Special Report: QAnon Fantasies Look Like Colonial Realities (w/Julian Brave NoiseCat)
Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer and film doc maker, and a member of the Canim Lake Band, Tsq'escen. In May of 2022 he posted this Twitter thread. Matthew wanted to learn more:
I'm struck by the similarity of right-wing conspiracy theories to actual policies towards Indigenous peoples.
'replacement theory' - Manifest Destiny
QAnon (mass institutionalized child abuse) - boarding and residential schools
'plandemic' - smallpox, alcohol, bioterrorism
It's all so Freudian. The fear that it will happen to them stems from an implicit admission that they did it to others.
As though the Black, Brown and Indigenous downtrodden are just as hateful as they are and are going to turn around and do to them what they did to us.
Show Notes
Julian’s website
Mary Simon Is Leading Indigenous Peoples to New Heights
Who’s Your People?
The Past and Future of Native California
Place Determines Who We Are
The Census Powwow
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Hello everyone, welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy
theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
And I should add to that tagline today, looking at how conspiracy theorists appropriate the language of indigenous survivorship and resistance.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
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Welcome to QAnon Fantasies Look Like Colonial Realities with Julian Brave Noisecat.
So here at Conspiratuality Podcast, we're building a bit of an archive on how conspiracy theories intersect with, distort, and appropriate the discourse of First Nations liberation.
And what we've found is that it's not just that QAnon people pump out potentially dangerous fantasies about vaccines and organized pedophilia.
In their quest to elevate their themes, they are also adopting the manners and survivor identities of Indigenous people, whose spirituality they may have already been naively fascinated with.
In episode 54, I interviewed Joe Trinder in New Zealand about how Q-adjacent influencers had recruited Maori musician Billy Takahika as their conspiracy theory candidate.
And in a special report from this past October called Stealing Indigenous Voices in Australia, Tyson Yunkaporta, Talk with me about how Australian Aboriginal freedom groups had been infiltrated by white QAnon and sovereign citizen activists and how this had helped destroy the movement behind a referendum to create an Aboriginal voice to Parliament.
And then I came across Julian Brave Noisecat's work.
He fleshed out this strange intersection in a Twitter thread that opened like this.
I'm struck by the similarity of right-wing conspiracy theories to actual policies towards Indigenous peoples.
So, I just had to pull on that thread.
And I also had to ask Julian, with whom I share some Catholic heritage, about the strange staying power of spiritual relief offered by corrupt religious institutions.
Here's our conversation.
Julian Brave Noisecat, thank you so much for taking the time and joining us on Conspirituality Podcast.
Thank you so, so much for having me.
It's great to be here.
Now, you are a journalist, you're a documentarian, you're a member of the Cannon Lake Band, Tequescan, and your people are Sequipmuc and Statliam, and also Catholic, and you're also a celebrated powwow dancer.
I hear a big league hockey player, too, so that's my introduction.
Like, that's how I would do it, but I'm wondering if there's a way that you'd like to introduce that background, those traditions and ways of life.
No, that was a good one, man.
I feel like I'm walking out to like, uh, like a boxer walking out to his, his, his match right now.
You know, he stands six feet tall all the way from the Cannon Lake band.
He's one hell of a powwow dancer and a great hockey player, at least at the Indian hockey tournaments.
Yeah, no, that was great, man.
I guess I'll also just say I'm talking to you today from my home.
I live on the homelands of the Suquamish people in Washington State.
I actually live off this little bay called Chico Bay that was named after the Suquamish patriarch whose family once lived here.
Across the way there's a little salmon stream.
There's a bunch of seals up in here.
It's raining.
as it often is in Washington State. So it's good to be here in the broader Salish Sea,
broader homelands of the Salish peoples in Washington State.
To set the context, in addition to having a book coming out soon, it's called We Survived the Night,
you're also co-directing your first documentary. And as I understand it, it follows the search for
unmarked graves at the Indian residential school that your family was sent to in Williams Lake
in South Central British Columbia. Now, in In English-speaking settler Canada, a lot of us first heard about this search and these searches back in May of 2021, when the Tukumlup's Sequipmuk Tribal Headquarters announced preliminary radar findings of 215 unmarked graves on the site of the nearby Kamloops Residential School.
That was open from 1893 to 1978.
So, I wanted to start by asking whether That particular event was a catalyst for your own documentary process at Williams Lake, which is about 300 kilometers north, or was that going beforehand?
And am I right that you're focusing on the St.
Joseph's Mission?
Yes, that's all right.
I'll also say you're doing a great job with your pronunciations here.
I don't know if I've ever been on a podcast with someone who's been able to get Szegesgen and Tecumleps and Szekwepemoch and Sztetlik, so you're doing a really good job, man.
The linguists actually like to study our Salish languages because they have such complicated phonology.
Like in some Salish languages, there are words that are Almost entirely made up of consonants.
