Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio.

For almost my entire life, I did not know the story of my father's birth.

I did not know that those whispers I heard about the incinerator at the mission weren't just res legends.

I did not know that for Dad, me, my sister, and all the Noisecats who will come after us, this is our origin story.

In fact, I didn't even know there was much to know about my father's birth until I was well into my twenties.

All I knew was that attended Saint Joseph's, that she finished high school and studied nursing at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, one hundred and fifty miles south of Williams Lake, and that she rarely said a word about any of it.

That's Julian Brave, Noisecat writer, oscar nominated filmmaker, champion pow Wow dancer, and student of Salish art and history.

His first book, We Survived the Night, has just been published.

Julian's is a story of legacy, the power of the unspoken, the complexity of identity, the weight of history, and the myths that are passed down from generation to generation that can help us if we let them make sense of our lives and the people we love.

I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.

My parents came from two completely different worlds.

My dad was born at Saint Joseph's Mission, which is an Indian residential school in the interior of British Columbia, Canada, and he was actually found just minutes after his birth in the trash incinerator by the night watchman at the school.

From there, he was raised by first his grandparents on the Cannon Lake Indian Reserve.

Alice Nuiskit, whose last.

Name I actually carry bastardized and became noise Cat over time, and then he bounced around.

From house to house.

You know, this was a period of time when Native people had been denied the right to raise our own children, and so there was a lot of dysfunction in Cannon Lake and on many other Indian reserves at the time.

So he moved from his his grandmother and grandfather's place to aunties and uncles, to white families in the neighboring town of Forest Grove and on and on, sometimes with his mom and dad too, and eventually, you know, when it was time for him to grow up, he got out.

You know, Candon Lake didn't feel like a safe place for him.

He was teased the time that he was a small child and called the garbage can kid, and so he essentially tried to get as far away from Cannon Lake as he possibly could, which eventually led him to New York, which is where my mom is from.

My mom is a is an Irish Jewish New Yorker, so's I would say, she's very New York.

Her father was a writer.

Actually, my mom was a really spunky kid.

She was whip smart, but she.

Was also a little bit of a little bit of a rebel.

From the age of about eleven, she started smoking pot.

She would hitchhike here, there and everywhere back when I guess that was something that people let girls do.

And she, you know, always felt a little bit like an outcast.

In her own family.

You know, they were because of my grandfather and his writing career.

They were kind of in the New York intellectual scene.

You know.

My grandfather, for example, once wrote a profile of his friend Glenn for the New Yorker, like you know, this was a heady kind of crowd, and my mom always, you know, despite being a smart woman, didn't really feel like that was who she wanted to be around.

So she never dated a white guy, despite being white.

And when my dad, this this native guy with long head of hair, you know, walked into the Shadow Brook where she was working as a as a bartender while also having a job, and I believe CBS in the city, you know, he immediately caught her eye and she poured him drinks all night, and at the end of the night, he thought she was I believe the words he used was cute as expletive, and he thought, you know, what can I do here?

So he he had a golden feast ladle ear ring in his left lobe, and so he took it out of his ear and he gave it to her.

And that's how I came to be.

I guess I was created from a golden feast ladle earing my father gifted my Irish Jewish mother.

It's quite a meet cute story with a lot of history behind it.

When your father came to New York, it's because he was an artist, Is that right?

Yeah?

My dad became an artist by accident.

So he grew up in Cannon Lake and after finishing high school, he was doing construction on the reds for like five bucks an hour, and he was always good with his hands.

My grandfather worked in the woods.

He knew how to do every single part of the forestry, you know, lumber process back when it was not mechanized as well, so there was a lot of work involved with turning trees into boards.

And my dad soon realized after you know, a couple of years into building homes on the Cannon Lake Indian Reserve, he actually built the gymnasium that is now the sea of our little reservation government in Candam Lake.

They gave him the kind of the dangerous jobs, you know, maybe because he was the garbage can kid and they wanted to pick on him, I guess, But he says he would be like up on top of the rafters, you know, like laying down the beams and stuff like that.

And he figured that that was not how he wanted to live his life, and not where he wanted to live his life, given the demons of his his birth and his upbringing, and so he moved down to the Vancouver area where he had this idea that he was going to become a PE teacher.

