My Father Was Found in a Residential School Incinerator When He Was an Infant

The noise came from behind the mission. It sounded like a cat. I’ve imagined it countless times.

At about half past eleven, the night watchman pulled his car around the back of St. Joseph’s Mission, one of the Indian residential schools in British Columbia where my family was sent to unlearn our Indian ways. The four-storey building was all white and right angles. Unadorned, save for a big cross looming over the entrance and blue-green trim that, from a distance, made the campus look like a hunk of mouldy cheese plopped in the middle of the valley.

In my mind’s eye, his carburetor is coughing, the crickets are singing, and there’s that tiny, eerie cry. When he killed the engine and stepped out from behind his insect-speckled windshield, the night watchman could hear it too. It was coming from the service wing, a single-storey brick annex at the back of the mission. The baby’s scream climbed the lone smokestack looming out of that annex and crawled across the school grounds. It was primal. The sound of birth meeting death.

The night watchman flicked on his flashlight. Its beam reflected off his browline eyeglasses. Antonius Cornelius Stoop went by Tony. He wore his brown hair in one of those short-cropped everyman cuts. And he was an everyman. A Dutchman who spoke broken English, Tony immigrated to Canada from the old country. At night, he walked the grounds of St. Joseph’s, a ring of keys jingling on his hip and a flashlight in his hand. It was his job to make sure the Indian kids weren’t up to any Indian mischief, like stealing food or running away. He also kept an eye on the mission’s prized and profitable herd of Herefords. Undoubtedly, he saw and heard things in his many nights at St. Joseph’s, where he worked for more than thirty years until the school was shuttered in 1981. But he said little and kept to himself.

In 2021, the Williams Lake First Nation opened an investigation into missing students at St. Joseph’s Mission. The First Nation’s investigators found that under Father O’Connor and other principals at St. Joseph’s, babies conceived by students and nuns—including some fathered by priests—were aborted or adopted out. Witnesses as well as records in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police archives attested to something even darker: newborn babies cast into the incinerator to be burned with the garbage.

The night of August 16, 1959, Tony followed that wail, flashlight in hand. Sound and light led him inside the service wing to a garbage burner about the size of an office desk, where trash from the mission was turned to ash. He opened it, casting rays of light onto rubbish and soot. Somewhere near the top of the pile was an ice cream carton, repurposed as a makeshift wastebasket and discarded no more than twenty minutes before. Within was a newborn. The authorities called him “Baby X.” And he was my father.

In the beginning, there was no death.

Raven and his horde of death eaters—carrion lovers like Maggot, Fly, and Crow—wanted to eat the eyeballs of the dead. So Raven, the paramount trickster of Northwest Coast lore, called together a council of all the animals. On the opposite side of that council sat Coyote, the wandering shape shifter who ranged across the river-gouged mountains and plateaus of inland legend. Coyote was sent to earth by Creator to arrange the world into its Indigenous state. He had a mixed record and reputation—I doubt any Indian would recommend him for a job. But he loved life, and boy was his full of stories.

Coyote laid a pipe, the ceremonial instrument of truth and peace, before Raven and asked, “Why is it that you wish people to die?”

“Oh, Coyote, can’t you see?” Raven cooed. “If people live forever, there will soon be too many.”

“But death will be hard on the soul,” Coyote responded. “It will cause pain and be full of questions.”

Raven pecked at his thoughts. “What about your enemies? Do you really wish to see them eat while you and yours go hungry?” His black horde murmured in agreement.

The animals looked to Coyote for his response. The trickster could be brilliant on his feet. “What if we let death be like sleep?” Coyote shrugged. “People could die for a while, but then come back?”

Raven and his flock cackled. “Let them rot!” squawked Crow.

And if you’ve ever nibbled on the eyes in a fish-head stew, you can understand why Raven wanted death so bad. Because eyeballs are gooey, umami, delicious. The mood of the council swung toward Raven and his vision for a corpse feast.

Coyote turned tail. “It’s agreed,” said the furry trickster as he lifted and lit his pipe, holding it awkwardly as far away from his body as possible.

“Careful!” teased victorious Raven. “We wouldn’t want you to singe that tail of yours.” And all the animals laughed at Coyote’s expense. Because he was always catching his tail on fire, turning it black.