In the New Hulk language, there are actually words that are entirely consonants.
So you're doing a really good job.
When the news about the discovery of the graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School came out, it was May of 2021, and I honestly, like I think so many other people whose families and lives were impacted by the residential schools, I was a little bit dazed when I heard that there were potentially over 200 Child-sized burials in the apple orchard of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
I was dazed for a few reasons.
The first is that my grandmother actually finished high school and studied nursing at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, so it's one of two residential schools she attended, the other being St.
Joseph's Mission in Williams Lake, British Columbia.
And the other was that I actually have been to the grounds of the Kamloops Residential School many, many times.
It's a place that I'm very, very familiar with.
They have the annual Kamloopa Pow Wow, which is the biggest pow wow in our part of the Indian world.
On the campus of the residential school there.
And I also actually did some research when I was in college at the Sequoia Museum and Archives, which happens to be housed at the residential school.
So I spent a lot of time growing up on the powwow trail, doing my own research when I was, you know, obviously like a cub.
Researcher, cub writer, young person interested in these kinds of histories and questions, right there, just steps away from potentially the bodies of children.
It took me a minute actually, I would say, to really confront and grapple with that fact.
I think that just speaking from my personal experience and my family experience, On the one hand, you know, I had family who were sent to the residential schools who, you know, I know had very challenging experiences.
It's also something I know that they don't talk about.
We don't really talk about it very much in our family because it was such a traumatizing experience.
There is a story about my father being born at the St.
Joseph's Mission, which was actually what I ended up investigating personally in the documentary that I'm working on.
And for a while, it actually took me some time to get comfortable with Really looking for the truth because I think the broader reality of the denial of this history is not just that white Canada and white society doesn't know or acknowledge what happened.
I think the broader truth actually is also that quite often Native people and Native families, we ourselves don't talk about what we went through because the experiences were that Awful.
And they aren't the kinds of things that you want to remember.
They're the kinds of things that get blacked out.
You know, they're the years that you lose.
And, um, that was certainly the case for, for my family.
Uh, but also the, the discovery of the, the, the graves actually demanded that we go and, and actually confront that history finally and find answers.
So, um, the day or the day after the, um, the news broke, My co-director for the documentary I'm working on, her name is Emily Cassie.
We sat next to each other at our very first reporting jobs at the Huffington Post.
She called me up and she said, you know, hey, would you be interested in potentially collaborating with me on a documentary about Indian residential schools?
And the news had just come out and so I was, you know, I was a little bit dazed and also I had just signed a book contract a few months earlier.
So I was, I was going to try to write a book and adding on writing, making a documentary about something that was, was, was deeply, um, that made me want to look away.
Sounded like a pretty, uh, a lot to take on.
I'll just put it that way.
Uh, so I took some time getting back to her, you know, I said, you know, I need to talk to some people.
I talked to my mom, um, You know, my agent.
I probably would have talked to a therapist if I had one at the time, but I didn't.
And then a few weeks later, I got back to her and I said, you know, I'd be open to potentially collaborating with you on this.
And she said, well, great.
That's awesome.
Well, I've made some headway.
I've actually identified a First Nation that is leading a search, and that's the Williams Lake First Nation.
And they're looking for burials at St.
Joseph's Mission in Williams Lake.
And she'd done this all unbeknownst to me, and so I paused.
She didn't know that that's where my family was, was sent.
And I said, uh, well, that's very interesting because that is the school that my family was sent to and, and where, to the best of my knowledge, my father was born.
And, you know, from that on, it was, it was one of those kinds of things that, you know, I think I, I, I believe, and, and, you know, my people believe that there are, um, Mysterious and greater things out there in the world that sometimes intervene in this physical realm that shape how events unfold.
And I just think that there's 139 schools across Canada.
What are the chances that Emily would have chosen the one school that my family was sent to where my father was born?
And where there's a story that we haven't really faced and told about that.
And then also at the same time, um, what are the like, what's the likelihood that she would have chosen to make a documentary about, about residential schools, uh, for her first feature documentary?
What is the chances that we would have, uh, been sat next to each other at our very first reporting jobs?
Cause we didn't work together.
We just happened to sit next to each other.
Um, and she had actually honestly had like a much cooler job than I did.
I was, I was basically an intern at the time.
And, you know, so what are the chances that all of these things would line up in the way that they have?
There are more that sort of come out in the documentary.
And I just believe that, in a way, that experience of that news breaking, needing to look away, you know, not running towards it, but running away from it, and then being brought to face that history within, you know, the history of this continent, as well as within the history of my own, Uh, family and blood was exactly what I needed to do and what I needed to go through at this moment in time in life.
And, um, you know, I was very fortunate to, to go through that with people who really cared and also to go through it and be present with my own family and people.
And the moment where the, the, the, the bodies and the, um, the spirits of our missing kids were starting to come home and come back into, Into memory and into, you know, the now and here.
