Tricksters and the Spirit World

Julian Brave NoiseCat discusses ‘We Survived the Night,’ his genre-bending revival of the ‘Coyote epic,’ with Leila Nadir.

By Leila NadirJanuary 24, 2026

• Cultural Studies

• Environment

JULIAN BRAVE NOISECAT’S debut memoir, We Survived the Night, published in October, begins with an act of literary resistance in the face of colonial erasure. NoiseCat’s father was born and then abandoned as an infant at St. Joseph’s Mission, an Indian boarding school in Canada now known to be the site of generations of systemic state violence against Indigenous children and their families. Through investigation, research, interviews, and time spent at St. Joseph’s and in the surrounding community while making the 2024 documentary Sugarcane, NoiseCat recreates the moment when his infant father was discovered and excavates the collaboration between church and state that created institutions like St. Joseph’s to break Indigenous languages, cultures, and traditions.

When stories and memories have been stolen by genocides and ongoing colonialisms—archives denied or destroyed, intergenerational memories displaced—rendering deep research into story, such as NoiseCat engages in here, is resistance, a form of “critical fabulation,” to use Saidiya Hartman’s term. After this initial scene in We Survived the Night, NoiseCat immerses the reader in tales of the trickster Coyote, a legendary figure in Indigenous storytelling, who has nearly been forgotten across centuries of colonialism. But NoiseCat does not just research and resuscitate Coyote in archival form. In true oral storytelling fashion, he also carries stories into the present with his own voice and style, paying homage to a long lineage of storytellers while remaining true to a tradition that was always transforming to respond to the present—the trickster was a shape-shifter, after all.

Traversing histories, centuries, ecologies, and literary genres, We Survived the Night performs an archaeology of the reverberations of colonialism in NoiseCat’s family and across the North American continent, especially the Pacific Northwest. NoiseCat, an enrolled member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq̓éscen̓ of the Secwepemc, excavates cultural memory and oral history, contends with family violence, revives legends that were nearly lost, investigates contemporary Indigenous struggles, and, along the way, heals his estrangement from his father, the artist Ed Archie NoiseCat. Halfway through We Survived the Night, though, NoiseCat pauses his stories of his family, his people, and Coyote to encourage another form of memory: “In parsing these identity issues, it’s easy to lose sight of what the colonization of North America was always about: land.” NoiseCat writes against the genocidal logics of colonialism, resuscitating, reinventing, adapting, and celebrating identity and culture yet never loses sight of the underlying ecological theft.

Last October, NoiseCat and I sat down together at SPACE Gallery, in Portland, Maine, for one of the stops on his book tour. We Survived the Night had been released two days earlier. This is an edited and condensed version of our conversation.

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LEILA NADIR: Your memoir opens with your father’s birth at St. Joseph’s Mission, an Indian residential boarding school in Canada. What was the process of bringing together all these sources—newspapers, photographs, archives, legislation—in order to write into colonial erasure?

JULIAN BRAVE NOISECAT: The reason I even know that story is that, at 28, I made a probably unusual decision for a bachelor who was about to embark on writing their first memoir and who had, at the time, lived on the East Coast for a decade. And that was to move across the country to a little Navy town in Washington state called Bremerton to live with my dad, a man who left my mother when I was six years old, a man who still owes me the money I loaned him to come to my high school graduation—just to give you a sense for our tragicomic history.

It felt really important to me that if I was going to tell a story about our relationship and what it means to be Indigenous, about the legacy of colonization and Indian residential schools like St. Joseph’s Mission, where my father was born, I needed to go all the way there with that story. I was choosing to live my life literally with my subjects and my people. That was what made it possible to write a scene like that.

At the same time, I was directing a documentary with Emily Kassie called Sugarcane, which follows an investigation into abuse and missing children at St Joseph’s Mission, the Indian residential school that my family was sent to. And it was through that investigation, actually, that we were made aware of the article that became the source material for that scene.

The reason I decided to write it in what we’d call “in medias res,” in writers’ speak, was that I wanted the reader to see and feel that scene the way I do in my own mind. Because it haunts me. This was not a story that I knew. It was not a story that my father knew. It was not a story that my own family told. The church and the government obviously had strong reasons not to talk about this history. But the other side that I see within my own family and community is that we don’t talk about this history either. What happened at these schools was so awful, so painful, that often the way we survived was by joining in on that colonial silence and erasure.

