You know Daphne du Maurier's 'Rebecca' — but she also wrote these terrifying tales

TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. 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 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 a hundred 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 6, 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 the 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 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 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.

JULIAN BRAVE NOISECAT: Thank you so much. It's an honor to be on FRESH AIR. This is honestly a dream come true for me, Terry.

GROSS: 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.

J NOISECAT: 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.

GROSS: And it was written down long before your father was born, so they didn't know his backstory.

J NOISECAT: 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 "Sugarcane." And so there is 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.

GROSS: So you're saying that you didn't know your father's origin story until you started doing the book and the documentary?

J NOISECAT: 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.

GROSS: And it's remarkable that he survived. So what did you learn about why it was his mother who actually put him there?

J NOISECAT: 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 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 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.

GROSS: Your grandmother tried to keep this a secret all her life.

J NOISECAT: Yeah, she - 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 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.

GROSS: Was she devastated when she found out that you knew and that he knew - your father knew?

J NOISECAT: Well, the curious thing about it is that it was kind of a 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 my kye7e, who is one of the last two remaining fluent speakers on the Canim Lake Indian Reserve. It's her and her sister.

GROSS: Kye7e means grandmother?

J NOISECAT: Kye7e 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.

GROSS: Did your father or did you try to talk to her about that?

J NOISECAT: Yeah, actually, the culminating scene in "Sugarcane" is a scene where me and my dad go visit my kye7e. 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.

GROSS: 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?

J NOISECAT: 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 kye7e, for example, still goes to church. I go to Christmas Mass with her. I could do the hymns in Secwepemctsin, our Indigenous language. One of them goes, (singing in Secwepemctsin). 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.

GROSS: What's an example of a custom that still remains, for instance, surrounding death?

J NOISECAT: 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 Secwepemc, 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, you know, 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 lahal 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.

GROSS: Why a gambling song as part of a death or a mourning ceremony?

J NOISECAT: 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 lahal games is that money 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, you know, 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 Canim Lake, you know, it is a real event. It's a real celebration. Hundreds of people show up.

GROSS: Can you sing the song that you just referred to, or would it be inappropriate to sing it now?

J NOISECAT: (Laughter) There's a lot of different versions of lahal song. So this is kind of a mix between a lahal song and a protest song, so it goes like this. (Vocalizing). (Singing) Canada is all Indian land, Canada is all Indian land, oh, Canada is all Indian land. (Vocalizing).

GROSS: I see what you mean by protest song.

(LAUGHTER)

J NOISECAT: Sometimes they do sing that for lahal, though, so that counts.

(LAUGHTER)

GROSS: OK. 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 Survived The Night." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF SOLANGE SONG, "WEARY")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Julian Brave NoiseCat. His new book is called "We Survived The Night."

Your father left the reservation when he was in his teens or 20s. How old was he?

J NOISECAT: He was in his 20s, early 20s.

GROSS: Why was he anxious to leave?

J NOISECAT: 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 Canim 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 onto 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.

GROSS: I should mention here that he has work in the Smithsonian.

J NOISECAT: He does, yes, in the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian.

GROSS: And he's also a wood sculptor.

J NOISECAT: He is, yeah. So he began his career as a fine art printmaker, but he could never really suffer a boss (laughter). 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 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 Beau Dick and Bill Reid, 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.

GROSS: 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 6, 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 "Sugarcane" documentary in which you're talking to your father, and you're basically confronting him about this.

(SOUNDBITE OF DOCUMENTARY, "SUGARCANE")

J NOISECAT: 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.

ED ARCHIE NOISECAT: You're looking for some kind of acknowledgment from me?

J NOISECAT: No, I just feel like - actually, yeah.

E NOISECAT: 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.

J NOISECAT: Yeah, you did.

E NOISECAT: What was I supposed to do? And I was lost and a [expletive] 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 [expletive] eyes out every day and I don't know why (crying). That's what I said to her.

GROSS: 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?

J NOISECAT: (Laughter).

GROSS: Your father in tears, and he wasn't the kind of guy who cried a whole lot.

J NOISECAT: Sometimes I can't believe I did it, yeah.

GROSS: And you're doing it, like, in public. Yeah.

J NOISECAT: Yeah.

GROSS: Do you have any regrets about it?

J NOISECAT: 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 6 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 "Sugarcane." 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.

GROSS: Well, let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is Julian Brave NoiseCat. And his new book is called "We Survived The Night." We'll be back after a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF THE HALLUCI NATION SONG, "ELECTRIC POW WOW DRUM")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. If you're just joining us, my guest is Julian Brave NoiseCat. His new book is called "We Survived The Night." It's part memoir, part Indigenous history and part Coyote stories. Coyote is the trickster who is believed by many Native tribes to be the ancestor sent by the creator to finish creating the Indigenous world. Julian's father is Indigenous and grew up on a reservation in British Columbia, Canada. When he was a young man, he left for the U.S., where he met his first wife, who is white. Julian is their child.