So, yeah, I'm just really grateful that I've gotten to take it on.
And at the same time, now that we're in the very throes of the edit, where you actually have to make all the material into a feature film, I'm also like, man, what the hell did I sign up for?
This is like really hard.
I can imagine, especially when the whole project is a reconstruction of bodies and memories and presences and I had not considered or heard of this internal silence community wise that you're describing and also not just community wise but personally.
And I think that my next question probably becomes harder because of that, because there was a predictable backlash to the Kamloops story.
And that's that the ground-penetrating radar couldn't, for some people, offer enough proof of what others knew all along.
You know, there were settler skeptics suddenly wanting exhumations, some assholes even cheered on by right-wing media, and Canada showed up with shovels at certain sites.
It sounds like your communities are mixed on whether exhumations should happen.
And so, I imagine, you know, the search at the heart of your film, like, has to also confront these questions about how we know things, like, who we listen to, and then who gets to be believed.
Like, is that fair?
I just make two points about this.
The first is that we know definitively that there were many, many children who died at, um...
The Indian residential schools, there are documented deaths that go into the thousands.
Many of them had to do with the incredibly poor health circumstances at the school.
So kids were malnourished, there was lots of sickness and disease, and kids were dying from that sort of negligence pretty commonly.
And there was actually an entire Canadian government report made about this in the 1930s, I want to say 1940s.
It's been a minute since I've read the history about it.
But that is documented and that is very well known.
It is true that unmarked graves are being detected with ground penetrating radar, which picks up disturbances
in the ground that experts who analyze that technology can, with varying degrees of certainty,
say, OK, this one looks very much to be like human remains or burial.
And this one, you know, we're not sure.
Right.
And in the process of, of, of documenting that, that, um, Search of St.
Joseph's Mission, the Williams Lake First Nation was very careful to say, you know, when they first announced the number of potential unmarked graves, they said 93 potential unmarked graves, and they used the term anomalies.
And then they further clarified that 50 of them were not associated with the graveyard, so they weren't found near the present Boundaries of the graveyard.
So I think that, you know, there have not been excavations and exhumations yet.
But, you know, we can say with a very, very high degree of certainty that there are definitely dead Native kids and any dead Native kid, of course, that was taken away from their family to these schools is too many.
But I also think that in a way, the hyper focus on Unmarked graves and the language with which they're used to be described, whether these are mass graves, et cetera, is also a red herring because the broader truth and really what our documentary very clearly became about once we started making it was that the residential schools, you know, have a death toll, clearly, historically.
They also have a present death toll.
People are still dying because of the ongoing impacts of Indian residential schools,
whether that be the trauma that recurs and is passed down through generations,
sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, et cetera, or the ways in which people self-medicate
and cope with that, you know, alcoholism, addiction, drug overdose, suicide, all of that.
I mean, like in the actual community that we were filming in on the first ever National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, a member of the community hung himself in front of his home that sits right at the entrance to the reserve on a road that's called Mission Road.
So I mean, if you if you look at those facts, and you know, you tell me, you know, residential schools weren't weren't so bad.
And you know, these Indians are just backwards.
And that's why they're killing themselves.
You know, like, I think that that requires an immense amount of Prejudice to hold that view, if you know the facts, and also just an immense amount of ignorance about what has come to light about the history of these schools, the ongoing and enduring legacy of them, and a very large body at this point of research, social science literature, medical studies, etc., that really definitively show that this
This trauma really does pass down through generations.
And I think we should also call that trauma what it is, which is a genocide.
The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission described the residential school system as a cultural genocide.
You know, as you look at not just the cultural toll, which, you know, culture is everything.
It's worth saying that's everything that we move through.
It's how we connect with and relate to each other in the world around us.
But also when you look at just the human toll, the biological toll of the residential schools
and just the realities of health outcomes and premature death
and all of these statistics, Native people are way far ahead of the rest of society in terms of how
young we die, how frequently we die.
And that was really truly the other part of the story.
While we were following this search for unmarked graves, I was a pallbearer at two funerals.
I gave a eulogy at another funeral.
I cut my hair short for a deceased relative.
In many of those instances, there was over, I believe, a dozen funerals in my little community of Canem Lake, which has 300 on-reserve members.
So just think about that for a second.
We were burying people at a very, very rapid clip.
You know, in that place, just the magnitude of the death and the extent to which it is young people dying, I think is truly shocking to the rest of the world.
And, you know, We're a people who, when our family members die, we pick up the shovels and we dig the grave.
We throw the dirt on the grave.
We sit with the body for four days and mourn.
We really do it in a full-on kind of way.
It is an immense loss every time we lose someone in our communities.
And it also happens incredibly frequently.
St.
Joseph's Mission is also part of the national story because I believe it's where school survivors started the Orange Shirt Day campaign, the Day of Remembrance campaign, is that right?
