Oscar-nominated filmmaker promotes his book We Survived The Night at Toronto event

Though his debut book will not be available until mid-October, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat was in Toronto this month to provide details of We Survived The Night.

NoiseCat, a member of Canim Lake Band in British Columbia, made history earlier this year when he was the first Indigenous to North America filmmaker to be nominated for an Academy Award.

His movie Sugarcane, which focused on the impact of residential schools on his family and Indigenous peoples, was nominated in the Best Feature Documentary category.

NoiseCat, who is also a writer and Indigenous activist, was at the TIFF Lightbox in Toronto on June 3 to promote his book. A screening of Sugarcane followed his presentation.

We Survived The Night is a deeply personal book for NoiseCat, with stories about his family and, in particular, his father.

NoiseCat began his Toronto presentation by reading a portion of his opening chapter. He described a scene at a British Columbia residential school where nightwatchman Tony investigates a late-night sound.

“It was his job to make sure the Indian kids weren't up to any Indian mischief, like stealing food or running away,” NoiseCat wrote.

He said Tony undoubtedly had heard and seen many things during his nights at the residential school where he worked for more than 30 years. 

One particular night, Aug. 16, 1959, he heard a wailing sound and investigated with a flashlight.

“Sound and light led him inside the service wing to a garbage burner about the size of an office desk, where trash from the mission was turned to ash. He opened it, casting rays of light onto rubbish and soot. Somewhere near the top of the pile was an ice cream carton, repurposed as a makeshift wastebasket and discarded no more than twenty minutes before. Within was a newborn. The authorities called him “Baby X”. And he was my father.”

After his father abandoned his family, NoiseCat was primarily raised by his mother in Oakland, Calif.

In the book he described his father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, as someone who was brawling, self-destructive, creative, anarchic and dangerous to know. He thought of him as Coyote, the trickster.

“I knew from the outset that when I set out to write this book that it would have a lot to do with my dad,” NoiseCat said.

His father was a famous artist.

“He was also, before he was absent, he was very present,” NoiseCat said. “He was an artist and working at home and we'd go on all sorts of different little adventures together.”

NoiseCat said losing his father and his love was a huge deal to him.

“And so, the entire time that I've been telling stories as a journalist and filmmaker and now author, I guess, it's been to try to recover something,” he said. “Something personal. But also to recover something that is also continental in scope, of course, because there was so much taken from us as first peoples.”

NoiseCat, who is now 32, did end up moving in with his dad to write his book. And that’s when he had a realization.

“What I need to do is to see if I can, if it's possible, to write this entire book as a Coyote story to show that this tradition captures the truth of at least this man and, maybe more broadly, our family, maybe more broadly, our people, and maybe even more ambitiously of the world as it is today,” NoiseCat said.

He said his grandfather, who fathered more than 20 children, was also a version of Coyote.

“Immediately following the era of this country's history where they were trying to do us all in as Native people, this man took it upon himself to singlehandedly try to bring us back from that genocide,” he said. “And he did a lot of work towards that end.”

During the Toronto presentation, NoiseCat also explained the meaning of the title of his book.

“This was something that I knew a long time ago that I wanted my first book to be called We Survived the Night,” he said. 

During his university days he received some research grants and was able to go spend a summer learning the Shuswap language from his grandmother.

“And one of the things that I learned as I was trying to wrap my very Anglo-wired jaw around our language, which has sounds that are completely foreign to someone who's been speaking English from the time they were young, was that the way that we would say good morning in our language doesn't actually translate to, literally, good morning,” he said. 

“It actually means ‘You survived the night.’ And I have always been so enthralled with what it must have meant for our ancestors, not so long ago, to greet each other and the day with the acknowledgement that they had survived another night.”

We Survived the Night is published by Penguin Random House Canada. To order go to https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/688144/we-survived-the-night-b…

Local Journalism Initiative Reporters are supported by a financial contribution made by the Government of Canada.