Coyote shot his coastal counterpart a look. Maybe it was then that he resolved to get the last laugh. Because after that, he drew breath and exhaled the natural law: “People shall die when their time has come. Their bodies shall be buried. And their souls shall travel the red road to the Land of the Dead.” All the animals murmured in agreement, smoked the pipe, and returned home.

When the seasons changed, Raven’s daughter fell ill. In his majestic coastal perch, Raven tried to work his magic. But he could not return life and soul to the girl. She was the first to die.

Teary eyed, Raven flew back to Coyote. “Coyote, I take it back. I don’t want death in this world.”

But Coyote, that trickster, told Raven, “No take backs.” And Death grabbed hold of the world.

A long time ago, the Interior Salish peoples, whose homelands stretch across the rivers and plateaus of the Pacific Northwest, used to say we were “Coyote People.” By this, we meant we were not only people who told stories about the antics of the trickster Coyote who helped Creator make the world, as many Indigenous nations in North America do. We also believed we were Coyote’s descendants. For better—but also, often for worse—a good part of our wonderfully imperfect world, history, philosophy, and bloodlines came from that prolific trickster, transformer, and shape shifter.

But that was before the missions. To the world of crosses, paper, and property, our trickster forefather was heathen fairy tale at best and the Devil himself at worst. By the time Dad was born, the memory of Coyote had been so thoroughly stamped out that his descendants rarely, if ever, spoke his name: Sek’lep. We didn’t know we were Coyote People. And we had forgotten the trickster was our ancestor—even though we are still a lot like the guy.

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My father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, grew up on the Canim Lake Indian Reserve, a Secwépemc community about sixty miles southeast of Williams Lake, where, like him, I am a band member. Our reserve, about a ten-minute drive west of the lake, consists primarily of a verdant wooded rectangle in the Canim Valley, roughly one and a half miles wide by five miles, long known as “Canim Lake Indian Reserve No. 1.”

There’s a creek that used to be full of kokanee and a road worn down by logging trucks running through the valley. Along that sole thoroughfare, the Canim Lake Band has three dirt-road subdivisions of government housing. The standard issue is two stories with two baths, four beds, and far more than four Indians packed inside. Our rez looks the way you might imagine a rez looks: cars up on blocks, free-ranging dogs, horses here and there, the occasional cousin getting around on a bicycle pieced together out of spare parts. It’s hard edged and gorgeous. The kind of place where the same brother who knocked out your teeth will sprinkle dirt and tears on your grave.

Dad hand-painting a Lichtenstein at Tyler Graphics (From the Roddy/NoiseCat Collection)

Dad never saw a life or future for himself in Canim Lake, only a painful past of mere survival. As soon as he was grown, he got out, made himself into a semi-famous Indian artist, and fathered two kids—my sister and me—in places as far away from the rez as he could get. Then, not long after, he left us kids behind too.

When Mom visited the rez without Dad for the first time, she put the two of us on a plane to Seattle, rented a car, and drove nine hours north. My parents were getting a divorce because Dad had had an epiphany: he needed alcohol more than he needed Mom and me.

When I was little and Dad was sober, I would hang out with him most of the day in his studio. We’d go on little artist adventures: carve this, pick up that, paint this, deliver that. He’d spoil me with candies, toys, and other presents. I wore my hair long, a “mini Ed.” I have a distinct memory of calling out for “’Addy’s” help. When Mom came running, I told her, “No. I said ’Addy!”

Left: With Mom, who is holding an advance reader’s copy of my book, at the ninety-seventh Academy Awards (Photo by Christopher LaMarca). Right: Dad and I in Canim Lake, on a road trip to St. Joseph’s Mission, 2022 (Photo by Emily Kassie)

After ’Addy left, I started sleeping in Mom’s bed. She read Harry Potter books aloud as I dozed off. I started calling my first-grade teacher “Snape” in private. Like Harry’s dreaded professor of potions, it turned out she had my best interests at heart. And like every other millennial, I identified with the Boy Who Lived. When, in truth, the Boy Who Lived was my father.

My mom is white. Out and about, people seldom recognized her as my mother, because she’s Irish pale and I’m qelmúcw (Native) brown. Once in a while, when I was little, someone would stop her on the street and ask what she was doing with “that child.” After Dad left, she didn’t know if it was her place to take me back to the rez and keep me connected to my family, my people, and our culture. Her own sister told her she shouldn’t.