And when he showed up at the community college where he was supposed to take classes to become a PE teacher, they didn't actually have the PE classes because those were only offered at like another campus that was like a forty five minute drive away from where he was, you know.

Enrolled, and instead they had enrolled him in a bunch of art classes.

He'd always been, you know, decent in our class in high school, always encouraged on up front.

I think that that's kind of a maybe a bit of a commonality for Native people all over the place, you know.

I think we're kind of known for being good at arts and crafts and those sorts of things.

We definitely have a lot of stuff that we make with our hands in our culture.

So he ended up going.

With it and studied a printmaking process called stone lithography, which is, you know, pretty old printmaking process.

It involves slabs.

Of stone that are treated with gum arabic and like grease cran to make sort of layers of colors that you then sort of layer on top of each other to make it to prints.

My dad was like really good at it, so good in fact that he, you know, got an offer to go to proper art school out of community college.

And he was choosing between the University of British Columbia and Vancouver and the Emily Carr College of Art and Design.

And he thought Emily car was cooler, and Emily Car is actually just as an aside, really cool Canadian woman painter and artists from the early nineteen hundreds, and so he decided to go downly Car and he continued studying stone lithography.

This was the eighties, so it was actually a really consequential time in the art scene, in particular the Native arts scene in Vancouver.

He had some friends who he played in a punk rockabilly band with in Vancouver called the Red Cats.

They'd go to all the different like punk Indian bars around the city and party and carry on and whatnot.

And the guys in the Red Cats were also themselves artists.

They were quag.

Giolf and new chah Nols, you know, guys from Vancouver Island who came from very long ancient traditions of carving and art making.

You know, these were guys.

Whose ancestors carved like the totem poles and those big house posts and you know, masks and all these sorts of things that you've probably seen in museums before.

You know, this is like one of the most recognizable artistic traditions in the world, not just indigenous artistic traditions, but like you know, you've probably seen a total poll before, Like you know what I'm talking about.

That's what these guys came from.

And so my dad was hanging out with those guys.

He was going to Emily Carr.

You know, he was playing in a punk band.

He was a cool dude.

And it was Vancouver, so it was like in the eighties, so it was a pretty cool, alternative, queer place.

And Dad wanted to chase that sort of art world dream as far as it would take him.

And he already, you know, had very little interest in being anywhere near where he came from.

He wanted to get as far away from there as he could.

So when he graduated, his printmaking professor put him into contact with some printing presses all the way out in New York, and so he got hooked up with a guy named Tyler who Ken Tyler who ran Tyler graphics which printed like huge you know, artists like Frank Stella and Robert Motherwell and giant figures like that.

And Dad basically moved out there just like a kid, you know, not that long ago from the rez, you know, fresh out of art school in Vancouver, and she was really lonely, like didn't know anybody.

You know, this was way before the Internet or anything like that.

He didn't know anybody who'd ever moved out to New York.

In fact, when he moved there, he drove out there with my uncle Greg in an old buick, and you know, he was like wondering where the heck he might find some friends and community.

And he was a bit of a partier and a drinker, and he would be hanging out at this old bar for old Irish guys in Peak Skill, I believe it was.

And eventually one night he was like, where do the young people hang out around here?

And they directed him to the Shadow Brook, which is the bar that my mother was the bartender at.

And your parents shared this sense of, you know, as you right, looking for a world or family as far away from the ones they came from as they possibly could get.

They each shared that for very different reasons.

Yeah, you know, I think my dad was trying to get out of the hell, frankly that Native people were born into in his day.

I mean, the man was literally found minutes after birth and you know, on the precipice of death and a trash incinerator, and that was kind of how his life proceeded from that moment on him.

He was a survivor from the beginning.

Did he know that or was that something that sort of followed him around like smoke until he later learned it in adult life.

I think that's a great metaphor.

It did kind of follow him around like smoke.

He didn't really know it, but he knew that there was some kind of reason why he was outcast and ostracized.

And he did remember being teased and called.

The garbage can kid, but he didn't know why.

But he didn't really know why.

