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His film Sugarcane was nominated for an Academy Award. Now Secwépemc writer and filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat has released a new book.
We Survived the Night tells the story of his relationship with his father, weaving in oral history and journalism.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You’re already like a writer, filmmaker, screenwriter, you do it all. Why was it so important for you to have this book published?
I didn’t really set out to become a filmmaker. Filmmaking was something more that happened to me. But writing, on the other hand, is something that I’ve dreamed about doing ever since I was a little kid. And to see my first book out in the world, it’s just such a special thing for me.
Where did the idea of We Survived the Night come from?
Secwépemc culture and our own language, actually. The title of the book is derived from the way that we give the morning greeting in our language. We say tsecwinucw-k, which means “You survived the night.” I often thought about what it was for our ancestors to greet one another in the winter of 1863, for example, when two-thirds of our nation died of smallpox. What it was for our elders to say that to one another on the mornings after the children were taken away to the residential schools. I think there’s poetry, there’s social commentary, and there is a wittiness and a wry, dark humour that gets at the truth of our experience in our world.
And the focus of the book is about your dad, is it not?
The book is very much focused on my father. I am a child of two worlds, my father grew up on the Canim Lake Indian Reserve and my mother is an Irish Jewish New Yorker. My dad had a hard upbringing. I think like many Native people, he was sort of running away from his past and his demons. And he got as far away from the Canim Lake Indian Reserve as he could as an adult, which led him all the way to New York.
Was he around a lot when you were growing up?
My dad was this really mythic figure. He was a noted Native artist, he has work in the Smithsonian Institution’s collection, for example. He became a figure in the Native world. I remember when I was a little kid, he was pictured on the cover of Native Peoples magazine in a backwards Kangol cap and purple rockstar shades. At the same time, he left our family when I was six years old and I was raised solely by my mother. I wrote this book to try to understand him and the identity and culture and the family that he connected me to, but that was kind of broken because he left.
Is your dad still alive?
Yes, to write the book I moved in with him for two years. And, the book itself is supposed to be an act of reconciliation between us. You know, it created the possibility, despite our history, for us to heal and be together as a father and a son and to love each other despite the pains of our past.
What was that like living together for two years?
It was a great time. My dad is really charismatic, he’s a really fun guy. There’s always rock’n’roll on in his studio and he’s carving, chipping away at a big log. And while I was working on the book in the evenings we would eat dinner and he’d just tell me all these stories about his life.
Part of the way that I started to understand him was through some of our people’s own oral histories, particularly about our trickster ancestor Coyote, whose stories of his great creations and destructions reminded me a lot of my old man. What I tried to do in the book was not just to tell a story about myself and my father, but also tell a story in a traditional Secwépemc story structure that brought back to life the Coyote stories on the page. This is an art form, a way of seeing the world and of telling stories that has nearly been lost to colonization.
Did you achieve the healing you were hoping to achieve by writing this?
Yeah, absolutely. I lived with my old man for two years. He became one of my best friends. And he actually read the memoir. Afterwards, for the first time in my life, he told me he understood a bit more now the pain he put me through. And that has meant the world to me.
What’s on the front cover of the book?
The front cover of the book is a depiction of the trickster Coyote by the Salish artist Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith, who’s from the relatives of our people south of the border in Montana. She is probably one of the most significant American painters of the last century. It’s called Coyote Sees the World Clearly. And about a month after I reached out to her, she actually died. So to the best of my knowledge, my book is the last thing that she personally gave permission to to use her art.
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