Julian Brave NoiseCat, Author: I, uh, was really terrified.

You know, these are not just intense stories for real life people, they are intense stories for real life people who I know and am related to.

Marcia Franklin, Host: Coming up, I talk with author and filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat about his memoir, "We Survived the Night," and his Academy Award-nominated documentary, "Sugarcane."

That's "Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers' Conference."

Stay tuned.

[MUSIC] Announcer: Funding for this program is made possible by contributions to the Friends of Idaho Public Television from viewers like you.

Thank you.

Franklin: Hello and welcome.

I'm Marcia Franklin.

My guest today calls himself a "child of two worlds."

Julian Brave NoiseCat grew up in the hills of Oakland, California with his mother, who is white, but spent many summers on an Indian Reserve in Canada where his father is from.

That diversity of backgrounds and experiences informs NoiseCat's artistic voice.

After receiving his undergraduate degree at Columbia University and a Master's degree from Oxford University, he worked as a political strategist and journalist.

NoiseCat then decided to move in with his father, from whom he had been estranged, and re-establish a relationship with him.

That led, as you will hear, to the writing of an in-depth memoir, "We Survived the Night," and a haunting documentary film, "Sugarcane," which was nominated for an Academy Award.

I spoke with NoiseCat about those projects and his life when he was at the 2026 Sun Valley Writers' Conference.

Marcia Franklin, Host: Well, welcome.

Welcome to Ketchum/Sun Valley.

I understand you've been here before, and I know you've been to Idaho before because you've done powwows at Fort Hall.

Julian Brave NoiseCat, Author and Filmmaker: Yeah.

I went to the Fort Hall Powwow.

I won it in 2013, and they used to have a powwow in Coeur d'Alene called Julyamsh that was one of my favorites as well.

And yes, I have been here to Sun Valley and Ketchum before; uh, my film played at the film festival back in 2024.

So it was a bit colder last time I was here.

Franklin: That's awesome.

And I understand you had a really cool opportunity already on this trip, which is to stay at the Hemingway house.

NoiseCat: Yes.

Yeah.

Uh, we, me and my partner and my baby, um, Copper -- so Joan and Copper -- we got to stay at the Hemingway house.

My understanding is that my son was the first baby to stay at the Hemingway House.

So we now have a little NoiseCat claim to a bit of literary cultural history, which is kind of cool.

Franklin: Well, Hemingway is an influence for you, yes?

NoiseCat: Yeah, absolutely.

You know, "The Old Man in the Sea" is one of my favorite books of all time, "A Farewell to Arms," "A Movable Feast" as well.

My prose style is kind of shaped by, by Hemingway to a certain extent.

Franklin: Well, and congratulations on the birth of your child.

Talk about a creative act.

That's probably the highest one there is.

So, uh, congratulations on -- Copper, right?

NoiseCat: Yes, Copper.

Franklin: What a great name.

Tell me a little bit about the name.

NoiseCat: Well, the name is actually an ancestral name.

So it comes from my, uh -- the first person we know to have had the NoiseCat name recorded, his name was Copper John.

So one of our sort of traditional practices is to give the names of your ancestors to kids and nobody had used that name in, since him, I think, so I kind of love it.

And my partner is from four different coastal First Nations and for her and her people, copper has a cultural significance.

It's a sign of traditional wealth.

So, yeah, people, people always say that they're into the name.

Franklin: You've had quite the year.

I know it's been a minute, but I wanted to congratulate you as well on the Academy Award nomination for "Sugarcane."

NoiseCat: Thank you.

Franklin: And I've seen it several times.

I encourage everyone to watch it.

It's difficult in places, but it is so important to watch.

So, to have that Academy Award nomination, and I believe the first North American indigenous person to have received a directing nomination?

NoiseCat: Yeah.

A filmmaking nomination.

Yeah.

It's a bit of a mouthful to say all that.

"First Indigenous North American filmmaker."

Franklin: Yeah.

NoiseCat: No, it's very special and it was a very special project.

You know, in addition to being a really important story to myself and my family and, you know, getting to tell it in a way that, you know, now that I have a kid, I could not have gone all in on it.

Uh, you know, we also had an incredible filmmaking team.

My, my directing partner, Emily Cassie, just everybody who worked on that film.

We got to work with the best.

And I think we made a film that we're all going to be proud of, you know, not just five years down the line, but, you know, 10, 20.

Franklin: What was the evening like for the Academy Awards?

NoiseCat: Uh, it was a bit of a blur.