Julian co-directed a documentary called "Sugarcane" about child abuse and infanticide at the Catholic missionary school for Indigenous children in Canada. All Native children were required to leave their families and go to missionary boarding schools as mandated by an 1894 law. The U.S. also had a long history of missionary boarding schools designed to separate children from their families and assimilate them to help solve the, quote, "Indian problem." The last such school closed in 1997.

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 her 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.

J NOISECAT: 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, you know, 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?

You know, so it was - 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 Canim Lake, British Columbia. She'd take me down to the Intertribal 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, 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.

GROSS: Were you both initially accepted as family on the reservation?

J NOISECAT: 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 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, you know, were struggling, had them over for a big feast. What a nice thing to do.

GROSS: What is the English way of saying your father's reservation?

J NOISECAT: We call it Canim Lake, which is interesting. It's actually - Canim is not an English word. Canim 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 Tsq'secen, 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.

GROSS: I think it's interesting that your father left his family and the reservation. And your mother left her family, too, and, you know, 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've become so connected to them and to the reservation. And it seems like a bit of a pendulum swing.

J NOISECAT: 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, 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.

GROSS: You've learned to speak your father's reservation's native language, even though, like, your grandmother is 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, you know, the languages we're most used to. It doesn't sound like the Arabic languages, either.

J NOISECAT: (Speaking Shuswap). Yeah, this is my Shuswap language. We call it Secwepemctsin, the language of the Secwepemc people, the spread-out people is what our ethnonym technically means. It is very different phonologically (laughter) 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.

GROSS: Though, I will say, the ka, you hear a lot of that in Hebrew and Yiddish.

J NOISECAT: Yiddish, yeah.

GROSS: And also, I think, in some Middle Eastern languages.

J NOISECAT: Yeah, yeah, there's definitely - I mean, it's not completely...

GROSS: Did you have to learn how to say the ka?

J NOISECAT: Well, so in the first month, I was learning the language. So when I was in college, I spent the summers on the Canim Lake res. And in the evenings, I'd go sit at my kye7e's kitchen room table, and she'd teach me Secwepemctsin. 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.

GROSS: I also want you to explain the title of your book, "We Survived The Night."

J NOISECAT: So the way to give the traditional morning greeting in Secwepemctsin is tsecwincuw-k, 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 kye7e, from my grandmother, she would go to the cupboard and pull out a coffee mug that had tsecwincuw-k written across it. And eventually, I learned that tsecwincuw-k 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 kye7e uses sort of responses to that word or that word in kind of a tongue-in-cheek, dark humor - right? - kind of way. You know, like, I'll come into her house, and it might be the morning. I'll say, tsecwincuw-k, kye7e. And she'll say, oh, don't remind me, because, you know, she's getting on the 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.

GROSS: 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 Survived The Night." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF BRITTANY HOWARD SONG, "POWER TO UNDO")

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Julian Brave NoiseCat. His new book is called "We Survived The Night."

So you have become very steeped in Native history, tradition and in your own family's, on your father's side, reservation. 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?

J NOISECAT: 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 him. People used to call me a mini Ed when I was a kid.

GROSS: That's your father's name.

J NOISECAT: Yeah, that's my dad's name.

GROSS: I mean, mini Ed isn't your father's name, but Ed is.

J NOISECAT: 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 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 Costner, which I think is a kind of funny historical note because he was, at that point in time, the Kevin Costner of "Dances With Wolves" fame rather than the "Yellowstone" Kevin Costner. So he was kind of like, I don't know, a woke cowboy or something like that.

And, you know, I just think it was something that I felt so 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, 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 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. 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.

GROSS: What does it mean to be a powwow dancer? Does that describe the dance or just where the dance is done?

J NOISECAT: 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 cultures and traditions.

But 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. 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.

GROSS: You also fast every year. In your mind, what is that tradition about? And what do you get out of it?

J NOISECAT: 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 wherein 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 grandmother. And so, you know, I was made aware that in one of the neighboring communities to my own, a rez called Esk'etemc 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, 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, you know, 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.

GROSS: How long do you fast?

J NOISECAT: 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 - I mean, like, 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, you know, puberty training for our young people. Because 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.

GROSS: So what's next for you? Where do you go now, now that the documentary and the book are done - two overwhelming projects?

J NOISECAT: 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.

GROSS: Well, I thank you so much for talking with us. It's really been a pleasure.

J NOISECAT: Kukstsemc, Terry. It's been a dream come true for me.

GROSS: 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. This is FRESH AIR.

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TERRY GROSS, HOST:

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 her review of "After Midnight" by Daphne du Maurier.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN: 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 du Maurier'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 3 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 farm hand named Nat Hocken, realizes that he's not alone on the beach.

(Reading) 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 in "The Birds" gives it a weird, up-to-date-ness. 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 Charon Three 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.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "After Midnight," a collection of stories by Daphne du Maurier.

If you'd like to catch up on FRESH AIR interviews you missed, like this week's interviews with writer Mitch Albom, veteran Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller or our rebroadcast of my interview with Diane Keaton, check out our podcast. You'll find lots of FRESH AIR interviews.

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GROSS: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Briger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Thea Chaloner directed today's show. Our cohost is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.

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