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I'm Terry Gross.
Minutes after being born, Ed Archie Noisecat was thrown away.
Literally.
The infant was discovered with the garbage ready to be burned at St.
Joseph's Mission School for Indigenous Canadians.
He was rescued from incineration by the night watchman.
St.
Joseph's was one of the 139 missionary boarding schools that Indigenous children were required to attend, as mandated by the Canadian government in 1894 to help solve the quote Indian problem through assimilation.
There were 100 such schools in the U.S.
The last one closed in 1997.
An investigation that was opened in 2021 in Canada revealed that rape and infanticide were not uncommon in these schools.
My guest is Noisecat's son, Julian Brave Noisecat.
Julian's father is from a reservation in British Columbia.
He left the reservation and moved to the U.S. and married a white woman.
Julian is their son, and he grew up in Oakland.
His parents divorced when he was six, but his mother was determined to find ways to connect Julian with Native culture.
She succeeded.
She made sure he spent a lot of time on his paternal family's reservation and with a Native group in California.
He became a champion powwow dancer, a journalist covering indigenous-related issues and an activist.
Last year he co-directed a documentary called Sugarcane about the investigation into the mission schools, their often brutal treatment of children and the infanticide.
Julian and his father are among the people who appear in the film.
The documentary also explores Julian's relationship with his father.
Sugarcane is the name of a reservation near St.
Joseph's.
The documentary won the directing award at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, won Best Documentary from the National Board of Review and was nominated for a Peabody and an Oscar.
Now Julian Brave Noisecat has written a new book called We Survived the Night.
It's part memoir, part indigenous history, and part coyote stories.
Coyote is the shape-shifting trickster who was regarded by many Native tribes as the ancestor sent by the creator to finish creating the indigenous world.
Julian Brave Noisecat, welcome to Fresh Air.
I enjoyed the book, and I also learned a lot, which I appreciate.
Thank you so much.
It's an honor to be on Fresh Air.
This is honestly a dream come true for me, Terry.
I really am honored to hear you say that.
So the investigation into St.
Joseph's Mission found that infanticide was common there.
Students were sometimes raped by the priests or other staff, and when a student was pregnant, the baby was often aborted or disposed of.
But rape wasn't your father's backstory.
Tell us, to the best of your knowledge, what his story is.
So my father was discovered in the trash incinerator at St.
Joseph's Mission on the night of August 16, 1959.
The night watchman, Tony Stoop, described his cries for life as sounding like the noise of a cat, which I only bring up because my last name is Noisecat, which is kind of unbelievable to me, because it only became Noisecat, my last name, after it was written down wrong by those same missionaries who came to our land to turn us into Catholics.
And it was written down long before your father was born.
So they didn't know his backstory.
Yes.
So it was a story and a name that really found its meaning in his survival, which is, you know.
There are subjects in the book that I think get at questions of the presence of ancestors and forces greater than human ones in our present life.
And you know, I didn't know the story of my father's birth until I set out to write this book and to make Sugar Cane.
There's also an element of telling these stories that is about touching the family histories that even your own family is too scared to tell.
And so, while there's a piece of this story that, of course, the church and the government you know is not talking about, there's also an element of that silence that has been internalized by Native families like my own.
So you're saying that you didn't know your father's origin story until you started doing the book and the documentary?
No, he did not either.
All that he knew was that he had been born somewhere near Williams Lake and found not long after in a dumpster.
And it was kind of a hazy story.
Other than that, we didn't really know that there was much involving the residential school.
And we really didn't know the circumstances around all of it until the documentary in the book.
And it's remarkable that he survived.
So what did you learn about why it was his mother who actually put him there?
Well, you know, I think that this is part of the history of colonization that has often been remarked on by scholars of colonialism.
You know, Frantz Fanon, for example, talked about the way that the colonized subject sometimes internalizes the oppression of colonialism.
And I think it makes discussing these subjects that much more difficult for the very people who sometimes survived them.
You know, the truth of the matter is is that at these schools, children were abused, and sometimes those children grew up to themselves become abusers.
That at these schools...
Native children were separated from their parents and therefore did not necessarily know how to parent.
So when it was their turn to do that, they turned around and abandoned their own.
