Fresh Air - A Story Of Indigenous Survival & Resurgence

Episode Date: October 16, 2025

Filmmaker and writer Julian Brave NoiseCat is the son of an Indigenous Canadian father and white mother. After a cultural genocide, he says, living your life becomes an 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 art and tell stories from that position." NoiseCat spoke with Terry Gross about his father's origin story, dancing at powwows, and the bonds of kinship. His new memoir, We Survived the Night, takes its name from a translation of the Secwépemc morning greeting. His Oscar-nominated documentary Sugarcane is on Hulu/Disney+.Also, Maureen Corrigan reviews Daphne Du Maurier's collection of short stories, After Midnight. Follow Fresh Air on instagram @nprfreshair, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter for gems from the Fresh Air archive, staff recommendations, and a peek behind the scenes. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life. Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, Sources and Methods. NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people, helping you understand why distant events matter here at home. Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. Minutes after being born, Ed Archie Noiscat 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 Knight Watchmen.

St. Joseph 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 Noissecat's son, Julian Brave Nois Cat. 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.

They're 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 at Sundance Film Festival, won best documentary from the National Board of Review, and was nominated for a Peabody and an Oscar. Now Julian Brave Nois Cat 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 Noise Cat, 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 noise cat which is kind of unbelievable to me because it only became noise cat 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. hour 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. And so 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 in 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, Franz 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, you know, my grandmother at the time was a very young, unwed mother. My grandfather was a bit of a womanizer, as I write in a 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, we're supposed to die. Your grandmother tried to keep this a secret all her life. Yeah, we actually learned through the research and 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 mother at the time. 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, that pattern also raises questions about in the words of the paper back then, quote unquote, routine procedure at St. 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,

families, I did not believe those stories when I heard them back then. You know, when I went to learn language from my Kea, who was one of the last two remaining fluent speakers on the Canom Lake Indian Reserve, it's her and her sister. Kea means grandmother? Kea means grandmother, yes. 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, you know, to this day. 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. You know, our way of life really did nearly die out until recent decades. It started to finally come back. But, you know, my Kea, for example, still goes to church. I go to Christmas Mass with her. I could do the hymns in Sequat Machin, our indigenous language.

One of them goes, Ot Kael, Tatmich. 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. 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? 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 sequetmach, what it is to be a Shushua 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, you know, there are some mixtures in of Catholic rights and things like that, but ultimately the way that we do it, which includes playing the gambling game LaHalle late at night, singing a crossover song for the person as they, you know, go to the other side, giving away 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 like sort of reawakening your spirit and acknowledging the greater than human power that we all sort of carry in our soul in that. I would also say that it's a way to sort of redistribute goods and wealth and these sorts of things. Part of what happens at the La Hale 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 given away. And that's to, you know, redistribute what belonged to the family of the deceased, to honor that person, and also to get people to come to these, you know, these funerals. It's really important for us that our whole community comes together to honor the debt. And when you go to a funeral in Cannon Lake, you know, it is a real event. It's a real celebration, hundreds of people show up. Can you sing the song that you just refer to, or would it be inappropriate to sing it now? There's a lot of different versions of La Hale song. So this is kind of a mix between a La Hale song and a protest song.

So it goes like this. Hey, ah, ho. Hey, ah, hey, oh. Hey, ah, hey, oh. Hey, ah, hey, oh, yeah, hey, ha. Yeah, heyah, heyah-ho, yeah, hey-ah-ho, hey-ah-ho, hey-ah-ho. Canada is all-Indian land. Canada is all Indian land.

Oh, Canada is all Indian land. Yeah, hey-ah-ho, hey-ah-ho. I see what you mean by protest song. Sometimes they do sing that for La Hale, though, 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, was a really interesting place to be for Native art. There was kind of a renaissance happening in the art of the Northwest Coastal Native peoples. Your listeners might be familiar with 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, like, 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 sugar cane 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 in a 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 up every day. 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. And you're doing it like in public. Yeah. Do you have any regrets about it? No, 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. And years while we worked on sugar cane 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 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 um relationship that was really rebuilt because we we i did make the choice to move back in with him to to 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 nois cat and his new book is called we survive the night we'll be back short break. I'm Terry Gross and this is fresh air. Latin music has

never been bigger, but it's always been big on Alt Latino. 15 years in, we continue celebrating Latinidad through a music lens, transcending borders through Ritmo. Get to know artists from La Cultura on a deeper level and throw some new Latin music wrecks

into your rotation. Listen to Alt Latino in NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. So you have 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. We were a father's side of the family still lived. She found a group in Oakland where you grew up. That was a native group and 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 jeans really kicked mom's jeans, but, you know, and I have a, about as Indian a name as you can imagine Julian Brave Noise Cat and my dad on top of that was a noted

native artist and if you said Noise Cat 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 you know so it was a 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 Oakland, California.