You know, the thing that I try to convey to people sometimes is the swath of human experience that is encapsulated in a single project for that one is pretty crazy.

You know, there's everything from, you know, the intense stuff that you see in the documentary, all the way to we had this, like, going to Hollywood moment.

And just to have all of that as part of a single project is kind of mind-bending sometimes.

But it was really beautiful.

And, uh, there's definitely a lot of life experiences and stories that I, uh, am now going to get to share with my little guy someday.

Franklin: We're going to be talking a lot about your relationship with your father, because your memoir and your film really delve into that.

But your mom also really intrigues me, because she's not indigenous; your father is.

And yet when your parents split, she really made a huge effort, um, to make sure that you still stayed in touch with that side of, um, your being.

NoiseCat: Mm hmm.

Franklin: She even beaded your powwow outfits and she had you go visit your relatives in Canada.

Um, talk to me about the importance of your, your mother in this journey that you've been on.

NoiseCat: You know, I am the child of two worlds.

I should maybe just give a little context.

My father is a Secwepemc and St'at'imc artist and to the extent that there's such a thing as a famous native artist, my dad was that in the '90s and 2000s.

I remember when he was pictured on the cover of Native People's Magazine with a backwards Kangol cap and purple rockstar shades.

So, you know, he was kind of a character.

And my mom's an Irish-Jewish New Yorker.

And even though she's lived on the West Coast now for a few decades, when she really gets going, you can still hear it.

And you know, he left; my dad left when I was about six or seven years old.

And so, you know, there I was a little half-Native kid with a white mom who, you know, turned out looking the way I look, and who had a pretty Native name as well.

Like, nobody was reading "Julian Brave NoiseCat" at, you know, attendance and being like, "Well, what's your ethnic background?"

You know, it was kind of written all over me.

And yet, I uh, my connection, my familial connection to that through my dad was broken when I was a little kid.

And my mom I think kind of understood that.

And so she made a lot of effort to keep me connected.

She'd bring me home to the Canim Lake Indian Reserve, which is a thousand miles and a country away from, from Oakland, California.

She brought me down to the Intertribal Friendship House, which is the third oldest urban Indian community center in the country.

It's in Oakland.

Uh, she even learned, as you said, to bead, and to this day beads, like, my powwow regalia.

I'm sure she's going to help bead my son's powwow regalia as well.

So yeah, you know, she's a really important character in the book.

The book and the film are kind of more squarely about my relationship to my father, but in the book, she plays a very important supporting role and the book is also dedicated to her.

Franklin: Both the memoir and the film, um, involve your father, but also have broader implications.

NoiseCat: Mm hmm.

Franklin: Tell our viewers a little bit.

It's a very sensitive situation, but you have talked about it.

NoiseCat: Mm hmm.

Franklin: .and I feel we need to talk about it because it's right up front in the book.

Talk about what happened to your father.

NoiseCat: So my dad was born at an Indian residential school called St.

Joseph's Mission on the night of August 16, 1959.

He was discovered a few minutes after his birth by the school's night watchman, who described his infant cries for life as sounding like the "noise of a cat."

And he followed that noise of a cat to the school's trash incinerator, where he found in an ice cream carton my newborn father.

They called him in the local paper "Baby X."

And the night watchman described his survival as being like an act of God.

And, you know, I think it's interesting that he described the, the way that my father's cries for life sounded as being like a noise of a cat, obviously, because our last name is "NoiseCat."

And interestingly, it only really became "NoiseCat" after the missionaries wrote it down wrong.

It was actually originally "Newisket."

So, you know, there's something in there about, I don't know, the meaning of our name finding itself in the story of my father's survival.

And through "Sugarcane" and the making of, the writing of "We Survived the Night," I learned that my father is the only known survivor of a pattern of infanticide actually at this institution, St.

Joseph's Mission.

And that there, there seems to have been a process wherein babies sometimes born to priests or nuns -- although that's not my dad's story -- would be adopted out, would potentially be aborted, um, or would be put in the school's, uh, trash incinerator to be burned with the garbage.

Franklin: There are just remarkable scenes in this film of epiphanies and um, emotion and silence.

NoiseCat: Mm hmm.

Franklin: Because part of the difficulty here is that the trauma was so embedded that there was a lot of accumulated silence to try and penetrate.

Really extraordinary, uh, filming that only comes, I know, from being a documentary producer myself, from spending the time that's needed to do that.

NoiseCat: Yeah, we shot 150 days on "Sugarcane."

A hundred of them were in Williams Lake.