And so, it felt really important to me to try to understand what it was for my father to be found in the trash incinerator. To imagine and put on the page what it was for my father to enter the world on the precipice of his near biological death and on the precipice of our people’s near collective cultural death.

Your book articulates how being mixed-race can place us in positions that are precarious to our identities. You write, “[A]s a half-breed, I’m always at risk of losing my Indianness,” and in your memoir, this vulnerability is amplified by family estrangement and violence: “[T]his guy who taught me to dance and who calls me son held a knife to my mom’s throat. My irreconcilable worlds in his hands.” Do you feel you’ve built your own connections to your history and identity so that you didn’t have to rely on these familial connections?

I’m a child of two worlds. My dad is a Secwepemc and St’at’imc man. He’s FBI—full-blooded Indian, as they say, although there was a German who we assimilated way back during the Gold Rush. My mom is an Irish, Jewish New Yorker. And if you heard her talk, you would know it.

My father was this famous artist pictured on the cover of Native Peoples magazine in a backward Kangol hat and purple rock-star shades, and his last name was “NoiseCat.” If you looked at a picture of me, my mom, and my dad, it would look like my dad’s genes kicked my mom’s genes’ ass. On top of that, they gave me a really Indian name: Julian Brave NoiseCat? Nobody reads that and is like, “What’s your ethnic background?” It might as well have been like John Redcorn or something.

So my formative childhood experience was losing that Epic Mythic Father Figure who connected me to my reservation, my family, my culture, my identity. Firstly, it was really painful. But it also created this sense of loss and absence that I was always trying to understand. Who was this man? And what was this identity? This culture he connected me to?

But I would say that that’s not a unique experience, necessarily, just to people who are “half-breeds” like me. There is something inherent to being Native that carries a sense of loss. Even the identification of a people as “Native” supposes that there was a colonizing system that made us into the “Natives,” that made us into “Indians,” and that took away life, land, and culture.

Your memoir braids stories of the legendary trickster Coyote into your personal story. I was raised Muslim, immersed in a religion that taught me there was an all-knowing, omnipotent God in the sky—definitely not on land—and so I found Coyote unsettling at first. He seemed to bumble through life with dubious intentions. But my feelings changed as I continued reading because Coyote was also an ecological and creative force responsible for the abundance of salmon in the Pacific Southwest. What was it like for you to revive Coyote’s stories?

I actually had only heard a member of my family tell a Coyote story once in my entire life. This tradition is nearly dead among my people. I was making Sugarcane at the same time as I was writing We Survived the Night. Sugarcane is about the system that nearly killed off my people’s way of life and culture, and if you’re making a movie about that, you end up thinking about what pieces of your way of life and culture you, as a storyteller, have a responsibility to bring back to life on the page. That question is going to be a formative question for all of my life—not just my art—moving forward.

When I moved in with my dad, he’d be off in the garage, which was his carving studio, working on his art. He’d be grooving to Led Zeppelin, smoking weed. It was a scene. I, on the other hand, was hunched over my laptop working on my book and documentary, and I had this idea that I would look up my people’s mythology as a way to add a nice flourish here or there.

As I was reading these Coyote stories in these hundred-year-old ethnographies—because that truly is the state of this incredible body of oral literature, that is the only place they really exist anymore for my people—I started realizing that the trickster, this incredible creator, destroyer, survivor, deadbeat dad, looked a lot like my own dad, this incredible creator, destroyer, survivor, deadbeat.

Probably the most significant quality of the Coyote is that he dies and resurrects so many times that our people didn’t even bother to keep count—not that it’s a competition with Jesus or anything, but Jesus only did it once.

While reading We Survived the Night, I was editing LARB’s interview with Maria Pinto, who describes mushrooms as “wily tricksters who will not fall in line with endlessly extractive visions for the future,” and I thought, that sounds a lot like Coyote! It began to feel revolutionary to have such a wily coyote central to a culture’s self-understanding and storytelling, and I felt the loss, within North American settler-colonial cultures, when you wrote that the white world is missing out on a lot of stories and wisdom. Might there be something like a “trickster ecology” that Americans and Canadians can learn from?

My people considered the Coyote stories to be nonfiction. These were our accounts of major moments in our environmental and cultural history, and they’re not bullshit either. For example, in the story of Coyote leading the salmon up the river, he breaks this fish trap that is being operated by these two witches. In the Secwepemc version of that story—my people’s version—we situate that fish trap in the same place that experts would tell you there was, in fact, 11,000 years ago, an ice dam holding up a series of glacial lakes across what is now the interior of British Columbia. And 11,000 years ago, that ice dam broke, forming the present course of what is now the Fraser River, which was populated by salmon.