Yeah, and you know, to this day, it's actually not something that my my my grandmother who's still with us, it's not something that she ever been able to talk about.

I'm interested in these invisible the stories that we carry, the ones that we know that we're carrying and the ones that we don't, and the powers that those stories have over us, which you know, I think is threaded throughout your book in terms of both the stories that happen to us when we're alive and on the planet and the ones that come before us and the ones that we're haunted by.

I mean, do you have a sense of you know, your father, this is all before you're born.

I mean, some of the work that you've done is imagining your parents as people who preceded you, and then on and on ancestrally, you know, back through time who who begat them, and who begot them and who begat them?

Yeah, you know, I think that for many cultures, but especially for indigenous cultures.

You know, our relationships to our ancestors are of sacred significance.

You know, that's how we understand who we are, what our roles and responsibilities are within our family and community.

And you know, we also feel a great responsibility to carry forward the memories of the people who we come from, and that that takes on even greater significance because of the fact that you know, we were nearly killed off.

Our cultures are to this day, you know, deeply imperiled.

My language squat machine, for example, has only two remaining fluent speakers on the Indian Reserve that my family comes from Cannon Lake, and so there's this real imperative.

To know who.

Your family is, how you're related to people, where you come from, you know your ancestors as far back as you can remember them, because you know, society more broadly has definitely made it difficult to know these things, has in fact purposefully tried to stamp them out.

At the same time, there's this broader context of erasure of our history as Native people, you know, by big institutions and forces in society that through policy literally tried to do that through churches that tried to, you know, wipe out our belief systems and replace them with others.

But I think also, and this is one that I've thought about, you know, a lot, in my life and in my work, there's also within our own families because of the pain of that history, because of what happened to us at places like Saint Joseph's Mission, you know, the Indian residential schools that we were taken to to wipe out our way of life, and also what those things ended up doing to us, and the kinds of harms that then were carried generation to generation within our own families, you know, are things that we don't really talk about.

And so the broader silence of colonialism, you know, this thing that is a big topic of interest and study and concern in you know, history and the humanities and definitely and indigenous studies, you know, is also something that I see not just being pressed upon us by outsiders, but also something that we have truly internalized and internalized in part because that's a survival strategy.

When you were born in an Indian residential school and found in the trash cinerator, sometimes you forget things so that you know, life is a little bit easier when you feel guilty for having abandoned your own child in that circumstance, Sometimes you don't talk about things because they're too difficult to talk about.

And so part of my work has been, i would say to and not just like my you know, creative production, but in my life, you know, has been to try to understand those stories that we struggle to put words to within our families.

When Julian's parents get married, his mom is going to graduate school in Boston.

His dad just left his job as a printmaker.

He wasn't one to take orders from a boss, so he sets off on his own art career.

When his mom finishes grad school, she gets a job in Saint Paul, Minnesota, working on the business side of a newspaper.

Julianne is born in nineteen ninety three, and the family moves briefly to Miami and then to Oakland in the Bay Area, where he grows up on the age of three, all the way through high school.

Julian closely resembles his native father and looks almost nothing like his light skinned, half Irish half Jewish mother, to the point where when just Julianne and his mom are out together, well, it confuses people.

Yeah, I think to this day people maybe unless you know that the relationship is mother and son, I think maybe we're a bit of a confusing pair out in the world.

My dad, he's got such a big presence that everybody assumes he's like six feet tall, and he's got this enormous head of hair and these giant hands, and he is really as a larger than life character.

You know.

The guy looks like, or looked like, at least when he was younger, kind of like a rock star.

And he really was, like you know, photographed for the cover of Native People's Magazine when I was a little boy, with like a backwards kangle cap and purple rock star shaites on.

He was a big character and he had, you know, the name to go with it.

I mean, ed Archie noise Cat is a lot of name, and you know here I was, you know, the little noise cat, Julian Brave noise Cat with also an excessively Indian name.

And you know I also looked quite a bit like my dad.

I turned out brown like him.

You know, I started growing out my hair when I was a little boy.

And because he was an artist, you know, I would be able to while my mom was at work when I was when I was little, i'd hang out with him in his studio.