And I think that the story with my father is one where my grandmother at the time was – a very young unwed mother.
My grandfather was a bit of a womanizer, as I write in the book.
And there was this process at the residential school, wherein unwed mothers with unwanted babies had a certain set of protocols it appears that they might be able to follow if they wanted to get rid of that unwanted native child, which mirrored really, in a sense what was happening to Native children more broadly in society, because we were of course considered an Indian problem and our way of life, if not our people as a whole, were supposed to die.
Your grandmother tried to keep this a secret all her life.
Yeah, we actually learned through the research in We Survived the Night and the documentary Sugarcane that she's the only person who was ever punished for the pattern of infanticide at St.
Joseph's Mission, even though she was just a 20-year-old child.
And, as the local paper itself commented back when this happened in 1959, there's no way that she could have delivered the baby and put it into the incinerator minutes later without someone else's help.
And that, of course, happened.
Joseph's mission.
But you know, I think that there's also a lot of understandably, a lot of guilt and pain and shame associated with having done something like that.
And so to this day, her and my father have never really been able to have a full conversation about that circumstance of his birth.
Was she devastated when she found out that you knew and that he knew, your father knew?
Well, the curious thing about it is that it was kind of an open secret, in a sense.
So, on the one hand, my family never talked about it and my father didn't really know the specifics around what happened when he was born and how he was found.
On the other hand, when I was a teenager, I had heard...
What I assumed at the time were ghost stories about babies being born at St.
Joseph's Mission being put into the trash incinerator there.
And just to give you a sense of how internalized the denial was, even within Native communities and families.
I did not believe those stories when I heard them back then.
You know when I went to learn language from Maikea, who is one of the last two remaining fluent speakers on the Canem Lake Indian Reserve.
It's her and her sister.
Maikea means grandmother means grandmother.
Yes um, you know, i asked her a little bit about what happened at the residential schools and it became very clear with the couple stories that she was only willing to tell that it was not a subject that she ever felt, you know, willing to open up about.
And that remains her truth and at the end of the day, you know, that is how she has survived and you know, i think that that is very understandable given the weight of the pain that she carries.
Did your father or did you try to talk to her about that?
Yeah, actually the culminating scene in Sugarcane is a scene where me and my dad go visit my kia and he, you know, tries to have a conversation with her about it.
And you hear her break open.
She cries.
And you know she says that she still struggles to talk about it and that it's something that hurts her.
I'm assuming that just about everyone, or everyone on the reservation, was forced to go to one of these, you know, missionary boarding schools where part of the goal was to convert Native people into Catholicism.
Does the old religion or, you know lore, still get followed, or are people like genuinely Catholic?
On the reservation now?
It's a big mix.
Our way of life really did nearly die out until recent decades it started to finally come back.
But my cat, for example, still goes to church.
I go to Christmas mass with her.
I could... do the hymns in our indigenous language.
One of them goes, you know, we do the whole thing in our own way.
And at the same time, you know, we have our own belief systems, our own way of worship, of prayer.
We have our own way of telling stories and accounting for the creation of the world.
And those were nearly lost because of schools like St.
Joseph's Mission.
You know, for example, I had never heard Anyone other than a single uncle tell a coyote story, except for once in my entire life.
And so you know, we really did almost lose so much of our way, of our culture, and our language is almost gone now.
But it is starting to come back, which is a really beautiful thing.
What's an example of a custom that still remains, for instance, surrounding death?
Well, that's one of the most interesting things about our culture, I would say, is that, despite the fact that we've lost so many different parts of what it is to be a Shuswap person, we still bury our dead in a way that remains true to our customs and practices.
Which I think is because our people want to make sure that when we send our own to the afterlife, that they remain a part of us.
And there are some mixtures in of Catholic rites and things like that.
But ultimately, the way that we do it, which includes playing the gambling game, how late at night, singing a crossover song for the person as they go to the other side, giving away their, their goods and materials, abstaining from certain things for an entire year.
Those are practices that go back generations, maybe even thousands of years.
Why a gambling song as part of a death or mourning ceremony?
You know, I've thought about that myself.
LaHal is about, in part, the spiritual power of the people who are playing it.
So the way that the game works is one team is singing a song and trying to hide two sets of bones.