You know, sometimes I explain to people that this was in a certain way a young person's documentary, because, um, you know, once you have a family, a mortgage, kids, all that sort of stuff, I don't think you can really go about making a documentary in the same way that we did.

So I'm really grateful that we had the opportunity to do it that way.

Um, and you know, obviously this was a very personal story to me.

And there's actually a kind of crazy story about my, how I came to the project, which was not my own choosing.

Franklin: Yeah.

It seems providential, really.

Because Emily was, who's a reporter who you knew in another life as a reporter back East, called you because she was starting to work on.

she's Canadian, originally.

NoiseCat: Yeah, she's From Toronto.

She wanted to make a documentary about the subject.

And so she reached out to me about co-directing a project with her.

And, um, I told her I needed to think about it.

And while I was thinking about it, she went off and found a First Nation that was going to be in its own investigation into one of these schools.

And so when I circled back around two weeks later to tell her whether I was going to work on it or not, she said, "Oh, that's great.

I'm glad you're going to join me.

Uh, the institution we're going to be focusing on is St.

Joseph's Mission near Williams Lake."

And it just so happens that that was the school where my father was born and where, where my family was sent.

Out of 139 in Canada, she happened to.

Franklin: So it was meant to be.

NoiseCat .choose the one school.

Yeah, really crazy.

Franklin: Let's talk about the title, "We Survived the Night."

NoiseCat: So the title of the book comes from the way that we give the morning greeting in Secwepemctsin.

We say "Tsecwínucw-k."

That would be "We Survived the Night."

And I learned that that was the way that we gave the morning greeting when I was a college student.

I spent the summers on the Canim Lake rez learning our language from my Kyé7e, that's my grandmother.

She's one of only two remaining fluent speakers now of Secwepemctsin on our rez.

And every time we'd sit down to do language lessons, she'd actually bring a coffee mug and she'd fill it up with tea.

And it would usually say "Tsecwínucw-k" on there.

She had one up in her cabinet that said "Tsecwínucw-k."

And that's how I came to learn that that was the morning greeting and that it didn't mean "Good morning," but that it meant, "You survived the night."

And after learning that, I often ask myself what it meant, you know, for our ancestors to say that.

What did it mean in the winter of 1863, for example, when two-thirds of our nation died of smallpox?

What did it mean in the mornings, after the children were taken away to the Indian residential schools?

And also, you know, what kind of like dark Indian sense of humor puts "You survived the night" on a language that was nearly, you know, wiped out the face of the earth by those very schools on the mug of one of the survivors of those schools?

You know, I think there's a lot, I think there's a lot there.

You know, I think that there's social commentary, there's a little bit of poetry, uh, there's, you know, some sort of gallows humor.

And I think that, you know, in that I'm trying to draw out in multiple other ways in the book, um, the sophistication, the insights that can be derived from a people and from a way of life, from a language, from a culture, uh, that was nearly killed off by colonization.

That was the intention of colonization, was to kill these things off.

And I think once you start to understand the sophistication of some of these oral histories, the nuance and complexity of these languages, uh, I think that you start to realize that actually in the history of colonization, it was not necessarily progress and enlightenment that were being brought to the world, but that actually the world may have lost a great deal of knowledge that was embedded in these cultures that, you know, existed on this continent for, uh, you know, tens of thousands of years.

Franklin: Well, speaking of that, and speaking of the themes that you use, um, one is -- a major one -- is Coyote.

And we see here, this is a very famous piece of artwork of Coyote.

These are stories that you've wound in, but they are truth, too.

NoiseCat: Yeah.

So structurally, the book weaves together a few different elements to paint a portrait of contemporary indigenous life in Canada and the United States.

Um, the first that we've kind of gotten into is my personal and family story.

Um, a second element that comes in a little bit later in the book is, um, reportage on indigenous communities across Canada and the United States.

That's what I've done for the last over a decade now, is I've worked as a reporter for, you know, basically whichever magazine or newspaper will pay me to do it.

Um, but what I think is I guess literarily innovative about the book is, as you mentioned, a major thread running through them is the Coyote stories.

And in fact, the entire book is structured around sort of three of the greatest hits from the Coyote epic.

Our people always consider the Coyote stories to be nonfiction.

And there are elements of these stories that go back, like, 11,000 years.

Franklin: 11,000 years, yeah.

NoiseCat: For example, they correctly situate major environmental transformations that happened at the end of the last Ice Age.

And that's not just true for my people's versions of the Coyote stories.

That's true throughout the entire interior Pacific Northwest.

