Forum from the Archives: Julian Brave NoiseCat Weaves Memoir with Indigenous Myth and History

KQED's Forum

KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 26 November 2025

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Julian Brave NoiseCat’s paternal family traces their origins to the Coyote, a trickster from native mythology who helped create the world. The story of Coyote weaves through NoiseCat’s memoir, “We Survived the Night,” which recounts his childhood in Oakland, growing up with a non-native mother and an absent Indian father who was born, and nearly killed, in an infamous Canadian reservation school. NoiseCat’s book weaves together the personal, historical and mythological stories that “were nearly tossed in the dustbin of history.” Guests: Julian Brave NoiseCat, author, "We Survived the Night" - NoiseCat is the co-director of the Oscar-nominated documentary "Sugarcane" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:50.9	From KQED.
1:03.8	Thank you. From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal with this special episode of Forum from the Archives.
1:09.9	We survived the night. The new book from
1:12.5	Julian Brave Nois Cat is fundamentally a family story. But how big is family? Family is his
1:18.6	powerful mom and wandering artist dad. Family is his cousins on the reservation in Canada. Family is
1:24.6	also the people of the fourth world whose stories of reclamation fill the book,
1:29.3	and family for Noise Cat extends back to Coyote, who he considers an ancestor in the tradition of
1:35.2	the Salish people. We'll listen back to my conversation with Nois Cat about this unusual book
1:39.4	in the 90s, Oakland of his youth. It's all coming up next right after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Because the Bay Area has produced so many
1:59.8	legendary figures during the ferment of the 1960s and 70s,
2:03.6	we often talk with an older generation of leaders in the broader multicultural landscape.
2:08.6	Julian Brave Noisket, though, is the next generation, a kid who grew up in the very institutions that the leaders of the 1970s built,
2:16.6	learning the traditions they carved and embodied
2:19.3	from the histories of their communities.
	...

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