“We Survived the Night”: Julian Brave NoiseCat on Residential Schools & Recovering Native History

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To mark Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we sit down with the award-winning Indigenous writer, journalist and filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat, an enrolled member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’secen of the Secwepemc (Shuswap) Nation. His debut book, We Survived the Night, is part-memoir, part-investigative journalism, telling both his family story and the story of Indigenous erasure and resistance in what is now called North America. “I often think about what it must have meant for my ancestors to greet one another in the day by saying something as simple and profound as that they had 'survived the night,'” says NoiseCat. “What did that mean in the winter of 1863, for example, when over two-thirds of our nation died of smallpox? What did it mean in the days after the children were taken away to Indian residential schools?”

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