The Coyote himself is perhaps the most widely-told trickster in the history of tricksters.

You know, indigenous peoples all the way from Costa Rica to British Columbia used to tell, you know, their own versions of Coyote stories.

Franklin: Well, and as I understand it, you were kind of struggling a little bit with the memoir and getting a framework and you started reading about Coyote stories, which hadn't necessarily been transmitted to you.

And you realized with kind of this awakening or epiphany that your father himself would be Coyote.

NoiseCat: Yeah.

Franklin: .in the way that he has lived his life.

NoiseCat: What happened was that I, I, so I moved in with my dad to write "We Survived the Night" and to make "Sugarcane."

And, you know, I had this kind of picture and sense of my dad as this epic creator, destroyer, you know, absent father, survivor.

And so I was reading in these hundred-year-plus old ethnographic recordings of the Coyote stories about this epic creator, you know, destroyer, survivor, deadbeat dad.

And, you know, it kind of hit me like, "Oh my God, you know, like my own dad is kind of a Coyote in his own way."

And that insight, you know, fundamentally transformed the book and led me to ask a question that I hadn't seen asked of narrative nonfiction before, which is, "What would it be to take these stories seriously as nonfiction?"

And also, you know, "What are these stories getting at?"

And it turns out that they're getting at a lot of different things.

One of them happens to be the complexity of the men in our community and others.

Uh, you know, the Coyote is, is kind of the first absent father figure.

But it's also getting at questions of, you know, the Coyote himself as a transformer.

So it's getting at like, "What is transformation?"

"What causes things to change in the world?"

Again, some of these stories stretch back thousands of years before the Bible and the pyramids.

They needed to be sophisticated.

They also needed to be entertaining to endure and to, you know\, carry forward our way of life across an immense amount of time.

Franklin: And I know you are interested in doing more work perpetuating oral traditions as well.

NoiseCat: Yeah.

Part of, part of how I've done my book tour is I have, I perform the Coyote epic as told through my own family story.

So it's like a contemporary rendition of this ancient tradition.

I'm really interested in orality and the transition back to orality, and I'm kind of exploring that in the way that I perform and relate to these stories, which to me actually feels like the more logical endpoint, actually, if you're trying to bring the Coyote stories back to life is to bring them back to life as an oral tradition.

Franklin: What, what has been the response, first of all, from your family, the band, the tribe to the film and the book, that audience?

NoiseCat: You know, I, uh, was really terrified in especially the film, because I knew a film just has a little bit more reach than a book.

Uh, and you know, these are not just intense stories for real-life people.

They're intense stories for real-life people who I know and I'm related to.

Uh, you know, this is where eventually I will be buried when it's my time.

And, um, you know, I, you can put all your best intention into telling the story in the most loving, careful way, but there is always some distance between how, you know, a story is intentionally put out into the world and how it's received, including by the people who, you know, are implicated in it or even in it.

Uh, and so we obviously did everything we could to make "Sugarcane" and also to write "We Survived the Night" in the most loving potential way.

Uh, but, you know, that gap is a real gap.

And so I actually filled that gap with, with prayer and ceremony and spirituality.

Franklin: Fasting.

NoiseCat: With fasting.

The book is in part - uh, the breaks between the different sections are, I, sort of little poetic moments where I talk about -- and sometimes humorous moments -- where I talk about a four-day, four-night, uh, fasting ceremony that I, I participated in.

And you know, what I was praying for while I was out there fasting was that these stories that I felt called to tell would be, you know, gentle with my, with my loved ones.

And I did this for four years.

You know, no food and no water for four days and four nights, this is a long time with no food and no water.

The leading sort of nutrition journals and sorts of things like that say that you actually shouldn't do that or you can't do that.

But I did.

And, you know, you can't definitively say that that was why the book and the film were received the way that they were by the world and by my own community, uh, but it surely didn't hurt.

I think that part of what I am trying to do with, with both projects, but I think more explicitly with the book, is to challenge some of the ways that colonial society, you know, the dominant tradition of nonfiction, uh, has been written.

You know, the way that it has, as we brought up, excluded these oral traditions that were considered nonfiction and that give us access to, uh, you know, human experiences that stretch far beyond the print record.

Uh, but I'm also interested, I think, in the sort of, uh, spiritual dimensions of human life.

Nonfiction (and) documentary writing tend to be very secular forms.

And, you know, they tend to reach for secular explanations for why, you know, the events in the narrative happen.

Social science, investigative fact, hard truth.

And I obviously do a lot of that.

