Julian Brave NoiseCat's survival story is both personal and ancestral
toggle caption Emily Kassie/Penguin Random House
Minutes after being born, Ed Archie NoiseCat was thrown away. A janitor at St. Joseph's Mission School for Indigenous Canadians discovered the infant as he was preparing to burn the garbage. Ed's son, writer and filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat, was an adult before he learned the full story of his father's birth.
"My family never talked about it, and my father didn't really know the specifics around what happened when he was born and how he was found," Julian says. "When I was a teenager, I had heard what I assumed at the time were ghost stories about babies being born at St. Joseph's mission being put into the trash incinerator there."
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St. Joseph's Mission School was one of more than 100 missionary boarding schools that Indigenous children were required to attend, as mandated by the Canadian government in 1894.
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