That was a lot of my earliest memories are of me and my dad hanging out in his studio, or you know, hopping in the red pow Wow van with the HS player in the back where I'd watched Land Before Time while we drove to you know, Indian art shows all across western North America.

I really was like a mini Ed.

You know, people called me that I was like his little tiny ADYBD sidekick, and you know that was that was my understanding of who I was and of my identity and also.

Who I wanted to be.

You know, when I was a little kid, I imagined myself someday becoming a carver and an artist like my father, you know, because that was the way that it was kind of done in native culture.

You know, it was a thing that was pasted father to son, you know, across so many generations.

Do you think you had any sense?

It's hard to answer, I guess because memory is such a trickster itself.

Because you weren't growing up on kind of like you weren't growing up on the res, you had a lot of relatives who were a lot of cousins, a lot of your father's family when you were a little kid.

Did you do you have a sense of the history that you've described, or.

Of the residential schools and all that, yeah, or just the pain of it, Yeah, I think the pain of it, yes, the specific story of the residential school in my father's birth, there no, But from a very young age, you know, my dad and just the sort of broader family and community contexts that I grew up in, you know, gave me this sense that there were these historical and enduring injustices that Native people faced and that here we were proud to be you know, Indian and still fighting back.

You know, I think that was very much how I understood myself from a very very small age.

And you know, I think Oakland also was the kind of place where that sort of legacy was, at least in certain you know parts of the city and certain you know, cultural corners of it was something that was celebrated and embraced.

You know, Oakland has had a long counter cultural history of you know, birthing the Black Panther Party and playing a prominent role in the United farm Workers movement, and also was a place that was significant in the Indian movement as well.

In nineteen sixty nine, there was this big occupation of Alcatraz Island led by a group of Native activists called the Indians of All Tribes.

That was kind of the starting point for the enduring resurgence of Indigenous peoples in the United States and beyond.

And so I think that that was something that.

The place I grew up in and this sort of like you know, being my dad's son, and look the way I did, you know I had this sort of broader sense of it without maybe the specific understanding of what exactly it was that my family had gone through and my dad had gone through.

I mean, I was like five, after.

All, will be back in a moment with more family secrets.

Julian is five when his parents begin to gradually drift apart.

Splitting up is not a single moment, it's a process.

His father starts drinking again and their marriage unravels, and by the time Julian is six or seven, the divorce is made final.

Soon after, his father leaves Oakland, moves to Santa Fe, starts a new family, and opens a few galleries on Canyon Road that don't last.

So Julian's been left behind, left to watch his father's life expand elsewhere away from him.

Between ages five and twelve, Julian carries something he later names dad sickness.

It shows in his eyes, a quiet ache, a missing and there's a moment, when he's twelve, in the car after hockey practice, his mother's softly, you need to be prepared for the real possibility that your father dies, and in that moment the ache becomes something else, not just loss, but precarity.

And fear after my dad left.

You know, here I was this half Native kid who looked very native and looked like his dad, but his dad was gone, and I was with my white mom.

And up until that point, you know, to be completely honest with you, of my two parents, who I was closer to you, I was definitely closer to my dad because of the reality of him being around making his art and my mom being off at work.

And I mean, it's hard for me sometimes to find the words to fully express this, but I was, you know, devastated, heartbroken, just completely cracked in half by this experience of losing my dad, of having him leave.

And you know, he didn't claim any custody of me after the divorce, and I rarely saw him.

There were entire years of my childhood where I, you know, maybe saw him once or not at all.

And in addition to that, you know, he he was carrying on out there in a kind of constant state of partying and drinking and chasing fame and and as a consequence, you know, like putting himself in real peril with the law and with his life.

And so that was something that I grew up with some form of awareness about at the same time as I like also have this kind of belief, I guess that like there was no possible way that like my mythological father could die because he was my mythological father, you know.

He told me one time, I remember very vividly.

We were at a hockey tournament and it was like he agreed, I guess to be the parent for the hockey tournament.

And I was, ironically, i should say, also playing for a team called the California gold Rush.

It was like an all star team.

And here I was a little Indian kid on a team called the California gold Rush.

And Dad at the time was he loved to speed everywhere.

