwow dancer, and Oscar nominated filmmaker, opens his debut book, We Survived the Night, with the story of his father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, abandoned as a newborn in a garbage burner at the St. Joseph’s Mission School for Indigenous Canadians. St. Joseph’s was one of more than 100 missionary boarding schools where attendance for Indigenous children was made mandatory under Canadian law in 1894 so they could be taught to “unlearn their Indian ways.” Labeled thereafter as the “Garbage Can Kid,” Ed left the Canim Lake Indian Reserve as soon as he was grown and built a career as a semi-famous Indian artist, embracing an itinerant lifestyle that NoiseCat likens to Coyote’s—the folkloric trickster ancestor of the Secwepemc and St’at’imc people who traversed the land, did much good (such as sharing with the Indians the salmon he liberated from the Fraser River) but also was driven by self-interest. 

Part memoir, part reported indigenous history, part recounting of the lost folklore tales of Coyote, NoiseCat’s memoir moves from the hurt inflicted by his father, who abandoned him at six years old, to conversation on the intergenerational trauma of colonisation and erasure that has shaped men like his father and created fractured familial structures within Indian communities. He reports on the Tlingit in Southeast Alaska working to save herring from endangerment by the commercial fishing industry; the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina fighting for federal recognition; the continuing exodus of Ouje-Bougoumou Cree from their ancestral lands in Quebec, and other stories that highlight how his people continue to persist

In conversation, Julian tells me he sees his work as trying to write back into strength his people and other Indigenous peoples, to tell their stories that no one else will—stories that are difficult, funny, and ultimately, good. On Zoom, we spoke about the confluence of land and indigenous identity, writing uncomfortable familial truths, contending with the Western facade of freedom and equality, and more.

Bareerah Ghani: In the opening chapter, you write that all indigenous peoples are related but that your humanity remains deeply particular, “tied to our places of origin.” When you identify yourselves in your language, you essentially say, “we are our lands and our lands are us.” I am fascinated by your choice of the word “humanity.” Can you talk about it in connection with how land and indigenous identity are inseparable?

Julian Brave NoiseCat: In my people’s language, as in all of the Salish languages, the root word for people and land are actually one and the same, which has fascinated me ever since I started learning my language about ten or fifteen years ago. There’s this idea that there’s something essential about our humanity that is supposed to be tied to the land and the places that we come from, and perhaps vice versa, that land also lives in some relationship to humanity. I find there is something essential in the view that Native people, that people are supposed to live in relationship to their places. And I think we live in a moment in time wherein we are increasingly alienated from one another and from the land.

BG: When speaking of your own self-discovery, you write, “I’ve been looking out at the Indian world to look within and looking within to look out at that Indian world.” To me, this circles the idea that we exist in community, in relation to one another. Elsewhere, you talk about obligations to relatives as one of the oldest laws indigenous people abide by. I see this in stark juxtaposition to the hyper focus on individualism in Western culture at large. As someone who traverses both cultures, how do you contend with this polarity?

JBN: I think that’s exactly right, it is implicitly a juxtaposition with the crisis of meaning and connection in Western capitalist civilization right now. I don’t make that explicit very often in the text but, I am a child of two worlds. My father is Secwepemc and St’at’imc, and my mother is an Irish-Jewish New Yorker. If you heard her speak, you could tell. But on my mother’s side of the family, being related to each other doesn’t carry as much weight as it does on my father’s side of the family. We are mostly from Ireland and have a little bit of Hungarian Jewish ancestry, but I’ve never been to the place that my ancestors on that side of the family call home. We don’t really have many family traditions, despite the fact that I’m a writer, and I learned that from my mom, and that that comes from my grandfather, who was also a writer.

Part of what I think Native life in general has to offer the world, and that this book is saying, is that there are ways Native people live in relationship to one another, to the land, to our culture and traditions, to who we are, that are essential for our humanity. In my view, a big part of the crisis in so many individuated, nuclear, family, atomized parts of the Western world has to do with the fact that so many people are cut off from these essential parts of what makes us human.

BG: I’m Pakistani, and our culture is also very family-centric, so it’s been really interesting to find that in your community. I think about my language, how it’s being passed on less and less. When you speak of your ancestral tongue, you note there are fewer fluent speakers. But then you also say, in your ancestral narratives about Coyote, cultural and linguistic death is said to be like sleep. I understood this as a hopeful lens where Indigenous languages and cultures are eternal, that there is more to being Indigenous, that loss of language is not necessarily loss of indigeneity.

JBN: I wrote We Survived the Night at the same time as I directed the documentary Sugarcane alongside Emily Cassie—the documentary is in part about the system that nearly wiped my culture off the face of the earth, as it did with almost all other Indigenous cultures across Canada and the United States. I inevitably thought very purposefully about what parts of my own culture and tradition were nearly killed off, and that I had a responsibility as a storyteller to bring them to life on the page. And so, I see my work in this book as telling these stories, as an act of speaking my family, my people, Indigenous peoples across this land, and our cultures and traditions back into strength by telling real, complicated stories that engage with us in all of our layers and complexity, but ultimately in a way that is filled with love. Ultimately I see a people who, contrary to the entire premise of the colonial project, still have an incredibly beautiful and powerful and meaningful way of life that deserves to be seen as good.

BG: When you write these difficult stories, especially about your relationship with your father and Koko, who you call your second father, I admire the way you are empathetic, offering grace for their behavior and choices, even when those have hurt you deeply. How do you grapple with conflicting emotions or guilt that may surface when speaking uncomfortable truths about family history?