That's correct, yeah.
So Phyllis Webstead, Who's a survivor of St.
Joseph's Mission.
She attended the school, has a story about how her family member gave her an orange shirt.
She went to the school and they took it away, and that is the origin of Orange Shirt Day.
We're actually distantly related, so she's a distant cousin of mine through The part of my family that comes from Canoe Creek, which is a remote little rez on the Fraser River.
It's also happens to be where my last name, Noiskat, or Nowiskat as it traditionally would have been pronounced, comes from.
So St.
Joseph's Mission played a really important role in the origin of We're in Shirt Day, or as it's now recognized, National Truth and Reconciliation Day in Canada.
It also, I should say, while we're talking about the significance of St.
Joseph Mission, it was also one of the first, if not the first place, where survivors of the residential school who were sexually abused actually came forward and prosecuted.
Or tried to prosecute some of the perpetrators, including a bishop, actually, in the province of British Columbia.
So there was a bishop named O'Connor who, when he was a principal at the residential school, abused students.
And in fact, there's evidence that he got some women pregnant and that those babies were adopted out or aborted.
It's really horrifying stuff to think that this is what was happening at the school that Native kids were being taken away to.
I mean, like, Just truly shocking stuff.
He was actually convicted and then later acquitted and was able to get off or get away from the charge because the survivors essentially got pretty worn out of talking about what they'd gone through.
They didn't want to go do it again because it would have been the third trial at that point.
And there were a number of other abusers at that school who were tried, a couple who were convicted, and a number of others who were named, but criminal proceedings never went forward.
Well, I ask about the orange shirt because that's kind of where I came into this story, even if, you know, I'm slow on the uptake with regard to the bigger picture, because in June of 2021, I reported on this anti-vax influencer team called 100 Million Moms on Instagram.
They were selling orange shirts to really kind of steal the Day of Remembrance signifiers.
The shirts were implying that the COVID vaccine rollout, in their words, constituted Canada's second genocide of Indigenous people, meaning them.
Right.
And about eight months after that, the orange shirts and language about sovereignty, although in a different register, became centerpieces at the Trucker Convoy.
So I'm wondering, as you're going into this film work, as you're doing all of this uncovering, were you aware of that particular flavor of appropriation at the time?
It's not something that we focus on in the documentary.
We spend a little bit more time focusing on the white Town folks or the people in the town of Williams Lake and how they respond to this history and their own forms of denial of it having happened or of it having been so bad.
You know, that sort of more soft conservatism.
No one went so far as to try to put on an orange shirt and say that they That being vaccinated was equivalent to taking away native children en masse.
And I actually hadn't heard about that one.
That's a pretty far out one.
But what I would say is that I've spent a lot of time, to the detriment probably of my own Mental health at moments, really thinking about this system and this story and St.
St. Joseph's Mission in particular, but also just more broadly speaking, what it was to have a
system wherein Native children could be removed through threat of prosecution, through threat of
force, from their families, taken away, often great distances, to a school where they were
indoctrinated with a faith and culture that was not their own, where they were physically abused
at the very least if they practiced the culture that they grew up with in their own homes. And
then at night, and maybe sometimes not even at night, were often sexually abused by the people
who were supposed to be teaching them about God and also about mathematics and English and science.
And that is all incredibly well documented and known to have been Disgustingly widespread.
And if we just stop there and don't even get into the business of also a good number of them died, you know, that is a pretty horrifying, horrifying, horrifying picture.
What is also really interesting about it to me, if you think about some of the other manias or sort of obsessions that exist on the internet and particularly among Not just the right wing, but often among the right wing in our culture today is that, you know, if you think about QAnon, for example, there's a lot of people in this world who believe that there's a cabal of elites who are systematically kidnapping and abusing children, which on the face of it sounds crazy.
But also, if you think about it in another way, that's exactly what they did to Native children.
There really, truly was a conspiracy against our people.
It was widespread conspiracy.
It was funded by the government.
It was carried out by the largest church in the world.
You know, some of the most powerful institutions in Not just Canada, but on the face of the earth, we're involved in this process.
And it stretched all the way from the folks who patrolled these campuses at night and who taught the kids, to the banks that were writing them loans, to the government that was funding them, to the churches that were staffing and creating these schools.
It had many tentacles.
It spread out all across All across society and across borders, because many of these, like the Oblates of Mary Immaculate that ran St.
Joseph's Mission in Williams Lake, for example, they also operated a number of Native American boarding schools in the United States.
So it truly was, you could say, a global cabal of elites to systematically abduct and abuse children, which in a way sounds a lot like QAnon.
Well, this is how I came to your writing.
Right.
We're at it because, you know, Naomi Klein quotes you in Doppelganger, this Twitter thread that you posted in May of 2022 that blew my mind.
You summed it up here.