Usually it's deer bones and one bone has a mark in it and the other bone is unmarked.
And the other team is trying to guess which hand the unmarked bone is on the opposite team, as they're singing a song and trying to sort of fake them out and use their spiritual power to hide the bones.
And there's an element of sort of reawakening your spirit and acknowledging the?
Um greater than human power that we all sort of carry in our soul.
In that i would also say that um, it's a way to sort of redistribute goods and and wealth and these sorts of things.
Part of what happens at a, at the lehal games, is that money or or different goods i mean back in the day, like horses and guns and those sorts of things would be would be given away, And that's to redistribute what belonged to the family of the deceased, to honor that person and also to get people to come to these funerals.
It's really important for us that our whole community comes together to honor the dead.
And when you go to a funeral in Cannon Lake, it is a real event.
It's a real celebration.
Hundreds of people show up.
Can you sing the song that you just referred to, or would it be inappropriate to sing it now?
No.
There's a lot of different versions of La House songs.
So this is kind of a mix between a La House song and a protest song.
So it goes like this.
Hey-ya-ho, hey-ya-hey-yo-ho, hey-ya-ho, hey-ya-hey-yo-ho-ya, hey-ya-ha, hey-ya-hey-ya-ho-ya, hey-ya-ho, hey-ya-ho.
Canada is all Indian land.
Canada is all Indian land.
Oh, Canada is all Indian land.
I see what you mean by protest song.
Sometimes they do sing that for La Jolla, so that counts.
Okay.
Your father left the reservation when he was in his teens or 20s.
How old was he?
He was in his 20s, early 20s.
Why was he anxious to leave?
Well, when you were called the garbage can kid, when you were growing up you know there's a lot of stuff to run from.
And that was just the beginning of his story.
You know, he had a very troubling childhood.
It was a dysfunctional time to be an Indian anywhere in North America, and particularly on the Canem Lake Res where our people were really messed up by what happened at St.
Joseph's Mission.
People were dying left and right.
There was all kinds of abuse.
Alcoholism was rampant.
I mean, it was a pretty dark era.
So he got out essentially as soon as he could.
He went to Vancouver where he attended art school, which was a complete accident.
He actually was intending to take... classes to become a PE teacher.
And then the campus that was closest to where he lived.
They didn't actually have those classes, so they just enrolled him in some art classes.
And he ended up getting really good at this technique of printmaking called stone lithography.
So he went on to Emily Carr College and then found his way into a job at a printmaking fine art print press in New York called Tyler Graphics, which is actually where he moved, and then met my mother in a bar outside the city.
I should mention here that he has work in the Smithsonian.
He does, yes, in the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian.
And he's also a wood sculptor.
He is, yes.
So he began his career as a fine art printmaker, but he could never really suffer a boss.
So he ended up becoming an artist.
And when he was in Vancouver in the 80s, it was a really interesting place to be for Native art.
There was kind of a renaissance happening there. in the art of the Northwest Coastal Native peoples.
Your listeners might be familiar with like totem poles and masks and those sorts of artworks.
Well, that was really what was coming back in Vancouver in the 1980s.
So he got to see some of the greats of that era, guys like Bo Dick and Bill Reed, who did a piece that was on the Canadian 20 bill for many years.
He got to see them actually work.
And he had been building houses when he was in his 20s.
And his father was really good with his hands.
And he watched them do it.
And he was like, you know what, I think I could do that.
And so he embarked on his own artistic career, wherein he started carving and he got really good at it.
Yeah, so your father is a very gifted artist, but he also became an alcoholic.
He became irresponsible after he married your mother.
And your parents divorced when you were six, and you felt abandoned.
You really loved your father and really looked up to him.
And later on you realized that he was abandoned by his mother and you felt like and then he abandoned you.
And I want to play a scene from the Sugarcane documentary in which you're talking to your father and you're basically confronting him about this.
I guess I just feel like I'm here trying to help you when you don't really fully recognize the thing that we share.
Your story is someone who was...
Abandoned, but also who abandoned.
You're looking for some kind of acknowledgement from me.
No, I just feel like... Actually, yeah.
Well, tell me what you want.
I'll write it.
Whatever you want.
You know, it's just like... I didn't leave you, son.