I don't really know why, but I remember asking him, like why he wasn't scared to be pulled over by the cops, and he said, the cops will never catch me some because I have Crazy Horse medicine, by which he meant that he had some form of like spiritual protection that would protect him from ever being commandeered by law enforcement, you know, kind of the way that like crazy Horse was able to you know, the Oglala military leader, sort of a mythological figure who was never photographed historically, was able to elude the seventh Cavalry in the United States military, you know, in the eighteen seventies when the Lakota people were at war with this country.

And you know, there's also a little bit of irony in that because of course at the end, a crazy horse was actually stabbed in the back.

After the divorce, it continues to be very important to Julian's mom that he stayed connected to his Native American heritage, so that, as he put it, he won't be like an apple red on the outside and white on the inside.

My mom was I've asked her about this before and she says, you know that it wasn't necessarily something that she thought all the way through, Like, it wasn't something planned out.

It was something more instinctual.

And I think something in her told her that, you know, here she was this white lady with you know, obviously native kid, absent to his native father, a thousand miles away from the reservation that his family called home.

And if she didn't make significant efforts to connect me to my family and the res that I come from, which you know, is a twenty five hour drive from Oakland, California.

By the way, it's not an easy journey, and it's to a very remote and cold part of the continent.

You know, if she didn't make efforts to keep me connected to my identity and culture as well, that I was going to have some resentment about that.

So in addition to making sure that we went home by home, I mean Candam Lake on the you know, on the winter holidays and during summers too.

You know, she made it possible for me to have a relationship with the family of you know, my family, the family of the man who left.

And then also in Oakland, she was very thoughtful about bringing me down to the Inner Tribal Friendship House, which is one of the oldest urban Indian community centers in the country.

It's right on International Boulevard in Oakland, California.

And on Thursday nights they would have powow drum and dance practice at IFH as it's called, and.

I would go with my mom.

And for the first number of months, you know, I was like too scared to get up from her lap to like try to dance or try to you know, engage in our culture in that way.

But slowly and steadily over the years I ended up taking more of an interest in it, and my mom ended up getting involved with another Native man who ended up becoming a little bit of like a father figure for me for a number of pivotal years, and he encouraged me to become a powow dancer, which is something that is something I still do to this day.

I've actually traveled now all over North America to dance at celebrations, and those two things, you know, the powow, the inner travel frendship house, and you know, the time on Cannon Lake with my aunts and uncles and my and my my cousins and all that really helped me hold on to who I am in a way that I think made it possible for me to not lose my way.

Yeah, it's really extraordinary.

And both of those father you know, your father, and Coco, your mother's partner.

You know, you're young.

When she's with Coco, you describe as you didn't mistake him for your dad, but he was the closest thing to a dad that you have.

And in both cases those relationships are complicated by I guess the way that I would put it is the pain.

To call it intergenerational trauma feels almost just too reductive.

I know this is worth pointing out.

You know, like my mom says, she went to a stand up thing the other week and there's a woman comedian and she makes the joke where she, you know, asks everybody in the audience who.

She says, I'm going to prove to you that being a good man is the hardest job in the world.

And you know, if you if you know a you know a good woman, you know, if you had a good mother, like raise her hand.

You know, pretty much everybody in the audience probably raises their hand.

And then he says, okay, well raise her hand.

If you know, if you know a bad man, everybody in the audience raises their hand.

And you know, I think it is it is just as a starting point, I think it is hard.

There is something uniquely challenging for whatever reason.

I'm just not an excuse to navigate masculinity in this world.

I think that's a actually true when you add into the equation the centuries of efforts to wipe our people off the map and the very confusing position that that puts Indian men into.

When I would say, for my father and for Coco and others, you know, we struggle to play a role of provider.

Because of the you know, economic realities of colonization, we are viewed as you know, potentially violent threats to the general order of things.

We run into trouble with the law partially as a consequence, and you know, we struggle more than the average with the kinds of addictions and you know, substance abuse issues that make life difficult for us and for people around us.

And you can add into that also like you know, we suffer at higher rates from you know, sexual abuse happening in our in our families and in our pasts.

And at a certain point when there's a really low density and saturation of men who have been healthy and men who have you been present, you know, fathering their kids.