You said, I'm struck by the similarity of right-wing conspiracy theories to actual policies towards Indigenous peoples.
Replacement theory, Sounds a lot like Manifest Destiny.
QAnon, or mass institutionalized child abuse, boarding and residential schools.
Plandemic points towards smallpox, alcohol, bioterrorism.
And then you say, it's also Freudian.
-♪ ♪ -♪ The fear that it will happen to them stems from an implicit admission that they did it to others as though the black, brown, and indigenous downtrodden are just as hateful as they are and are gonna turn around and do to them what they did to us.
So.
That was a good series of tweets, man.
I don't even tweet anymore and that was pretty good.
Maybe I should tweet more.
There's a way in which I think often some of these conspiracy theories are really folks
who are lost and vaguely speaking on the right or just in some of these darker corners of
the web mediated information environment, holding up a mirror to society and then looking
in the mirror and saying, you know, I see this here, I see this there.
If you really think about what actually happened to indigenous peoples in North America, to black people, to many other oppressed groups, there truly were conspiracies against us.
They're not theories, they're conspiracy histories.
And I do think that there is some Freudian thing that is happening there, some psychological It's a phenomenon where people see and implicitly recognize that and then try to map those patterns onto what they perceive to be the injustices or the things that they resent about a world that is very unequal.
And a world where people who they disagree with ideologically, culturally, etc., do seem to be better off than they do are making policy decisions that they disagree with.
And then they sort of try to read in these theories that sound a lot like, you know, histories of racialized, sexualized, gender-based oppression.
Well, I wanted to ask you if what you've done in that Twitter thread is part of a larger indigenous discourse that is trying to understand settler psychology.
Is that a thing?
Is that a literature on its own?
There's a whole sort of set of academic study, area of academic study about what's called settler colonialism.
There's a very, very, very well read and cited paper by this late scholar from Australia named Patrick Wolfe called Settler Colonialism and the Elimination ...of the Native, and basically sort of the famous line from this is that settler colonialism is a structure and not an event, and that it is geared towards the elimination of the Native.
And it sort of takes on this question of genocide, and it sort of points out that in contexts wherein large numbers of colonists came to stay, what they were really trying to do wasn't genocide per se, but to eliminate and to replace.
The native population, which led to these instances across North America, as well as Australia, New Zealand, to a lesser extent, South Africa, but other places around the world of a sort of colonizing to replace the indigenous population, which is, of course, distinct from, you know, what happened in India, for example, or in, you know, many parts of Africa or other parts of Asia and the colonized world.
It's a different kind of colonialism.
And so there is, I think, some More academic writing about that.
But, you know, I occasionally, you know, I'll listen to like a podcast here and there and or just pay attention to some of the discourse on social media.
And people will identify some of these these little Freudian ticks that exist on on the sort of conservative side of the aisle, as well as, you know, to a certain extent, the liberal side of the aisle.
I don't want to say it's not studied and then someone will probably show me something where it is it is written about because I'm not going to claim to know everything.
But it's not something that I've come across that frequently.
But on the other hand, there is, I would say what I am also thinking about when I'm when I'm when I write something like that, or when I think about these sorts of things, is that Indians in general exist as such a significant, immense cultural literary trope in Western civilization, broadly speaking, in American society as well, for sure, in a very big way.
There was actually an exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian a few years ago that really got at this, just the ubiquity of Indian names and things on cars, on sports teams, in cinema, throughout American society and culture.
So it clearly, you know, some sort of image of The native exists in deeply ingrained in American psychology and Western psychology in its own way.
I remember I went to Italy and there's like some coffee brand out in Italy where like they just have like some native guy in a headdress like as like the mascot of this coffee brand in Italy, man, like.
You know, like crazy.
Yeah, probably dates back to the 50s and the crossover with like Spaghetti Westerns.
And I think it's also often easy to forget that because you just brought up Spaghetti Westerns, right?
You know, there was a period in time where Hollywood and so much of American culture really was about the West and the frontier and the cowboy and the Indian and how John Wayne and Stagecoach, you know, shot off all the Apaches.
And that was like sort of America's understanding of its past and how it came to be a democracy.
And there was even like a whole significant historical thesis by Frederick Jackson Turner about how that was actually really the engine of American democracy up until the closing of the frontier was the frontier.
I think that as time has gone on, you know, the Western, Westerns have come back much more recently in our culture, but there was a large period of time where the Western sort of subsided a little bit in American culture, where Native people subsided a bit in Native culture, where other racial anxieties, you know, obviously significant white racial anxieties about racism towards Black people, more recently about our involvement in The Middle East, etc.
really came to the foreground.
You could see these things in everything from America's obsession with sort of crime procedurals to, you know, TV shows like 24, you know, which was so much about these like very trumped up ideas about Dangerous Islamists.
