What does it mean to survive—and who carries the story afterward?

When writer and filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat talks about survival, he does not begin with abstraction. He begins with a story. On this episode of All My Relations, Julian joins us to discuss his new book, We Survived the Night, a father–son narrative shaped in the tradition of a Coyote story—layered, funny, painful, and exacting in its truths.

The book traces Julian’s relationship with his father through ancestral structure rather than Western memoir form. Coyote appears not as metaphor but as guide: a trickster forefather who teaches through contradiction, humor, and refusal. Julian describes dark Indigenous humor as a survival strategy honed over generations and carried forward through oral tradition.

Throughout the conversation, Julian challenges the language often used to contain Indigenous knowledge. These stories are not myths or folklore. They live and change, told differently depending on who listens, who tells them, and what the moment requires. Multiple truths coexist within them, held in relationship rather than resolved into a single meaning. Indigenous languages, Julian explains, do more than preserve these teachings—they shape how knowledge moves through the world.

That insistence on truth also shapes Julian’s filmmaking. The episode turns to Sugarcane, his award-winning documentary co-directed with Emily Kassie, which investigates the legacy of St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School. The film refuses easy closure, instead asking what responsibility looks like after harm, and how survivors and descendants carry grief alongside love.

Across writing and film, Julian returns to the same question: how Indigenous people endure without flattening pain into spectacle. Basket Lady and Coyote emerge not as figures of the past but as living teachers—offering guidance for a present still shaped by trickster energy, rupture, and repair.

These stories survived attempted erasure.
They survived the night.

May the stories of Basket Lady and Coyote live on.

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Resources:

Purchase We Survived the Night today:

https://shoptidelands.com/products/books-rooted-in-fire-copy?_pos=1&_psq=We+Survived+the+Night&_ss=e&_v=1.0

Watch Sugarcane on Disney+ and Hulu

National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition:

https://boardingschoolhealing.org/

Tribal Boarding School Toolkit for Healing:

https://acf.gov/sites/default/files/documents/ana/NPAIHB_Thrive_BoardinSchoolToolkit.pdf

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Support the show

Follow us on Instagram @amrpodcast, or support our work on Patreon. Show notes are published on our website, Allmyrelationspodcast.com. Matika's book Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America is available now! T'igwicid and Hyshqe for being on this journey with us.

What happens when food becomes a blueprint for liberation? On this episode of All My Relations, we’re joined by Chef Sean Sherman (Oglala Lakota) and journalist/co-author Kate Nelson (Tlingit) to talk about Turtle Island—a cookbook, a history lesson, and a future-facing manifesto for Indigenous food sovereignty. We get into what it means to remove colonial borders (and colonial ingredients), why Indigenous foodways are global and relational, and how Sean’s nonprofit model is moving real resources back into Indigenous communities—from Native producers to Native jobs. Along the way: moose stew, fir tips, colonized palates, seed keepers, Buffalo Bird Woman’s garden, and a clear-eyed conversation about ICE, labor, and who actually feeds this country. Food is the entry point—but sovereignty is the goal. Just change everything. Feed your people.

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Resources

Purchase Turtle Island Today: https://shoptidelands.com/products/books-whereas-copy?variant=47505083924728

To learn about Sean’s work and North American Traditional Food Systems

https://natifs.org/

https://seansherman.com/

Kate’s Work: https://www.kateanelson.com/

Esquire Article: https://www.esquire.com/food-drink/restaurants/a36474711/chef-sean-sherman-owamni-indigenous-minneapolis-restaurant-profile/

Text us your thoughts!

Support the show

Follow us on Instagram @amrpodcast, or support our work on Patreon. Show notes are published on our website, Allmyrelationspodcast.com. Matika's book Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America is available now! T'igwicid and Hyshqe for being on this journey with us.

As SNAP benefits face new political threats, millions of families are being pushed deeper into food insecurity—including many of our Native relatives whose communities already navigate the long-term impacts of colonization on food systems.

In this special All My Relations + Old Growth Table podcast collaboration, Matika Wilbur and Temryss Lane sit down with Valerie Segrest (Muckleshoot), a leading Indigenous food systems expert and advocate, to unpack what these proposed cuts mean for Native nations and why food sovereignty is central to our collective survival.

Together, they explore how federal policy shapes daily access to food, the ongoing fight to restore Indigenous foodways, and what it means to nourish our people when systems fail us.

This episode also features on-the-ground field reports from Gray Fox Farm, Suquamish Seafoods, the Native American Youth and Family Center (NAYA), and professional forager Chai Tobar-Dupres (Cowlitz), offering a rich, real-time look at the work happening across our communities to reclaim sustenance, land, and autonomy.

This is a conversation about power, policy, kinship, and the future of how we feed one another.

Resources/places to donate:

www.unkitawa.org

www.chiefseattleclub.org

www.feed7generations.org

Businesses featured in the episode:

suquamishseafoods.com

www.grayfoxfarmwa.com

nayapdx.org

cowlitzforager

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Credits:

Film Production by Francisco “Pancho” Sánchez

PA Mandy Yeahpau

Edited by Francisco “Pancho” Sánchez

Produced by Matika Wilbur

Co/hosted by Temryss Lane

Social Media by Katharina Mei-Fa Brinschwitz

Text us your thoughts!

Support the show

Follow us on Instagram @amrpodcast, or support our work on Patreon. Show notes are published on our website, Allmyrelationspodcast.com. Matika's book Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America is available now! T'igwicid and Hyshqe for being on this journey with us.