Yeah, you did.
What was I supposed to do?
And I was lost and a f***ing drunk.
Just going like a madman.
At the time that I told your mom, I don't know what the hell is wrong.
I'm crying my eyes out every day, and I don't know why.
That's what I said to her.
Doing a scene like that on camera and including it in a movie.
Did it make it easier to have a conversation or make it more difficult, with both of you being kind of self-conscious, having this groundbreaking confrontation?
Your father in tears and he wasn't the kind of guy who cried a whole lot.
Sometimes I can't believe I did it.
Yeah.
Do you have any regrets about it?
No, no, definitely no regrets.
You know, I think that part of what made it possible for us to go on that road trip and to have, you know, intense conversations like that confrontation that you see in Sugarcane, was that I moved in with my dad actually, and lived with him for two years while we worked on Sugarcane.
And while I wrote my first book, we survived the night.
And so you know, after not living together for 22 years I mean he left when I was about six years old suddenly we were living across the hallway from each other and he'd spend his days out in the carving shed, you know, in the garage, and I'd be working on my book and working on sugar cane, and then at night we'd hang out.
And we got to know each other a lot better.
I'd turn on my recorder and he'd tell me stories from his life that I'd never heard before.
He learned a little bit more about mine.
And we really did become like best friends.
And so I think that that relationship that was really rebuilt because I did make the choice to move back in with him to create some opportunity for reconciliation, also made it possible for us to have real and hard conversations like the one that you see in the film.
Well, let me reintroduce you here.
If you're just joining us.
My guest is Julian Brave Noiscat and his new book is called We Survive the Night.
We'll be back after a short break.
I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air.
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So you're half Native Canadian, half white American.
After your parents divorced, your mother wanted you to maintain some kind of connection to Native people.
And she kept bringing you back to your father's reservation, where your father's side of the family still lived.
She found a group in Oakland where you grew up.
That was a Native group, brought you there.
Why was it so important to her to do that?
And I should mention here she seemed very interested in Native culture before she even met your father and was thinking of doing some kind of work with indigenous people.
Yeah, you know, my mom describes it as being something instinctual.
She understood that, you know, look, she had a kid who...
When you see my mother and my father and I in a family photo, it looks like my dad's genes really kicked mom's genes' butt.
And I have about as Indian a name as you can imagine, Julian Brave Noisecat.
And my dad, on top of that, was a noted Native artist.
And if you said Noisecat in certain periods of time, when I was a kid, in certain rooms full of Indian people, they'd be like oh, like the artist.
So his absence was something that kind of... followed me everywhere I went.
And she had this instinct that was, you know, brilliant for a mom, and bang on that.
I needed to be connected to my family, his family.
You know my culture and my identity.
And so she did things like put me in a car and drive me over 24 hours, which is how long it takes to get from Oakland California, to Canem Lake, British Columbia.
She'd take me down to the Inner Tribal Friendship House, one of the oldest urban Indian community centers in in Oakland, California.
And she also learned how to bead so that I could dance powwow and have my own regalia.
She did so much.
And she also remains my first reader and editor of my writing.
So it only felt appropriate to dedicate We Survived the Night to her.
Were you both initially accepted as family on the reservation?
Yes.
You know, that is, I think, one of the most beautiful things about at least Secwepemc culture, but I would also say many indigenous cultures all across North America that I've come into contact with.
You know, despite the fact that outsiders perhaps have not been the most kind to Native people, Native people are some of the most welcoming people in the entire world.
And our sense of who can be related to us is vast.
Very, very broad.
I mean, I think that that is actually the story at the core of the Thanksgiving myth, for example, that the people who these pilgrims landed on their land and were struggling had them over for a big feast.
What a nice thing to do.
What is the English way of saying your father's reservation?
We call it Canem Lake, which is interesting.
It's actually Canem is not an English word.
Canem comes from the Chinook trade jargon, which is like a trade language that was used in the Pacific Northwest, of about 700 words.
In our language we call it Tzik'aschen, which means broken rock, essentially because if you look up in the hill behind the rez, there's this rock formation that looks like a series of broken rocks.
I think it's interesting that your father left his family and the reservation and your mother left her family too and she didn't break ties with them, and then her mother ended up living with you and her for several years.