What I'm saying is that there is something deep in the American psychology and culture that is about this fictive view of the native and who we are that was created To both justify what they did to us, and then also for them to come to their own very strange grappling with what that history was.
As I mentioned, as per Klein, your insights about this relationship between, hey, you Here are the residential schools and their history, and the answer is, hey, well, here's QAnon.
She describes that as being sort of a sign of a mirror world in which the real history of Indigenous suffering is appropriated as the morbid fantasy of those who historically colonized them.
But part of, I think, what you're getting at is that this follows many prior appropriations And one of them is an appropriation, actually, of indigenous dignity and strength.
Like, I don't think it's a mistake that the white New Ager who got really interested in indigeneity or shamanism in 2010 is suddenly interested in QAnon in 2020.
So, I'm wondering if you see a relationship there.
Yeah, that's a really interesting one.
So, I grew up in the Bay Area, which is to say that I have a little bit of personal experience with it.
With that kind of a character, you know, they were liable to show up at the Native gathering and you'd see them on the side and they'd be a little bit of a freak show and we'd all just kind of be like, oh, you know, whatever.
As long as they don't behave too inappropriately, we'll just let them be.
Because Indians are nice, man.
We really put up with a lot of shit.
I don't think we get enough respect for that one.
You know, if we showed up at a church with our full-on regalia singing our songs, people would probably freak out.
But a hippie shows up with a bongo drum and we're like, yeah.
Let's just see how he acts, okay?
Maybe he just wants to learn and he's misguided.
Yeah, so I have some experience with that.
I think a lot of this often comes, we assume that a lot of this is coming from, broadly speaking, the right side of the aisle, sort of people who are already prone to Conservative resentment.
But I also think that there is a pretty significant strain of vaccine anti-vax sentiment or skepticism that exists within liberal circles.
You know, I imagine the sort of Venn diagram of people who are very sure that GMOs cause cancer, you know, is pretty overlapping with the set of people who are also vaccine Skeptics and you know who are interested in crystals and new agey stuff and what have you and you know, I don't want to I don't want to poopoo people in their Whatever it is that they're seeking on their own personal and spiritual journeys, you know, like the free to be you and me
Uh, is more or less my view most of the time.
What I would say, though, is that there is also this, um, this weird obsession with, with Native people as cool in our own, like, why does the New Agey guy show up at the powwows?
Because he, on some level, He wants to be an Indian.
Like, he wants to participate in our spirituality.
He wants to be closer to creation.
He wants to do all these things.
And he may very well be deracinated.
He may feel like he's lost without something like that.
Right, right, exactly.
And that's the other thing, is that I think, you know, my mom's family's white.
I love them, but there's just a lot less of a sense of our blood means something.
We are a family.
We need to be together.
There's not a shared place.
You know, there's not a shared commitment to to kinship and place in the same way that there is in any
kind of comparative way with the other, you know, the native side of my family. And I do think that's
a big thing. And I do think that there is something, you know, that society, liberal society,
has maybe lost touch with a little bit that is actually very fundamental to our soul
and our species, right?
It's that we actually are communal peoples who, for the vast majority of our history, were very attached to the places that we came from and lived with family.
You know, we lived in close connection, not just to our parents and siblings, but also to our cousins.
You know, like having a cousin in Native culture and society means something.
And I think, unfortunately, for a lot of white folks, and to a less extent other non-Native folks, I think other non-Native folks do have significant family connections, But, you know, a cousin is, you know, who's that?
Having navigated between those two spaces, is there like a brief maybe imagistic or even like sensual way that you could sum up the different feelings of being in those two different spaces?
You're in a place where there's an implied Understanding that that place and relationship is like really significant and bound versus whatever the other thing is like what does that feel like crossing over that threshold for you?
Yeah, I mean that's a really great question and also it's kind of a hard one for me to to answer because it's something that I've I guess done subconsciously throughout my throughout my life.
You know anyone who has had the opportunities that I've had, you know, you do a lot of crossing of, of worlds.
And sometimes it does lead to its own sort of whiplash effect.
You know, sometimes I'll, in particular, you know, from what, if I go back to Canem Lake for a funeral or something like that, and I'm, and I'm with my family and, you know, amidst, amidst that simultaneous immense love of holding each other when someone has, Has departed and also the deep, deep pain of that loss.
And then you come back to the white world, so to speak, where you have to perform in your nine to five and, you know, everyone's going around like the world is still spinning on the same axis.
You know, it is its own, um, it does create its own sort of dysphoria in a way.
I've started to do, I have my own, um, Spiritual and ceremonial commitments that I hold personally and more broadly in my community that have helped me to cope with that and to remain grounded.
But I think it really, at the end of the day, it looks like, it looks like from my very particular vantage point at this moment, it looks like, you know, you are a pallbearer one day and then, you know, two days later, you're on the phone with the folks who you're working with on your documentary, you know, most of whom are non-native, you know, one of them's in London and another one's in New York and another one's in LA.