But Mom didn’t listen to her sister or her doubts. She followed her gut north, to the homeland of her ex-husband. When the two of us pulled up to the Canadian border, I remember Mom handing over what felt like a stack of documents, including my birth certificate, her divorce papers, and a letter from Dad attesting to the fact that she and I may have different phenotypes and last names but that I was, in fact, her child. Even with documentary truth staring him in the face, the border patrol agent leaned out of his booth, looked me in the eye, and asked, “Is this your mom?”

My kyé7e (kya-ah, grandmother) used to have a mug with the word “Tsecwínucw-k” written across it. When I’d walk into her house, kick off my boots, and ascend the stairs for our almost nightly Secwepemctsín language lessons together in the summers of 2012 and 2013, when I was nineteen and then twenty, Kyé7e would rise from her living room recliner. Wearing her cozy slippers, she’d shuffle across the room to the kitchen. Peering up into cluttered cabinets from behind rectangular spectacles framed by short-cropped and permed silver-black hair—the look favoured by Secwépemc grandmothers—she would retrieve a mug, usually the one that said “Tsecwínucw-k.”

Then she would fix some tea—almost always the traditional variety called “Hudson’s Bay tea” by some and “swamp tea” by us—take her seat across from me at the table, and crack open a photocopied edition of the 1974 language workbook A Shuswap Course. Kyé7e spent the first month of our lessons teaching me how to wrap my anglophone-wired mouth around the forty-two unique sounds that constitute the Shuswap alphabet. Then she taught me words, phrases, and grammar.

That’s how I learned that tsecwínucw-k is a morning greeting, kind of like “good morning” in Secwepemctsín. Except it doesn’t mean “good morning.” That’s “le7 te secwenwen.” Instead, “tsecwínucw-k” means “you survived the night.” I often wonder what it meant for our people to greet one another and the day with the simple but profound acknowledgement that we are still here. And then I chuckle at the tragicomic sensibility that put “you survived the night,” in a language with no more than a few dozen fluent speakers remaining, on Kyé7e’s mug.

Every once in a long while, between our language exercises, I would work up the courage to ask Kyé7e about the mission. There are many bone-chilling stories told in hushed tones and private company about St. Joseph’s. I used to hear some of these tales retold from time to time around Canim Lake. But even I used to consider them more ghost story than truth. Because my own family never told them.

For almost my entire life, I did not know the story of my father’s birth. I did not know that those whispers I heard about the incinerator at the mission weren’t just rez legends. I did not know that for Dad, me, my sister, and all the NoiseCats who will come after us, this is our origin story. In fact, I didn’t even know there was much to know about my father’s birth until I was well into my twenties. All I knew was that Kyé7e attended St. Joseph’s, that she finished high school and studied nursing at the Kamloops Indian Residential School 150 miles south of Williams Lake, and that she rarely said a word about any of it.

To this day, I’ve only heard Kyé7e tell a couple of stories about the mission. One is about how she wasn’t supposed to go in the first place. Her parents tried to hide her and her older brother Tommy from the Indian agent and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police when they came to round up the kids at Canim Lake. My great-grandparents sent Kyé7e and Tommy out on the family trapline and told them to stay there for two weeks. At that cabin in the bush, Kyé7e says, Tommy treated her like his servant and made her carry all the squirrels he shot. Kyé7e got fed up. Too young to understand how long two weeks was, she marched home to the rez only to be picked up by the Indian agent. Every September for the rest of her youth, she was hauled sixty miles from Canim Lake to St. Joseph’s in the back of a cattle truck.

The other story I’ve heard Kyé7e tell is about how scary life was at the mission, where Kyé7e says little Secwépemc girls called the priests and nuns “kenkeknem,” which means “black bear.” “Ste7k re kenkeknem,” Kyé7e and her little gal friends would whisper to one another when the priests and nuns approached. “The black bear is coming.” Then they would stop speaking their language and fall silent. Because the black bear is a predator.

