Julian Brave NoiseCat Interview

This book is about finding love for, you know, complicated men,” says Julian Brave NoiseCat, the Oakland-raised author of We Survived the Night. “That’s one of the big things that I’m interested in doing with my father and my grandfather, myself to a certain extent.” It’s March, and he’s speaking to me about his book over Zoom from Surrey, British Columbia, while he’s shopping for baby shower supplies with his partner; they are expecting a son next month.

We Survived the Night is a blend of nonfiction forms: history, mythology, memoir, and reporting about the contemporary Indigenous experience. These different threads are woven together, a narrative shape that feels appropriate, since weaving is a major art form of the Secwépemc Nation, of which NoiseCat is a member. His father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, is Secwépemc and St’at’imc and grew up on the Canim Lake Indian Reserve in British Columbia; his mother, Alexandra Roddy, is Irish and “a little bit Jewish.”

This article appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
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NoiseCat explains that he wanted to write a “go-to book” for understanding Indigenous life in Canada and the United States today and that he wanted to do this in an authentically Indigenous way, showing Native life in relation to land, with the Canadian and U.S. governments “playing a backseat role in the narrative.” In fact, We Survived the Night was originally intended to be conventional, nonfiction reportage.

While growing up, NoiseCat had heard only one of his relatives recount folklore about the trickster shape-shifter Coyote, an ancestral figure. But NoiseCat’s research led him to the stories his nation historically told about Coyote, and he included them in the book. He explains there that Coyote stories have been “written off as fantasy by the dominant culture. This is an old colonial trick. When our accounts are read as fiction, our knowledge can be discredited.”

The Secwépemc and St’at’imc Nations’ Coyote stories that NoiseCat presents are a form of Indigenous knowledge. He writes, “This book is an extended Coyote Story about my family, my people, and all the First Peoples of North America. In it, Coyote and the ideas running through the trickster’s stories still shape and explain our world.” And this shape-shifter figure saturates We Survived the Night—NoiseCat casts his father and his grandfather as Coyotes of sorts.

Ed Archie NoiseCat, who would eventually gain major recognition as an artist, was an alcoholic and abandoned Roddy and six-year-old NoiseCat, from whom he became estranged. The book opens with a harrowing story about Ed Archie. In 1959, a night watchman was making the rounds at St. Joseph’s Mission, a residential school for Indigenous Canadians. Hearing cries that sounded like a cat, he investigated and found a baby inside the school’s incinerator. That baby was Ed Archie. Neither father nor son had grown up knowing of this story.

Rather, discovery of this incident happened in connection with Sugarcane (2024), the Oscar-nominated documentary that NoiseCat codirected with investigative journalist Emily Kassie, about the infanticide and rape that occurred at segregated Indian boarding schools whose goal was forced assimilation. NoiseCat had recently signed his contract for We Survived the Night when Kassie contacted him about working on the documentary.

For two years, while NoiseCat focused on these projects, he lived with his father, and their relationship dramatically improved. The two worked apart during the day but became close at night, smoking cannabis together, a practice that NoiseCat explains he uses when writing because it allows him to “see things from a slightly different vantage point than usual, which I find helpful for narrating.”

NoiseCat’s mother kept him connected to his Indian roots, regularly taking him to visit the Canim Lake reservation when he was young. A gallerist who had shown Ed Archie’s work introduced Roddy and her son to the Intertribal Friendship House in Oakland, where he learned powwow dancing and connected with other Indians in the area—he would later travel Indian country to compete at powwows.

Roddy also encouraged his interest in writing from an early age, a vocation for which he’d have to navigate the white worlds of journalism, politics, publishing, and filmmaking to get stories of his Native people out there. His irreverence and refusal to write an expected narrative set his work apart. “In a certain sense,” he jokes, “I’m also just another Irish Catholic writer who’s using the colonizer’s language to tell anti-
colonial stories.”

NoiseCat isn’t precious about his writing space. He writes wherever and whenever he can—the plane, the ferry, coffee shops, and the couch when other family members are around. Everybody who has found success in the arts has a deep drive to create, he says, noting that this is his own relationship with storytelling. “I feel like I have to do it. Otherwise, I’m not living in the full sense that my soul wants to live.”•