And they're in it with you in this artistic way, and they obviously are compassionate people and that's why they do documentary, but they're not of it in the same way.
You know, they're not going to be buried there.
They're not going to carry what it is that you make with you for the rest of your life.
It's not theirs to carry at the end of the day.
And this is, I think there is something about about being in it and of it and from it that is yours to carry for life.
It's ultimately, if you have the opportunity to go advocate for it and tell stories about it and represent it to this broader world that needs to know, because it needs to change in some sort of way, that is its own kind of responsibility.
It's a privilege, but it's also a responsibility.
And it's one that I...
I don't take lightly.
I try not to think about it too much because it freaks me out when I take it a little too seriously, but it's a lot, man.
It's a lot.
Turning to your broader work, you describe having some Catholic heritage in your background as well, and I come from that tradition too, and my ears started burning a little bit when I was reading this profile that you wrote of Canada's first Indigenous Governor General, Mary Simon, who is Inuit, appointed by Trudeau in the wake of the news from Kamloops, actually.
And you open that piece by writing, my people are quite Catholic.
We baptize our children, eat the body and drink the blood of Christ, and sing hymns in our Salish tongue.
Though we don't often speak of Coyote, the trickster from whom we are descended, we still cause trouble like he did from time to time.
One thing that really struck me about the residential school story was that the schools, as you've detailed, were often run by Catholics.
But many of the First Nations survivor voices that spoke out during that time said pretty clearly that they still identified as Catholics, and that has been hard for me to wrap my head around because it seems to say to the settler,
You have behaved very badly towards me, but there are valuable teachings in your religion that have become part of me that I will not ignore or abandon.
And so I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to how that kind of syncretism works.
Yeah, it's a question that I think about a lot because within my own Family, I have wildly disparate relationships to Catholicism.
So my grandmother, who went to the residential schools and had such a traumatizing experience there that she Barely tells any stories about it.
She is a devout Catholic and she still goes to church.
You know, when I went to the Vatican for the documentary, I brought her back, her and her sister back rosaries.
And we still actually go to Canem Lake Church for Christmas mass every year.
So we can go there and, you know, we sing our Sing our hymns in Sikhwep Mookchin.
you know, the one that comes to my mind always is, uh,
Oh, Cal,
take me, when shall we,
take me, when shall we,
when shall we.
And I, I really have thought a lot about that because my father, uh, who's an artist,
has a completely different relationship to it. He, He absolutely cannot stand the church, could not stand to go to mass just full
Rejection.
And, you know, I, I really do wonder how those two things can exist within the same family and how they, how they can be reconciled.
You know, on the one hand, like I, a large part of me agrees with my father and, and feels like how on earth does my kid go to this damn church, which did all these horrible things to her and her family.
Uh, and then on the other hand, you know, I, I go and I see the women, it's often women of her generation, Singing the hymns in their language together in this church at the center of our community.
And I see the rituals that are part of it because Catholicism is a very, you know, ritualistic kind of religion.
Yeah.
If you do it right.
Yeah.
If you're actually doing it, then there is a magic to it.
Yeah.
And there's, there's a communality to, to it as well.
You know, everybody lines up, everyone goes on their knees, you know, people, You know, repeat the same things at the same time and, you know, respond to what the, you know, and with it and, and with your spirit, you know, there's all these, these things.
And, you know, I think my perspective on this is I personally am more invested in bringing back the world and philosophy of, of, of coyote personally.
That's a little bit more my view on this, but I also don't think that the, That that is completely incompatible with, um, with some understanding of, of a Catholic kind of faith and worldview and, and, and conception.
And, you know, clearly there was some space in Catholicism.
On the one hand, it was quite authoritarian, and they were beating our children for speaking
our language at these schools.
On the other hand, there are all these hymns in our language.
And they did become these places where we were still living together and communally.
And there are so many stories of Catholic masses at the Canem Lake Church, where the profane comes right
into the world of the sacred.
There's this really kind of hilarious one where I think it was my Uncle Tommy, if I remember the story correctly, comes in and he's a little drunk, to understate it, and they're doing the tithing and he reaches in his pockets and he grabs a wad of change.
In Canada, the change includes the loonies and toonies, and he just chucks it.
Not in the basket.
Not in the basket.
Like at the priest, okay.
No, just like right at him.
And there's other stories and things like that.
And the priest isn't a native guy.
No, actually it's really funny.
Well, I don't know at the time.
He was probably a white guy.
At the time, right now, we've been getting a lot of, it's been at least two Nigerian guys in a row, which is another fascinating overlapping thing with these histories of imperialism.
They send us Nigerians and kind of like British Columbia for whatever reason.
So yeah, no, I think that there's a whole, there's a space where these things can exist at the same time.