Today there are two distinct lineages of coho salmon in the Fraser River—one below the Fraser Canyon and one above it, further proof of Coyote’s dam-breaking mischief. So, within this body of oral literature, there are human memories of events that stretch back thousands and thousands of years before the Bible, before the pyramids. I was really grabbed by the idea that this part of my people’s contribution to the humanities, which has been overlooked and nearly wiped out by colonization, needed to live again and that it needed to be taken seriously as nonfiction. And so, I wondered: Would it be possible for me to write this entire book in the style, tradition, and structure of a Coyote story?

And to do that, I had to think a bit about another one of my people’s most sacred cultural forms: weaving, a feminine craft regarded as the highest art form by my people and many other Salish peoples. When I wrote We Survived the Night, I imagined myself as a weaver of narrative honoring my great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother, who were the last weavers in our line.

You mention “colonial amnesia”—not only that there is a lack of historical memory in North American settler cultures about the violence through which their nations were created but also that American and Canadian citizens don’t listen to the ecological knowledge that was born out of this land. Your investigative chapters show the deep awareness Indigenous people have of flora, fauna, weather, and water, making it possible to notice slight shifts in, say, migrational and reproductive behaviors of salmon and herring, and the messages these changes send about disrupted ecologies and changing climates. What do North American settler nations stand to learn if they undo their colonial amnesia?

I spent years learning Secwepemctsín, my people’s language, with my kyé7e (grandmother). One of the most interesting things about our language and all Salish languages is that the root morpheme—the most basic unit of linguistic meaning—for “land” and “person” is one and the same. Which means that our understanding of humanity is inextricably tied to land and place. To be human was to be a person from a particular place on the land.

Part of what made Coyote supernatural—and devilish—wasn’t just that he had shape-shifting powers. It was also that he was wandering. Nobody knew where the heck he was from. Interestingly, the first “explorer” to come down our roaring salmon river, this guy named Simon Fraser, was identified as Coyote in some of our oral histories.

There are many things that can be learned from Indigenous relationships to the land, water, and environment. One of them is right there in that Coyote story about the fish trap across the river. In the story, these two witches are operating that fish trap, catching and keeping all the fish for themselves, which was obviously bad for everyone else. (In my version, they’re also two lesbians in the middle of a fight about their open relationship, which I think is fair game because the oral sources differ about the witches’ identities and these traditions deserve to live again, which means they need to remain relevant to the times, as they always were before.)

So one of the messages in that story is “Don’t catch all the fish!” Which is something that modern industrial fisheries have gotten wrong over and over again. It’s worth pointing out that in a river fishery, a single person or village could ruin the fishery for everyone else by doing exactly that. For thousands and thousands of years, our people cooperated, maintaining fish populations that were many times bigger than in the present day. In the span of a little over 100 years, commercial fisheries have nearly annihilated runs that were once so big, our people describe walking bank-to-bank on the backs of fish. Even the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada says a big run of sockeye used to number 100 million, more than five times the modern recorded record. And that’s just one of five Pacific salmon species native to North America and our river.

Salmon are really incredible. They migrate all the way from the Gulf of Alaska up the Fraser River. In that same section of the book, “Coyote Steals the Salmon,” I write about some of the fish our salmon eat—herring—when they travel up to Alaska. And I write about the ingenious way the Tlingit, an Indigenous nation from what is now Southeast Alaska, harvest herring: they create an organic but artificial herring-spawning habitat by submerging young hemlock trees in the shallows where herring spawn. Their regenerative herring fishery is, right now, in conflict with a wasteful commercial herring sac roe fishery that slaughters both male and female herring just to get the female’s eggs.

We Survived the Night contains memoir, investigative reporting, speculative nonfiction or critical fabulation, and Indigenous nonfiction. There are also poetic moments that open each of the four sections of the book, titled “The First Day,” “The Second Day,” and so on. You write about a ritual you undertook of fasting for four days with no food or water, for four years. These poetic moments feel spiritually sacred, but they also contain profanity, cursing, and frustration. What does this book structure mean to you in relation to your four years of four days of fasting?