By the time I started writing this, Kyé7e was the second-oldest person on the Canim Lake Indian Reserve. She’s the matriarch at the root of our sprawling family tree and one of the last remaining fluent speakers of Secwepemctsín. I never wanted to trouble her—or my dad, or myself—with these stories. So silence, avoidance, and even denial became my tradition too, a tacit family conspiracy.

But then, ground-penetrating radar identified what appeared to be 215 child-sized graves beneath the apple orchard at the Kamloops Indian Residential School. Many more investigations soon followed, including at St. Joseph’s Mission. The spirits of our missing children—Kyé7e’s classmates, babies like my father—were coming home. And their truths could not be hidden, suppressed, or ignored any longer.

Left: Alice NoiseCat and Jacob Archie in Canim Lake, circa 1956 (From the Roddy/NoiseCat Collection). Right: Kyé7e Elsie and Kyé7e Toni (seated) with me and my sister, Zia (standing), 2024 (Photo by Mandy McLelland)

Like other Indigenous peoples, the Salish divide oral narratives relating to our history, philosophy, and environment into two categories: lexéy’em and tspetékwll. Lexéy’em are oral histories of recalled events, often from the storyteller’s own life and genealogy. Tspetékwll are stories about the creation and transformation of the world, often dealing with the more distant past and the supernatural. The story of how Coyote brought death to the world is one such tspetékwll.

The ideas running through these Coyote Stories are always multi-layered. Even though Coyote was a model of qualities not to emulate, the trickster was behind some of the most significant acts in the creation and transformation of the world. So, while bumbling and treacherous, he was also revered.

The Coyote Stories convey a world view wherein the complexity of humanity, nature, and life is celebrated, cursed, laughed at, and grappled with all at the same time. Multiple perspectives and interpretations live in these stories. And since this wonderful mess of a trickster is our ancestor, every time we come back to these traditions, we are also talking about ourselves—the best and worst parts of our nature, our supernatural achievements, base desires, wild adventures, tricksterly foibles, and damn good times that we believe ought to be remembered and passed on to our descendants. Because on the most basic level, the Coyote Stories told our people that it was right to remember one another and our ancestors—the good, the bad, and especially the funny.

These Coyote Stories are not mere echoes of an ethnographic past. Not at all. They are commentaries about our present. With each retelling, the speaker pulls forward and pushes back details, adding the values and interpretations of their generation to what they learned from those who came before. In this way, every story connects us to our forebears. They are living representations of who we are and how we ought to live—questions of great consequence to the Indian world. Because, of course, the world wasn’t supposed to have any living Indians.

In Salish, the root morpheme—the most basic linguistic unit of meaning—for “land” and “people” is one and the same: “-emc.” So, every time we identify ourselves, we are saying that we are our lands and our lands are us. This is an idea shared by many Indigenous peoples. Because to be Indigenous is to come from a particular place and people—to live and carry forward a human experience connected to generations who came before, often stretching all the way back to the creation of your people and your place. Perhaps all the way back to a time when we were not human, when we were something else—something animal, something supernatural, something more. We are all related, but we are not all the same.

Looking out at that big, diverse Indian world is one of my ways of looking within—just as looking within is a way for me to look out. Ever since Dad left, stories have helped me better make sense of him and what it means to be a descendant and son of Coyote in both the cultural and personal sense. Because in my world, my father is Coyote. He’s mythic and elusive. A great creator, terrible demolisher, and downright hilarious hellraiser. I caught sight of him maybe two dozen times from the age of eight to twenty-three. There were many calendar years when I saw him just once and some when I didn’t see him at all. I had to loan him money so he could attend my high school graduation. My mom paid his way to my college commencement. And yet, it has always felt like my life and identity are defined by him. And by his absence. How can that be?

How can it be that our humanity—something as fundamental as who we are—is so often shaped by people, parents, and ancestors we rarely if ever encounter? That our people can come to be defined by what was stolen from us? That our path forward so often demands we uncover our deepest wounds and darkest secrets just to understand who we are and why we persist? If not to heal, then at least to know and name. To see this night has a story and that it is survival. To say my father, like his father before him, was a trickster in the vein of Coyote. And to know I am his son.

Excerpted from We Survived the Night by Julian Brave NoiseCat. Copyright © 2025 by Julian Brave NoiseCat. Published by arrangement with Random House Canada. All rights reserved.

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