And it's interesting that they both kind of broke away from their families but then your mother connected you to your father's family and you've become so connected to them and to the reservation.
And it seems like a bit of a pendulum swing.
Yeah.
Yeah, you know, I think that.
Listen, I think society more broadly for the last number of decades has done this experiment wherein we see whether we can live in sort of individuated lives mostly centered around the nuclear family, or sometimes not even that.
Wherein to be someone's cousin, to be part of someone's extended family, doesn't necessarily really mean anything in at least dominant society, at least my mom's side of the family.
And I think that part of what is really beautiful about being Native, about being Indigenous, is that being related really means something to us.
We are very involved in each other's lives.
We take care of each other.
We feed each other.
You know, we look out for one another.
I had a cousin who was helping me with a housing application literally last week.
You know, and I think that ultimately that is not just something that's important to Native people.
I actually think that that's the way that humanity lived for the vast majority of our history.
And that part of our present crisis is that breaking of kinship, of the bonds that have maintained families and communities for thousands and thousands of years.
You've learned to speak your father's reservation's native language, even though your grandmother's one of the few people who know that language anymore.
Tell us what you needed to learn, just in terms of sound, in order to speak the language, because it sounds not at all like English or French or Spanish, the languages we're most used to.
It doesn't sound like the Arabic languages either.
Yeah, this is my Shuswap language.
We call it the language of the people, the spread out people is what our ethnonym technically means.
It is very different phonologically from the languages from Europe.
Actually, that's part of the reason why so many linguists studied our language and other languages in the Pacific Northwest is because the sounds in them are are very, very different from the ones that you can find in English and other languages.
Though I will say the ha.
You hear a lot of that in Hebrew and Yiddish and also, I think, in some Middle Eastern languages.
Yeah yeah, there's definitely.
I mean, it's not completely.
Did you have to learn how to say the ha?
Well, so the, in the first month I was learning the language.
So when I was in college I spent the summers on the Canem Lake, res and at.
In the evenings I'd go sit at my cat as kitchen room table and she'd teach me.
And the first thing we did for the first entire month was the alphabet.
Um, she basically had to teach me how to wrap my Anglophone wired mouth around all of those different sounds.
Um.
So it can be a bit daunting, and I think that part of the reason why it feels so important for me to be using the language, not just in life but in my own work, is to encourage other people to pick up the language and also to be willing to make mistakes in our language, because that's the only way you can learn.
I also want you to explain the title of your book, We Survive the Night.
So the way to give the traditional morning greeting in Sikwet Makhchin is Chukwinuk, which does not mean good morning.
It actually means you survived the night.
And I learned that because when I was about 20, learning the language from my grandmother, she would go to the cupboard and pull out a coffee mug that had Chukwinuk written across it.
And eventually I learned that Chukwinuk was the way that we gave greetings the morning greeting and that it translated as you survived the night.
And ever since I learned that, I've often wondered what it meant for my people to use that word at different moments in our history.
For example, what did it mean in the winter of 1863 when two-thirds of our nation died of smallpox?
Joseph's Mission.
And then i also think about the way that my uses sort of responses to that word or that word in kind of a tongue-in-cheek dark humor rye kind of way.
You know, like i'll come into her house and it might be the morning i'll say and she'll say oh, don't remind me, because you know she's getting on that older side of things now and i just think that there's so much in that you know so much poetry.
There's social commentary, there's a little bit of humor And I think that it gets at the beauty and the sensibility of our people and our way of telling stories.
We need to take a short break here.
So let me reintroduce you.
My guest is Julian Brave Noisecat, and his new book is called We Survive the Night.
We'll be right back.
This is Fresh Air.
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You're a champion powwow dancer.
You go to powwow every year, I think, and do a fast every year as well.
Why has it been so important to you to connect with that part of your ancestry and family?
Well, you know, I think I... grew up with a real sense of disconnection and loss.
I was trying to figure out who my father was and who I was.
I had his last name.
I looked a lot like him.
People used to call me a mini Ed when I was a kid.
That's your father's name.
Yeah, that's my dad's name.
I mean, mini Ed isn't your father's name, but Ed is.
Ed is my dad's name, yeah.