And she also learned how to bead so that I could dance powwow and have my own regalia. She did so much. She also remains my first reader and editor of my writing, so it only felt appropriate to dedicate We Survive 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 Siquotmach 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 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. Canam 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 Tsikaschen, which means broken rock, essentially, because if you look up in the hill behind the res, 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. But 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 become so connected to them and to the reservation. And it seems like a bit of a pendulum swing. 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 the one's cousin to be, you know, part of someone's extended family doesn't necessarily really mean anything in at least, you know, dominant society, at least my mom's side of the family. And, you know, 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 like 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 um english or french or Spanish, you know, 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 Sequat Makh-Chin, the language of the Sequat-Moch 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 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 in the first month I was learning the language.

So when I was in college, I spent the summers on the Canem Lake Rez, and in the evenings, I'd go sit at my kitchen room table, and she'd teach me Sikwap Makhine. And the first thing we did for the first entire month was the alphabet. She basically had to teach me how to wrap my anglophone-wired mouth around all of those different sounds. 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 Sequat Machin is Chukh, 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 kia'a, from my grandmother, she would go to the cupboard and pull out a coffee mug that had Chukhinach written across it. And eventually I learned that Chukh was the way

that we gave 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, what did it mean in the days after the children were all taken away in cattle trucks to Indian residential schools like St. Joseph's mission? And then I also think about the way that my ke-a 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, Chukwina'a, 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 Noiscat, and his new book is called We Survive the Night. We'll be right back. This is fresh air. So you have become very steeped in native history, tradition, and in your own families on your father's side reservation. You're a champion powwow dancer. You go to powwow every year, I think, and do a fest 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. You know, I had his last name. I looked a lot like, and 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, Minnie Ed isn't, Minnie Ed isn't your father's name, but Ed is. Ed is my dad's name, yeah. And so, you know, it was always something that I was trying to understand and reclaim, you know, reading and writing were part of how I did that. I did that.

devoured Sherman Alexey 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 Kozner, which I think is a kind of funny historical note because he was at that point in time the Kevin Kozner of dances with Wolves fame rather than the Yellowstone Kevin Kozner. 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, you know, probably the biggest part of that. Before I started doing journalism or documentary, long before I picked up a, you know, 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, you know, annual powwow is 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. And also, you know, I think that all Native people probably feel this in some sense.

But we have a responsibility to bring back the cultures and traditions and languages. And in my case, the stories that were nearly wiped off the face of the earth by colonization and by schools like St. 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 like the 1960s and sort of the feminist revolution and how that impacted some of our culture cultures and traditions. But they are 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, sit around a circle and they compete in singing contests. And then there's dancers in different age categories and dance style categories. And so I was what's called a men's northern traditional dancer primarily, which is 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 josephs 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 loved people like my father people like

my cat 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 Alkalai 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, you know, 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 and so four days and nights without any food and water is right up against what you can survive which is a very um i mean like by the end of it your eyes are yellow and you have no spit in your mouth um but at the same time as that it 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 to be in awareness of and also you you come to understand why our people use this often as part of the, you know, puberty training for our young people, because if you can set your mind to the discipline of sitting in a 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 in the book are done to 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 are you know 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 you know to live a life in an indigenous way is a kind of profound thing and it has been really beautiful to get to make art

and tell stories from that position. You know, I have my next sort of book proposal 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. And I also have, my next documentary 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 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 Noissecats' new book is called We Survive the Night. After we take a short break, Marine Carragan will review a new collection of Daphne Demoree's short stories. This is fresh air. 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 a review of After Midnight by Daphne DeMorriere. Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderly again. That's the immortal opening sentence of Rebecca,

Daphne Demorese'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 Demoree conjured up in that sentence, its potency lingers. Perhaps, just by hearing it, you too have become spellbound. Rebecca dominates Demorese'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 D'Morrier'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 Dumorrier's home turf of Cornwall. Like the Bronte's sisters, whose gothic legacy. she carried forward explicitly in Rebecca. Dumorriere was a master of describing weather,

imbueing 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, colorless like salt. The birds begin to amass, growing more sentient by the hour. Here's the moment where our main character, a farmhand named Nat Hoken, realizes that he's not alone on the beach. He looked out to see 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 Dumorier 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 and after midnight offer every shade of eerie. DeMorrier's best stories here also affirm that art remains one of the few reliable forms of immortality.

Marie Karegan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed After Midnight, a collection of stories by Daphne Demoree. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberto Chorock, Anne-Marie Boltonado, Lauren Crenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Yucundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nestor.

Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Thea Chaloner directed today's show. our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.