You know, my grandfather had nineteen kids I could name, and definitely more than that, and raised a minority of the who's you know, it becomes a real challenging thing to be a healthy man in the world, a healthy Indian man.

And you know, as a thirty two year old Indian man now myself, who's thinking about the future and what kind of dad I might be and what kind of man I want to be in the world and all that, it's hard, you know, which is not an excuse.

It's just a statement of what this history has put us into a position of.

We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.

Julian goes to Columbia University.

Well, he's essentially living in two worlds.

He's always at risk of losing his indianness, especially with his father hardly being in his life at all.

My dad was pretty absent from the time that he left until I was a full on adult.

You know, I had to lend him money to come to my own high school graduation.

You know, he was an artists still, and somehow I managed to convince when I was in college the folks at Columbia University to have him come give an artist talk.

And he was so broke at that point that, hey, they paid for everything other than I guess the trip to the airport from his house, and he had so little money to his name that he actually couldn't even make that, which was you know the time.

I was a little embarrassed by that.

And you know, he had a number of relationships marriages that didn't quite work out.

Maybe it is a nice way to put that in.

And you know, he also struggled to parent, my little sister who was in Santa Fe but who you know who he was not maybe the most constructive force in her life either.

I guess there are certain ways.

That, like, you can look at that situation and it's just kind of like, man, what a broken situation.

But there's also ways that you could look at it that are actually kind of like maybe sometimes entertaining.

So like, for example, when I was on summer break once in college.

In college, I had one of my girlfriends in college lived in Las Vegas, and so I was visiting her, and my dad happened to be driving through from doing some work up in Washington State going back down.

To New Mexico.

Las Vegas is kind of like the halfway point.

And I got a call from his wife at the time now definitely ex wife, and she told me that he got pulled over in a little town called Goldfield, Nevada, which is about as tiny as you might imagine it in your head.

I bet they like tested nukes not that far from Goldfield, and he had been pulled over with like a pound of weed in the back of his in the back of his ride and cloud of purple haze trailing behind, and it was it was a like a Thursday evening that he'd gotten pulled over, and so the next day I drove it was like three hours from Vegas to Goldfield and had to bail him and his sidekick, which at the time was a long hair in Chihuahua named Angus out of jail in.

Goldfield, Nevada.

Like I had to get the bail and everything.

It was like a kind of classically on paperworked and dysfunctional situation.

So like I picked my dad up off the side of the road, and then we had to go get his truck which was impounded.

But the truck was not in his name because he traded some Pueblo guy, like some art for it, and so he had to like call that guy so that he would say that it wasn't stolen.

And you know, it was like a Friday afternoon in Goldfield, Nevada.

So if we didn't get all this done by five o'clock, like we were going to be stuck in this tiny town.

For the whole weekend.

And then we had to go like liberate the dog who had been sent to the pound, and we went and looked for the dog with a pound and the dog was not at the pound.

And so here was my dad, you know, with this truck absent his sidekick, like just totally broken because he thought he was gonna be losing his you know, overweight, long hair chihuahua.

And we start making the drive down to like you know, Las Vegas, and I'm trying to like you know, get him to make peace with or come to terms with in some way shape or form that like the dog's gone.

And we get a call from the game warden about like thirty minutes down the road, and it turns out that Angus had gotten his long hair caught in some burrs in the doggy pound, which was right by where they kept the horse stable.

And so the game warden, who was like this lovely woman, had taken him to like the dogs alon, and so like my dad was like reunited with his like little fat chihuahua who like he was like proud cut too.

So you think he still had maybe still had his balls at that point.

So he pulls up, hangs pulls up with like his like nuts out, you know, it's a long tongue hanging out.

He's got like one patch over his eye like some kind of you know, bandit, and my dad breaks down and is crying and stuff, and we go get some ice cream even though we're you know, lactose and tawerant, and we drive.

Back to Vegas.

So those are the kinds of you know, adventures that were to be had with my dad back in that era, which I think is you know, that's kind of who he is, you know, like on one hand, who on the other hand, like, I don't know, it's kind of entertaining in a way.