And so it was always something that I was trying to understand and reclaim, and You know, reading and writing were part of how I did that.
I devoured Sherman Alexie books when I was a kid.
I watched every single cassette tape of this documentary series called 500 Nations until they basically fell off their reels.
It was hosted by Kevin Cosner, which I think is a kind of funny historical note, because he was, at that point in time, the Kevin Cosner of history.
Dances with Wolves fame rather than the Yellowstone Kevin Costner.
So he was kind of like, I don't know, the woke cowboy or something like that.
And, you know, I just think it was something that I felt soul driven to do from a very young age.
And dancing was probably the biggest part of that.
Before I started doing journalism or documentary, long before I picked up a documentary, I traveled Indian country as a powwow dancer all the way from the Enoch Cree Nation outside of Edmonton Alberta, to the Pala Band of Mission Indians in California and many different reservations in between to go to their annual powwows where I'd compete.
And one year I actually won a horse at a powwow.
So it's been a huge part of my life, and I think it's part of what gives me meaning.
It gives me connection to family and love.
Joseph's Mission.
What does it mean to be a powwow dancer?
Does that describe the dance or just where the dance is done?
So a powwow is a kind of pan-tribal cultural gathering and celebration.
There are different kinds of dance styles that happen at a powwow.
Each has their own sort of tribal origin and story associated with them.
Some of them, by the way, are quite modern, like they came out of the 1960s and sort of the feminist revolution era.
Um, and how that impacted some of our cultures and traditions.
Um, but they are.
They're really beautiful sort of summer.
Usually in the summer although not exclusively gatherings where people from all over Indian country come together and there's drum groups that you know go sit around a circle and they compete in singing contests.
Um, and then there's dancers and different age categories and dance style categories.
And so I was uh, what's called a men's Northern traditional dancer primarily, which is um Probably the oldest powwow dance style.
It's a dance derived from dances of the war and the hunt that were common among all sorts of different First Nations across this continent.
You also fast every year.
In your mind, what is that tradition about and what do you get out of it?
Well, while I was working on We Survived the Night and Sugarcane I was thinking very purposefully about what traditions I had a responsibility to try to reclaim and bring back in the wake of the cultural genocide that my people survived.
And, you know, the missions, St.
Joseph's was in part about a form of spiritual colonization, where in one way of life and way of belief was replaced with another.
And I was also.
I understood myself to be Telling some very painful stories, ones that could potentially hurt the people who I was telling them about, the people who I love, people like my father, people like my grandmother.
And so you know, I was made aware that in one of the neighboring communities to my own, a res called Esquette.
In our language it's called Alkali Lake Indian Reserve.
In English, they do an annual fast for four days and four nights, usually right around the summer solstice.
This is a really ancient ceremony that my people have participated in for a very long time, and it has come back in recent decades.
And I decided that if I was going to take on the responsibility of telling the story of what happened at the mission and the impacts of it on myself and my family and my people, if I was going to tell a hard story about our family, that I needed to pray and to make sure that the people who I cared about were taken care of and protected, not just in the way that I went about actually writing and telling those stories, but in a spiritual sense as well.
How long do you fast?
It's four days and four nights with no food and no water.
And the no water part is the really intense part because if you look it up, according to the Mayo Clinic, a human can really only go three to five days without any water.
I mean, by the end of it, your eyes are yellow and you have no spit in your mouth.
But at the same time as that, it does bring you into touch with the power of the life force that is coursing through all of us, which I think is a really beautiful thing to be in awareness of.
And also you come to understand why our people use this often as part of the puberty training for our young people.
If you can set your mind to the discipline of sitting in the same place for four days and four nights with no food and no water, then you can set your mind to anything.
So what's next for you?
Where do you go now that the documentary and the book are done, two overwhelming projects?
Well, you know firstly, I just have loved spending this amount of time working on a book and a documentary.
One really special thing to me about nonfiction is that it's in part about how you choose to live your life and observe life.
Which, if you take that logic to its conclusion, as a native person who's living in the wake of a cultural genocide that nearly wiped our way of life and telling stories, among other things, off the face of this earth, how you choose to live your life becomes a somewhat existential question.
To live a life in an indigenous way is a kind of profound thing, and it has been really beautiful to get to make that art and tell stories from that position.