JBN: To write this book, I actually made the pretty unusual decision as a 28-year-old bachelor living on the East Coast at the time, to move back in with my dad, who I hadn’t lived with since I was 6 years old, and who still owed me the money I’d loaned him to come to my own high school graduation. I think because we reconnected, I was able to understand him and his story at much greater depth than I had before. While we were living together, during the day, I would be writing We Survived the Night and working on my documentary, including doing a lot of research, and so I started reading—and it really was reading because this oral history has nearly died out—all of these stories about our first trickster forefather, Coyote. I ended up seeing so many parallels between him and my trickster dad. That concept helped me understand my father as both this epic, mythic figure who made my world, and also, a destructive force who left it and left me with a lot of pain. Within our own traditions, there is a very capacious moral outlook and understanding of the paradoxical, contradictory forces that often shape our lives and this world. I think that those stories were always there, in part, to help us understand men like my dad who made our families, but who also created pain in their wake. What I’m trying to suggest is that this tradition, that has nearly been completely forgotten by all human records, actually gets at a lot of the truth that I see in my family, in the indigenous world I’ve reported on, and in the world beyond that. It’s perhaps not a stretch to suggest that this is still a world shaped by tricksters and their tricks.

BG: Can you talk a little about your choice to include the Coyote stories as interspersed narratives within your broader reporting and personal stories?

JBN: I think about the text as a woven narrative, and that’s very intentional—that use of the metaphor of weaving—because for my people, the St’at’imc in particular, my grandfather’s people, weaving is considered the highest art form. Among all Salish people, it’s considered the highest art form. And so the book weaves together memoir, family history, criticism, reportage, and the mythology of the Coyote stories into this sort of woven text that is itself an echo of my great-grandmother’s basket weaving and my great-great-grandmother’s basket weaving. That is to put these ideas from mythology and reporting in conversation very intentionally with the personal lived experiences.

BG: That’s beautiful. That’s what makes this most insightful, a book you’re learning from, because it’s speaking of all this history that doesn’t exist outside of this.

JBN: What I would also say is that the reason why the Coyote stories are so funny and entertaining and have these slapstick elements and this really interesting contradictory figure at their core, is in part to convey the contradictions in our humanity and in the world more broadly, but also to make sure that the story is entertaining. Because if your culture is an oral culture, and it’s essential to pass down parts of what makes you you to the next generation, it can’t be a lecture, you know? Otherwise, nobody’s gonna remember the stories. And I think that piece of it, the narrative quality of the Coyote stories and the oral histories are essential to what has made them endure across thousands and thousands of years.

BG: Speaking of Coyote, at one point you talk about how following your forebears’ path can feel like you’re losing your way. You extend that into conversations about rampant alcoholism and drug use, absentee fathers and broken familial structures, which are all a manifestation of trauma, a pattern that’s passed down generations because of colonization. How do you go about forming new pathways of living while continuing to honor ancestral suffering and sacrifice?

JBN: What I’m trying to do is capture the full breadth and depth of the lives of the people who have let me in to help tell their stories, whether those be my relatives, my dad, myself, or Native people across Canada and the United States. Part of what is often so frustrating about being a Native person on this land is that we are so often overlooked, and then when we are mentioned, our story is flattened into a story about tragedy and loss. We are often depicted as the poster children of all of the most awful social outcomes that happen here in North America. And while it’s true that we fall to the bottom of every statistical measurement of misery in Canada and the United States, the richness of our lives across this land transcends that. I think that there’s a lot of beauty out in the Native world. There are many consequential political leaders and movements who have and are reshaping big debates in these countries about the environment, politics, culture, and the arts. We deserve and demand to be seen as significant players in the story of a land that was ours for thousands and thousands of years before it was others. And our traditions are often the ones that can capture those stories best. I think that the trickster narrative, for example, is an incredibly flexible kind of story that can account for figures like my father, ancient environmental history, like the creation of the Fraser River and the leading of the first salmon up that river, and even contemporary trickster politicians like Donald Trump. We were always assumed to be people who had nothing really to add to broader human understanding of the world, and I think that the exact opposite is the case.

BG: In your book you bring up Dakota 38, the largest mass execution in US history under Lincoln’s orders, and point out that this country is yet to come to terms with the fact that “its Great Emancipator freed the slaves and hung the Indians in the same week.” It got me thinking about myth-making and false narratives at the core of this nation. How do you contend with this American facade of espousing freedom and equality?

JBN: I think we’re in a moment in time wherein old myths about America as a land of immigrants, as a more tolerant melting pot, as a democracy, a land of opportunity, are very much falling by the wayside. I think that that has led to a broader crisis of meaning. What is the story of this land and this country? In that search, I would humbly suggest we turn to the First People and stories of this land to understand it. There’s a surprising amount of richness that stories that were nearly killed off by colonization but somehow still persist can bring to our conversation about what it is to be upon this land. Not just as Indigenous peoples, but as all people on this land. That has often been very much discounted. The story of Thanksgiving, for example, is one of the founding myths of this country and what’s really happening in that story is that the Natives were kind enough to let these starving pilgrims come over for a feast. That’s such a Native thing to do, such a generous act between neighbors, and of course, even those basics of the story are not remembered that way. There are countless other examples.

Part of what I’m trying to do, especially in the reported parts of the book, is to show how Native stories and the presence of Native people can reshape our understanding of these big ideas and myths about what it is to be American. For example, myths of race, assimilation, and colonization can add depth, not only to our understanding of Native people, but to our understanding of this place more broadly.