I think I always understood my dad to be this kind of like legendary figure, this trickster in a sense who was He was a survivor, and he'd gone through a lot, and he'd made it off the res to meet my mom, to make my life possible, and you know, he made beautiful art and still does, and so he was capable of great things and he was also, at the same time, you know, capable of destroying lot.

And I think I always kind of understood him that way from a pretty young age.

And I think that reading and consuming other Native stories I think helped me contextualize him.

You know, my mom, in addition to being really thoughtful about bringing me home and to the industravel friendship house and supporting me with my powow dancing being being Regalia.

She also introduced me to like Sherman Alexei and encouraged me to read and write.

And many years later, you know, when I was trying to understand how I would tell the story of this mythological father figure who is still here with me, I started reading, among other things, the Coyote stories, like these oral histories about the trickster ancestor of my people who had helped create the world and who had also gotten into a lot of trouble while doing it.

And as I was reading these stories and hanging out with my dad and learning more about his story because I chose to move in with him for two years when I was twenty eight, I kept like realizing, I kept seeing in these stories about you know, this mythological trickster ancestor, so many qualities that I saw in my father, and I guess, in a way stories themselves, you know, the ability to turn something into a narrative, to make sense of it in that kind of way.

It doesn't make it okay necessarily.

It doesn't like take away the pain.

It doesn't relieve the person of responsibility.

But I think it helps understand them as a full, you know, human and also then gives me the framework within which I can still love him despite the complexities inherent in that kind of a relationship.

Julian's father only learned the details of his origin story in recent years.

It has floated around the res of course, but he has never put the pieces together, nor has Julian.

But in an extraordinary intersection of a news story, the making of a film, and the asking of the right questions, Ed's story finally reveals itself, and as is so often the case with missing pieces of a narrative, it makes all kinds of sense and meaning.

So, you know, about four years ago, there was a discovery of over two hundred potential unmarked graves at an Indian residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, which is actually another school that my family was sent to.

It's where my my grandmother finished high school and studied nursing.

And it became an international news event, like you know, there's a New York Times headline, and there was a number of discoveries at other schools around the country after that, and it kind of reawakened I guess this set of questions that lived in so many Native families like my own, about what it was that are you know, our grandparents, our families, our parents endured at these institutions, and it definitely did that for my dad.

And so over the last four years, I was working on a documentary called Sugarcane at the same time as I was writing this book We Survived the Night, and the documentary happened to be following the investigation at the mission school that my family was sent to and where my father was born.

You know, that was actually not by my by design.

My co director reached out to me and asked me if I wanted to make a documentary on the subject with her, And then when I got back to her and said yes, she said, okay, I've identified a first nation and it's falling a search and it's happening at Saint Joseph's Mission, which was like, you know, there was one hundred and thirty nine of these schools across Canada, so that was like a total I mean, like what are the chances?

Right?

Kind of felt like fate.

So I was working on this documentary that was inherently you know, personal, and gave me the opportunity to maybe find some answers for for my father, who, like so many other Native people who were following this news event, wanted answers.

The trouble was that my grandmother Mi Kaa, who you know, was sent to Saint Joseph's Mission and has her own trauma from that, is still with us, and I also feel a great deal of love and loyalty for her.

You know, she's the one who she's the matriarch of our family.

She's the one who made it possible for me to you know, conclude one Marchen, to speak my Suqutch language.

You know.

So it was a very slow and cautious process of like figuring out what there was to be learned about my dad's birth.

Because we knew that he had been born potentially at or near the school and found in a in a dumpster.

That was kind of all we knew, and we wanted to figure out more.

And so a couple of years into an investigation that was unfolding at Saint Joseph's Mission and the making of this documentary, the investigators with the Williamslake First Nation who were leading that investigation, told me that someone had turned in an article about the birth of a baby at and discovery of a baby at Saint Joseph's Mission, And so we went and got the article that told the story.

There was actually literally only one copy of it left at the Williams Lake Tribune Archives, and if there had ever been a fire there in the years since nineteen fifty.

Nine, it would have been gone.

And it turned out to be the story of my father's birth and discovery and the trash incinerator.

They called him Baby X in the story.

Actually, the part about it that's also really crazy is that the story says that the night watchman who found him said his cries for life sounded like a cat, which is especially crazy because our last name, Noise Cat, actually has nothing to do with noises or cats.

