Oscar nominated filmmaker Julian Brave Noisecat releases debut novel

Months after receiving an Oscar nomination for his first feature film, Sugarcane, Julian Brave NoiseCat says the whole experience is still surreal. “That one is definitely going to be in the obituary,” jokes NoiseCat about the Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature. The film, directed alongside Emily Kassie follows an investigation into abuse and missing children at the Indian residential school NoiseCat’s family was sent to near Williams Lake, British Columbia. Sugarcane picked up dozens of awards including Best Documentary from the National Board of Review and was also nominated for a Peabody award. “My first love, my first dream was to become a writer, so, to become a filmmaker was itself a turn of events that I hadn’t necessarily planned for and then of course to have the first film that you ever made, I literally hadn’t made a TikTok before we made Sugarcane, and to have the first film that you ever made go all the way, as far as films can go, was completely surreal,” says NoiseCat on the latest episode of Face to Face. “The part about it for me that was especially beautiful was to get to bring my dad along for the ride and some members of my family, as well. To see him on the red carpet in L.A.. I have this distinct memory of him with his cowboy hat on with Ariana Grande going in the back,” adds NoiseCat who acknowledges the film was a healing journey for his family. “Telling such a painful story is a scary thing, I’m not going to lie. It’s the biggest thing that gave me pause. There’s a real reason why my family, my grandmother in particular, doesn’t talk about the Indian residential school experience.” “The things she endured there, some of which I still do not know, were so painful that the way that she survived it was by keeping it in, by not talking about it with anybody. And I have a lot of empathy for that, I had a lot of empathy for that from the beginning of the film but especially after making it,” she says. “I think that it’s totally understandable that some members of our own families who were sent to the residential schools, who survived them, part of how they survived was by being silent, by suppressing it. And also, they ended up carrying in a lot of instances, a lot of shame and guilt and complicated emotions because of this experience.” NoiseCat, who is a proud member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen and a descendant of the Lil’Wat Nation of Mount Currie, has over the years written for The New York Times, The Washington Post and The New Yorker, released his first book on Oct. 14. We Survived the Night was written at the same time as Sugarcane was being filmed and NoiseCat says the two influenced each other. “The book itself is a much broader story. Sugarcane, it’s not a narrow story in any sense but it is focused on St Joseph’s Mission and it’s legacy today on my own family and the people within my own community. We Survived the Night attempts to tell a broader story about what it means to be Indigenous to Canada, to the United States, to North America and what those stories are and how they should be told,” says NoiseCat. “I start that in a very personal way, of my own grappling with those questions of culture and identity and narrative. You know, my mother is non-Native, my father is First Nations, so that was always something I was confronted with just in who I am and it expands out from there.” We Survived the Night is told in the style of a “Coyote Story,” a legend about the trickster forefather of NoiseCat’s people. “The trickster and the stories about him, these aren’t just fairytales, these aren’t just fables. They actually are stories about someone who we understood to be our ancestor, someone who we understood to be within us in a sense and also to be shaping the transformations of the world as we saw it. As I was reading, because I really had to read these old trickster stories because my family and nobody I know really tells them anymore, I saw so much of my family and the Indian world and I just wanted to bring that back to life on the page,” says NoiseCat. Over the next month, NoiseCat is travelling across Canada and the United States with events to promote the book. Those events will include an oral chapter and performance piece that is not in the text. Continue Reading