Um, you know, i have my next sort of book proposal uh, in the hands of my editor, so i'm really excited to embark on that.
It's actually a novel, so that's going to be a nice change.
Um, and i also have uh, my next documentary, is is hopefully going to get its first little bit of funding.
So i'm just excited to keep telling stories because i feel that there are essential parts of the human experience that are part of the native story and um, i feel it's my life's work to help tell those.
Well, I thank you so much for talking with us.
It's really been a pleasure.
Cook's Jam, Terry, it's been a dream come true for me.
Julian Brave Noisecat's new book is called We Survived the Night.
After we take a short break, Maureen Corrigan will review a new collection of Daphne du Maurier short stories.
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In time for the season of ghosts and goblins, our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, has settled in with some stories by a writer who has bewitched generations.
Here's her review of After Midnight by Daphne du Maurier.
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
That's the immortal opening sentence of Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier's 1938 masterpiece.
How often have I been lured into both the novel and the 1940 Hitchcock film of Rebecca by that sentence.
Is it an incantation, a curse, a virus that infects the imagination?
Whatever mojo du Maurier conjured up in that sentence, its potency lingers.
Perhaps, just by hearing it, you too have become spellbound.
Rebecca dominates du Maurier's legacy, but she wrote plenty of other macabre novels and short stories in her over-40-year career.
A new collection called After Midnight gathers together 13 of her stories, appropriately introduced by long-reigning master of horror, Stephen King.
With so much to be nervous about in this world of ours, it may seem counterintuitive for me to recommend a collection that will only stir up more fear.
But think of these short stories as a kind of literary hair of the dog, a way to cope with existential dread by sampling it in small, potent sips.
Starting with the familiar may seem like a safer way to ease into the eerie world of du Maurier's short stories.
Not so.
You may think you're armored against the terror of the birds, and don't look now if you've seen the classic films they inspired.
But you'd be mistaken.
Sure, some of us readers already know what happens.
But it's the slow, sinister unwinding of the how that makes these stories freshly transfixing.
And the settings in these stories register even more vividly as malevolent characters than they do in the films.
In.
Don't Look.
Now all of Venice is a sinking slimy, watery maze entrapping our main character, a smug but disoriented vacationer who only stumbles deeper into his appointment with a death foretold.
The short story of The Birds is set not in Hitchcock's Bodega Bay but in Dumouriez's home turf of Cornwall.
Like the Bronte sisters, whose Gothic legacy she carried forward explicitly in Rebecca, du Maurier was a master of describing weather, imbuing clouds, wind, rain, Mother Nature herself with a sinister consciousness. the birds opens in autumn with a sudden drop in temperature two days later we're told that at barely three o'clock a kind of darkness had already come the sky sullen heavy colourless like salt the birds begin to amass growing more sentient by the hour here's the moment where our main character a farm hand named nat hoken realizes that he's not alone on the beach he looked out to sea and watched the crested breakers combing green they rose stiffly curled and broke again then he saw them the gulls out there riding the seas What he had thought at first to be the white caps of the waves were gulls, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands.
They rose and fell in the trough of the seas, heads to the winds, like a mighty fleet at anchor, waiting on the tide.
The haywire weather and the birds gives it a weird up-to-dateness.
The same can be said of another story here, a standout called The Breakthrough.
In that tale, our narrator, a young engineer named Stephen, is coerced into accepting a transfer to a top-secret barbed wire facility on the coast.
In a du Maurier tale, a change of locale is always bad news.
When Stephen arrives at the facility, he's initiated into the secrets of an AI-type machine called Karen 3 that's designed with a built-in storage unit to entrap the life force that leaves the body on the point of death.
As the head scientist, perhaps mad, explains to Stephen...
If we succeed, we shall have the answer at last to the intolerable futility of death.
The breakthrough turns out to be indelibly mournful, more than terrifying.
Taken together, the 13 tales in After Midnight offer every shade of eerie.
Du Maurier's best stories here also affirm that art remains one of the few reliable forms of immortality.
Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University.
She reviewed After Midnight, a collection of stories by Daphne du Maurier.
Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.
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Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberto Shorrock, Anne-Marie Boldenado, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Yakunde and Anna Bauman.
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