What an extraordinary read. Irish audiences may know the author from his 2024 Oscar-nominated film Sugarcane. It resonated in Ireland with its deeply personal examination of the fallout on a Native Canadian community of child abuse and the discovery of unmarked graves at the local residential school.
NoiseCat’s much anticipated book opens in the dead of night at the same school in 1959. A newborn infant is discovered in a cardboard carton by a night watchman on top of a pile of rubbish in an outhouse incinerator. “The authorities called him, ‘Baby X’,” writes NoiseCat, “and he was my father.”
We are then cast into a 415-page odyssey that is far-reaching, ever-surprising, funny, tragic, and written in what is almost certainly an unprecedented format. It is at once a memoir, a long-form journalistic study of indigenous history and resurgence in North America, and a wild, glorious series of sean nós yarns originating in First Nation creation myths.
Within this latter framework, the author tells his own personal story and that of his father (which is moving and a little bit heartbreaking). We meet Coyote: he’s a trickster, an on-the-ground spirit operator that creates chaos, imparts wisdom, breaks hearts teaches life lessons. These traditional stories intersperse with a meticulously researched testimony of the contemporary achievements, challenges and hopes of First Nation peoples.
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In this striking way, NoiseCat proves to be a formidable seanchaí: lively, meandering on occasion perhaps, but always engaging. At times, you nearly feel you’re sitting at a fireside beside him, as you learn his theory not only of historic genocide, but present-day ecocide: how factory fishing, land and water pollution and now climate change are as destructive to Native lives today as the openly murderous policies of past centuries.
In this narrative, that weaves past, present, myth and personal realities, the storyteller does an excellent job of delivering the “reckoning” of the book’s sub-title. The title, We Survived The Night is a translation of “tsecwínucw-k”– the morning greeting exchanged daily by members of the NoiseCat’s own Canim Lake Band of Tsq’éscen, in their native language, Secwepemctsín. A powerful name for a powerful book.