You know, "We Survived the Night" and "Sugarcane" break new ground on the history of Indian residential schools.

I, you know, bootstrap-reported my way across parts of North America that most newspapers, magazines never go to.

Uh, and yet, you know, I think that there is a way in which, uh, when you're engaging with questions of life and death - you know, my dad entered the world at the precipice of life and death.

Um, when you're engaging with questions about those who've gone, come before and sometimes gone on, uh, what it is to try to bring back traditions from, from the dead, you know, what it is to live in relationship to tradition, uh, I think that those are at least in part inherently spiritual questions.

And I think that we have to be alive to that dimension of human experience.

And, you know, we talked about how improbable it was that I got called to, you know, make "Sugarcane," how improbable it is that my father is the only known survivor of the trash incinerator at St.

Joseph's Mission.

And so I think in my own work, I've had to be open to, uh, those sorts of interpretations, which are also the same sorts of interpretations I believe that my ancestors would have reached for in some of these circumstances.

Franklin: So it sounds like your family, that there was some healing that took place, that it was received in that, in that spirit.

PHOTO NoiseCat: Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, my dad, my dad and I lived together for a couple years and became best friends.

Him and his mom have, you know, really repaired their relationship.

He went up to visit her earlier this summer.

Uh, you know, I've been approached by numerous people within my own community and beyond in Indian country who watched the film and, you know, said like, "Oh, like this helped me and my ex-wife who had like a dysfunctional marriage, uh, you know, talk about our experiences at the residential schools and, you know, start to sort through why, you know, we were the way we were."

I've had kids come up to me and say, "This helped me understand my own father, my own grandparents."

And that also goes beyond just the Native world as well.

I think that you don't have to be an intergenerational survivor of the residential or boarding schools to understand, you know, complicated absentee fathers, you know, to understand family trauma.

I think that that's actually a universal thing.

Um, and so, you know, I think that I've, I've just been really lucky that this book and the documentary, um, have spoken to the people in those kinds of ways and have led them to have their own, um, sort of personal or familial reckonings, you know, and conversations with, you know, circumstances that connect to some of the darkest parts of this continent's history.

But that again, also are ones that I think we all can relate to in our own ways.

Franklin: And I find it also very moving and spiritual that you now are a new father as well, bringing that full circle.

Um, and I think that you will be the best storyteller that, that a kid could have for a father.

I think that.

NoiseCat: I hope so.

And, you know, another kind of crazy coincidence in all this -- so very briefly, the last year of my fast, since I was kind of wrapping up writing the book and the documentary, I prayed to become a family man.

And it was actually the very next -- you got to be careful what you pray for sometimes - 'cause it was the very next month that my partner and I got pregnant.

And I became a dad at 33.

I was born in 1993; my son's born in 2026.

My father was born in 1959.

He was 33 when I was born.

So I ended up becoming a dad at the exact same age that my father was when I was born and he became a dad.

And so there's just a way in which, um, I don't know, there's, there's a lot of poetry in all of this.

And of course, you know, working so much about my own father's story, uh, you know, I now get to try to put some of those lessons, I guess, um, to the test in my own parenting.

Franklin: Well, all the best to you as you continue this journey.

Um, you have so many adventures I know ahead of you and I've just, uh, really been moved by both your film and your book.

And I'm interested to hear what's in the future for you.

NoiseCat: Oh, thank you.

Yeah, I mean, you know, I just love, uh, telling stories, uh, across the various mediums that I get to do that.

I, uh, you know, it feels like an imperiled thing these days.

And so I've started on my next book.

It's a novel this time.

And I've also started on another doc.

Franklin: Wow.

NoiseCat: And, you know, just trying to do that while, while raising a kid and being a good dad.

Franklin: Well, all the best to you.

Thanks so much for taking time.

NoiseCat: Thank you.

Franklin: ..to talk with me, and by proxy our viewers.

NoiseCat: Yeah, really grateful to be on, be on the show.

Franklin: You've been listening to Julian Brave NoiseCat, the author of "We Survived the Night" and the co-director of "Sugarcane," a documentary that was nominated for an Academy Award.

Our interview was taped at the 2026 Sun Valley Writers' Conference.

My thanks to the organizers of that excellent event for inviting us back and for all their help.

If you'd like to watch any of the nearly 90 interviews we've conducted at the conference since 2005, check out the Idaho Public Television website or YouTube channel.

Thanks for joining us, and keep reading!

[MUSIC] Announcer: Funding for this program is made possible by contributions to the Friends of Idaho Public Television from viewers like you.

Thank you.