There's also this entire, you know, on my writing front, there's this subset of coyote stories that are clearly a mix between Biblical stories of, of Genesis and concepts of the Messiah intermixed with Coyote and some of them, in some of them, you know, uh, the oral history is like, Oh yeah.
And creator had a son and his name was Jesus, but he didn't really do that much.
And then Coyote, he died once and he came back and then Coyote came around and he made everything and died a bunch of times and came back a bunch of times.
So it's, you know, I think it's, I just think it's, I think these things can be in dialogue and they, they literally are in dialogue in our lives.
I think it's just at the end of the day, that is the human experience, right?
That is the human condition.
It's how is it that we reconcile these things in our lives that feel irreconcilable?
How is it that we live professing our faith and praying to a God who Was the God who justified taking away our kids?
How do these things exist at the same time?
Those are, on the deepest level, I think, questions about what it is to be human, what our humanity is.
And how do we deal with that?
How do we cope with that?
How do we move forward?
Yeah, and played out in the dialogue between your grandmother and your father.
And the two thoughts I have on that as I'm wondering if there's something about your grandmother's Catholicism that allowed her to To be a better Catholic than the Catholic in charge.
To grasp something of substance that actually wasn't in practice but could be sustaining anyway.
Yeah, I would say that one move that I hear quite often from that generation is a separation of the ideas and the faith from the institution and the people.
Yeah.
Which of course they have to make because Because if you see them as one and the same, then you couldn't believe in any of it.
But what I often hear is that there's got to be something greater.
Out there that there has to be meaning in all this, that this process and these rituals of prayer and, and reconnecting ourselves with God and creation and Jesus Christ, you know, will amount to some sort of peace, some sort of, you know, salvation from the sins of this world, the sins that were visited upon me often implicitly.
And, um, On some level, I do believe in that.
I do agree with that.
Native people are very, very spiritual people, often.
We're very prayerful people.
And fundamentally, that part of it fits right in within our culture.
You know, we're constantly praying and, you know, Keeping that line of communication and connection between ourselves and the mysteries that are much greater than ourselves alive.
If you go to a powwow or any other kind of Native gathering, you're going to pray before you do anything.
It's always going to happen.
Okay, last question.
Our Governor General, Mary Simon, had to enter into as an activist, thinker, and now as a statesperson.
You write, quote, it feels like a trap.
On the one hand, of course, you should go into the broken institution that harms our people and fix it.
On the other hand, it's a broken institution that harms our people.
Inuit have a word for the feeling that the children had.
Ilira, which is a mix of apprehension and fear that causes a suppression of opinion and voice.
And that's from Hugh Brody's The Other Side of Eden.
So I wanted to ask you, I imagine that you yourself are familiar with Ilira, and I'm wondering how you have navigated it.
That's a great question.
Native people, we have Many of us, I don't want to necessarily say all of us, but I think almost all of us have a very strong belief in the power of names and naming.
And it just so happens that my middle name is Brave.
Like, you know, that's like a funny line that you'd imagine like some sort of wannabe superhero would say.
You know, a pickup line or something, but it actually is true.
My middle name is actually Brave.
Right.
Um, so in a way, you know, I, I, it's something that I guess I've, I was lucky enough to have at least one parent who, uh, encouraged me.
I'd say both actually encouraged me to be, to be brave and to have the courage to speak up and face these things and feel empowered.
I also think that, that I happened to be born and to come up in a time and a place where, um, That was changing, you know, the culture around around that was changing and that at least for some portions and segments of society, people wanted to hear and wanted to know.
And, you know, I'm on this podcast as I guess a broader expression of that shifting zeitgeist.
You know, I think also, you know, part of that is is is a recognition that I've been very fortunate to be to be loved.
You know, I think that part of it is that maybe earlier generations would have been able to do and say these kinds of things if they hadn't been ripped from their moms when they were When they were little kids, you know, if they knew what it was to, to feel and, and, and be loved for so much of the year.
I mean, like it's, it's, it's hard to overstate the importance and significance and the power of that kind of deep, intimate human affection and connection and the strength that that gives all of us, I think.
And, We are just now getting enough generations away from that, that at least in the Native community, people are, you know, have the, some of us, at least enough of us, have the kind of situation and background where we do feel love.
We get love somewhere.
And for entire generations of our people, love was incredibly scarce.
There may be, for some of them, there was no love in the world.
That is just such a monstrous thing to look at and to confront.
So yeah, I'm just really, I'm really grateful for that.
And I think that's at the core of it.
And, uh, you know, obviously my, my family gave me the middle name Brave and it was something they wanted me to live up to.
And, you know, it was also in its own way, an expression of, of their love for me and their aspirations for me.
And I think We will never be able to give that back to the kids who were lost and taken away, but we can give it to all the ones who come after.
And I think we should never underestimate how much of an impact that can have on the world.
Julian Brave, NoiseCat, thank you so much for taking the time.
