MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
In August 1959, a watchman at a Catholic-run Indian boarding school in British Columbia, Canada, heard a noise - a cry, really - coming from the incinerator. It was a newborn baby left in an ice cream carton. It was author and filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat's father, Ed. Ed's beginning was unusual, but what followed was not. Brave NoiseCat weaves his father's story into the larger canvas of the Native experience in a new book titled "We Survived The Night," and he's with us now to tell us more about it. Julian Brave NoiseCat, thank you so much for talking with us.
JULIAN BRAVE NOISECAT: Thank you so much for having me on the public airwaves.
MARTIN: So let's start with the name of your book. There's a meaning to it.
NOISECAT: Yeah, so "We Survived The Night," the title of my book, is derived from the traditional way to give the morning greeting in Secwepemctsin - that's my family's language, my Indigenous language. We say tsecwinucw-k, which doesn't actually translate to good morning. It means you survived the night.
MARTIN: You write about Indian names in your book, and you say names come with responsibility. So would you tell us about yours?
NOISECAT: My dad was found in the trash incinerator at St. Joseph's Mission - the Indian residential school that my family was sent to to unlearn our Indian ways. And according to the news article where the night watchman who found him is quoted, his cries for life sounded like the noise of a cat. You know, my last name is NoiseCat, which is especially kind of mind blowing to me because our last name NoiseCat actually did not originally mean noise cat. That was just - the missionaries wrote down the name wrong, essentially. It was originally Newisket. That was our ancestral Salish name. But then, I don't know. It means something about Indians and names, right? The name kind of found its own meaning and story, and it became one of survival.
MARTIN: What a start to life. Your father barely surviving his birth had to have affected his life, and then in turn, it had to have affected your life - which is kind of the core of the book. Tell us what you'd like to tell us about that.
NOISECAT: Well, my dad was the first generation of kids on the Canim Lake Indian Reserve that were not taken away to St. Joseph's Mission - the Indian residential school that my grandmother was sent away to. And when you deprive a people - an entire race - of the right to parent their children, eventually, you break down the fundamental structures of the family system. You know, my dad was sort of always running from his own demons, his past. And eventually, he left both me and my little sister behind. And so the book really is about trying to understand him and our story and what it is to be Native because my connection to that, you know, my community was broken when I was a young boy.
MARTIN: You know, you co-directed the Oscar-nominated documentary film called "Sugarcane." It follows you and your father's reckoning alongside the story of an investigation that unearthed remains of more than 200 children at a former Indian residential school in Canada. Why was it important for you to document these difficult conversations?
NOISECAT: You know, my father did not know about the circumstances of his own birth and discovery in the trash incinerator until I directed "Sugarcane" and until he watched it in the film itself. So I think that part of what I was trying to communicate with that film was why this silence, why this lack of knowledge about what happened to Native people exists in the broader world in the way that that was, in many ways, internalized by our own communities and our own people. And then on the flip side of that, you know, as a storyteller, I'm also thinking very purposefully about what traditions were nearly wiped out by those schools and that I, as a Native storyteller, have a responsibility to bring back to life on the page.
MARTIN: You know, we're talking about this as if it's kind of a linear narrative, but that isn't how the book unfolds. It's actually remarkably rich and multi-layered. You kind of lace it with native mythology - if I can use that term - about the Coyote in particular. Could you read a little bit, please?
NOISECAT: Yeah. You know, my people don't tell the Coyote stories really anymore. And so, you know, as I was working on the book, I was also reading these old Coyote stories that were gathered up in ethnographic texts a hundred-plus years ago. And I just started to notice that there were so many parallels between our trickster ancestor, this guy called Coyote, who was sent to the Earth by the Creator to set things in order and who was a trickster, so he did a lot of good but he also messed a lot of stuff up. And, you know, my own father, with whom I have a loving but, you know, complex back story. So here, I guess I'll read a story about how our people narrated the arrival of the first white man in our territory as the return of the trickster Coyote. This is from a chapter called "The Drifters."
(Reading) The most common account held that Coyote would reappear in the end times. When things came full circle, the trickster who molded the world into its indigenous state would be there just to do whatever trickster blank needed to be done - make something like a sun, or break something like the witch's fishing weir, or steal something like goose eggs or a wife, or invent essential ergonomic functions like the elbow, or live a life full of damn good stories, because how the world ends is just as important as how it begins.
MARTIN: That's wonderful. You know, before I let you go, I don't want to erase your mom.
NOISECAT: Yeah.
MARTIN: She has her own story.
NOISECAT: She does.
MARTIN: Your mom is not a Native person.
NOISECAT: Nope.
MARTIN: And the book is dedicated to her.
NOISECAT: Yeah.
MARTIN: I'm wondering how you decided to make sure she had presence in the story.
NOISECAT: You know, the truth is, is that she raised me, so she was always going to have presence. And, you know, even though she's non-Native, she's an Irish Jewish New Yorker, and if you hear her talk, you'll hear it.
(LAUGHTER)
NOISECAT: You know, she did things, like, after my father and her split, she would still take me to visit his family so that I could understand my culture and who I was. She even learned how to bead so that I could have my own powwow regalia to travel and dance.
MARTIN: Wow. So do you have a hope for this book, what it will do?
NOISECAT: When we include Native people in the story, I think that we understand this place a bit differently. My people have always considered the Coyote stories nonfiction, and I think that it's long past time that the social sciences actually take these ideas and these stories seriously because there's a reason we told them for thousands and thousands of years. And you can't tell me right now that this is not a world that is still spun around by tricksters and their tricks.
MARTIN: Julian Brave NoiseCat is the author of "We Survived The Night." Julian Brave NoiseCat, thank you so much for talking with us.
NOISECAT: Kukstsemc, Michel. Really loved the conversation. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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