It was originally just an ancestral named Noiskit that goes way back in time, but then was written down wrong by the missionaries and became Noisect.

So that was another sort of wild turn that I guess points towards other things that maybe exist out here.

In this world or not in this world.

Yeah, exactly, and that Native people have always acknowledged in our own ways, in our own storytelling traditions.

For a few years Julian lives with his father, who is trying, really trying to put the pieces of his life back together.

It's not easy, not after so many acts, so many false starts.

But it turns out that this is a false start too.

Once again, his father leaves, this time to pursue a relationship with a woman.

Julian feels it immediately, the anger, the abandonment, the sting of being left again.

But later Julian begins to shape meaning from the instability.

He finds language, perspective, maybe even forgiveness, within the myth of the Coyote people, tricksters, survivors, those who blur the line between creation and destruction, And in that myth he begins to see his father too, not just as the man who vanished, but as part of something older, something wild and deeply human, a legacy of longing and imperfection, passed down like a story.

I think I always hoped that me and my dad would, you know, have some sort of happy together ending.

And in the Indian country, in native context, there's a lot of examples of intergenerational families wherein you know, there's a parent and a kid and grandkids and all that sort of stuff.

And I imagined that we might be able to have something like that, and you.

Know, I was.

I was pretty broken when when that didn't work out, as as maybe unrealistic of an expectation as that was on my part, given our history and his needs as well.

Like, I think it's totally reasonable that he would want to have a relationship, and I think it's been a really good and healthy one for him.

And yet, you know, like I look at that and it hurts me.

And I also look at that and I see, you know, the continuation of a tradition that is complicated, you know, but that is also germane to who we are.

I see in my dad making the moves he has to make to survive, which I imagine is you know, I know, is what his father had to do and what you know, generations going back for over a hundred years had to do.

I see the ways that he has remade and unmade and transformed himself and his life over and over and over again.

That I see the legacy of fingers like the trickster coyote who was doing that, you know, left and right in our mythology about him.

And I also see, you know, the contradictions in somebody who has created immense beauty in their life, who made my life possible, who still to this day makes incredible art, who is a great hang.

You know, my dad might be a complicated figure, but he's like really fun dying out with.

He's really charismatic, and then you know, therefore.

Also is able to get away with with more than the average.

And ultimately, you know, I, despite the pain that it has caused me and still causes me at times, I can't help but love that and love that figure, and know that that is who I come from.

And also if I'm being you know, honest, I can't help but look in the mirror and see some of that, you know, in myself, you know, not to that degree and not in the same way, but that's who I come from too, And you know, I guess like the thing about like families and ancestors and all that sort of stuff is like they hand you down what they hand you down, and you gotta make of that what you're going to make of it.

And you also need to find the room in your heart, especially if you come from a tradition like mine, where families kind of everything.

You know, if we don't have each other.

We got nothing.

You got to find the room in your heart to love, to love the people who you come from, as as complicated and tricksterly as they can be at times.

Here's Julian reading one last passage from We Survived the Night.

The noise came from behind the mission.

It sounded like a cat.

I've imagined it countless times.

At about half past eleven, the night watchman pulled his car around back of Saint Joseph's Mission, one of the Indian residential schools in British Columbia, Canada, where my family was sent to unlearn our Indian ways.

The four story the building was all white and right angles, unadorned save for a big cross looming over the entrance in blue green trim that, from a distance made the campus look like a hunk of moldy cheese plopped in the middle of the valley.

The night of August sixteenth, nineteen fifty nine, Tony followed that whale, flashlight in hand.

Sound and light led him inside the service way to a garbage burner about the size of an office desk, where trash from the mission was turned to ash.

He opened it, casting rays of light onto rubbish and soot.

Somewhere near the top of the pile was an ice cream carton, repurposed as a makeshift wastebasket and discarded no more than twenty minutes before.

Within was a newborn.

The authorities called him Baby X, and he was my father.

Family Secret is a production of iHeartRadio.

Molly Zaccur is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.

If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode.

Our number is one eight eight eight Secret zero.

That's the number zero.

You can also find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder.

And if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.