Julian Brave NoiseCat, a member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen, took the title of his debut, We Survived the Night (Knopf, Oct.), from a way of saying “good morning” in Secwepemctsín. Tsecwínucw-kuc, meaning “you survived the night,” acknowledges his people’s persistence despite colonial efforts at erasure, and NoiseCat weaves his family’s memories with reporting on Indigenous communities and activists across the continent. With Emily Kassie, NoiseCat also co-directed Sugarcane, a documentary about Indigenous residential schools in British Columbia, which premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival and won the directing award for U.S. documentary. NoiseCat spoke with PW about mending family ties, becoming a storyteller, and reviving Coyote tales as nonfiction.
How does We Survived the Night dovetail with your directing work on Sugarcane?
You don’t need the documentary to read the book or vice versa. But if you make two big projects that have to do with similar themes, there’s going to be cross-pollination. The film is about the residential schools, which were designed to destroy our cultures, and the book is told in the form of a Coyote story, a narrative art that was destroyed by the residential schools and colonization. In that sense, the book’s revitalization of this nearly dead art form is a continuation of the work in the film.
Your father, master woodcarver Ed Archie NoiseCat, is central to the book and film. How did you reconnect with him through your research?
My dad is an artist, and Native carvers usually work in a father-son line. I remember spending time in my dad’s studio when I was a kid, and that didn’t end up becoming something he could pass on to me because he left. So I chose to move in with my dad to make both of these projects, and I lived with him for the better part of two years. It felt like an opportunity to make art about our relationship in a different medium, one that could get at the textures of Indigenous life, broadly speaking, and universal questions of father-son relationships.
You describe your father as a trickster and mingle oral tradition with history writ large. How did you decide to frame your book through the lens of Coyote lore?
The magic of the writing process—and one that AI and other technologies are never going to capture—is that you discover so much along the way. In my first year of writing, I didn’t think much about the Coyote stories. Then, largely because I was spending so much time with my dad, I thought about artistic forms that everybody has to do in carving: Everybody needs their pole that represents their clan, and specific rattles in the art of the Northwest Coast show diverse representations of Raven. I concluded that if I was going to be a storyteller in the tradition of my people, I had to engage in that tradition, not as something from an ethnographic past but as relevant in the here and now.
How have the Coyote stories changed the way you think about nonfiction?
The Coyote stories traditionally were considered nonfiction, and I became obsessed with the idea of what it would look like for narrative nonfiction to take that notion seriously. In reading so many Coyote stories, I realized that they were talking about our ancestor, and there’s so much of him still in us. Part of who we are remains true to this mythic, powerful, wonderful, awful, hilarious character. I think that the Coyote stories really get at who we are and why our world is the way it is.
In addition to retelling Secwépemc histories, you gather firsthand stories of the Tlingit, Nuxalk, and Lumbee people, among others. Why did you seek sucha wide range of Indigenous experiences?
We say in Indian country that we’re all related, in part because we have huge families. We are all interwoven across North America as Indigenous peoples. What I’m trying to do is to look at the stories that go untold, and the stories that can illuminate something overlooked in Indigenous life.