Every year for the last four years, I sat out in the woods near a Secwepemc community called Esk’et for four days and four nights during the summer solstice, going without food and water. If you google it right now, online health sources will tell you that a human body can only go three days without water—yet another example of Indigenous peoples knowing better than Western science! But in all seriousness, four days without water is a long time. By the end, your eyes are yellowing, and there’s no spit in your mouth.

The reason I committed to it was that I knew the story I was telling was really heavy and intense. That required every ounce of my heart and craft. And where intention and intellect fell short, I figured prayer couldn’t hurt. So while I was out there, starving and dehydrated, I was praying that these stories I was called to tell would be easy with my loved ones.

From a storytelling perspective, you know our people have always left space for the presence of spirits and the spirit world in the human story. I don’t think that we’re unique in that. Lots of different people have acknowledged that truth throughout human history. Spiritual life is part of human life. For whatever reason, that idea has been sort of shunned by the Western liberal world and the practitioners of this art form. In this work, I acknowledge that there are parts of our existence that are spiritual. When we’re out there fasting, we understand ourselves to be in the spirit world. So, in a sense, the book is a nonfiction book that includes journeys to the spirit world, which is an old form of Salish oral history.

It was also a bit tongue in cheek to call those sections “The First Day,” “The Second Day,” and so on, because the Christian creation story—Genesis—is structured around the seven days of Creation. I was in conversation with—and messing with—that. Reclaiming Creation on behalf of my people who were colonized by Christians and Christianity, while pushing the boundaries of this art form by suggesting you might read the text as a nonfiction creation story, or a nonfiction account of the spirit world. A sort of mythic realism wherein thunder responds to your prayers, wherein you might find yourself sitting there staring at the food offering in your altar thinking about how effing hungry you are.

Lastly, I want to ask about the writing process. Writing a memoir can be such a journey of self-discovery. You’ve previously worked in so many forms as a director, dancer, film director. What surprised you in the memoir-writing process? What did you discover in this form that you hadn’t discovered in other art forms?

I find writing to be a constant act of discovery and learning. There’s this old adage: “Write what you know!” To me, that seems exactly wrong. I think that you should write what you don’t know. By which I mean you should write what you’re learning and figuring out. I think that’s way more interesting.

Everything from my personal life to my family history to the stories that I chose to report across Indian country—those were stories I didn’t know. Things about myself and my people that I was rediscovering and reclaiming by turning them into words and narratives. Stories that stretch across Canada and the United States, intentionally decentering the nation-state in a narrative that puts Indigenous peoples at the center of the action on our land, where we belong.

For me, the essential ingredient in these stories is love. I can’t write about people and things I don’t love on some level. Every time I’ve seen people sit around and tell stories about others—often at funerals—I’ve seen the act of telling a story as an act of love. Even and especially when it’s a hard and complicated story about that person. Because those are exactly the kind of stories that say, “I know this person so well that only I can tell this story about them.”

I know my dad so well, for example, that I once bailed him and his long-haired chihuahua out of jail after he got pulled over with a pound of weed in the trunk of his car speeding through Goldfield, Nevada. At the same time, that story says certain things, maybe about my father? The fact that we share that story and that I can tell that story is itself an act of love because it says, “I know my dad so well; this is the life that we shared together, in the fullest sense of life and what it means to share it with other people”—a complicated thing, no doubt! That is the storytelling tradition I come from, and it is a beautiful one.

One thing that has always bothered me about the erasure and the invisibility of Native people is that we have some damn good stories. We deal with a lot of loss and death in our communities. Maybe that’s why we’ve gotten so good at telling stories, because we have to remember our loved ones? Otherwise, who else will? Clearly not this colonial society.

If you show up in any rez living room across this continent, I guarantee you will hear some of the most incredible, badass, intense stories you’ve ever heard. From a pure entertainment value perspective—setting aside all that political, cultural, intellectual stuff—broader society is missing out on some of the most incredible narrative traditions known to mankind by not paying attention to us.

And, like—I don’t know—we’re in a bit of a cultural recession right now. So maybe it’s finally time to listen to the first peoples of this land?

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Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer and filmmaker. His first documentary, Sugarcane (2024), directed alongside Emily Kassie, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Directing Award in the U.S. Documentary Competition. The film was recognized with dozens of awards, including Best Documentary from the National Board of Review, and was nominated for an Academy Award. A member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq̓éscen̓, NoiseCat published his first book, We Survived the Night (2025), a national bestseller, with Alfred A. Knopf, Penguin Random House Canada, and Profile Books. It has been long-listed for the PEN America/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.