Nonfiction – History – Indigenous – Biography & Autobiography – Social Science – Indigenous Studies

Published: 10/14/2025

A stunning narrative from one of the most powerful young writers at work todayWe Survived the Night interweaves oral history with hard-hitting journalism and a deeply personal father-son journey into a searing portrait of Indigenous survival, love, and resurgence.

Julian Brave NoiseCats childhood was rich with culture and contradictions. When his Secwpemc and Statimc father, an artist haunted by a turbulent past, abandoned the family, he and his non-Native mother were embraced by the urban Native community in Oakland, California, as well as by family on the Canim Lake Indian Reserve in British Columbia. In his fathers absence, NoiseCat immersed himself in Native history and culture to understand the man he seldom sawhis past, his story, where he came fromand, by extension, himself.

Years later, NoiseCat sets out across the continent to correct the erasure, invisibility, and misconceptions surrounding the First Peoples of this land, as he develops his voice as a storyteller and artist in his own right. Told in the style of a “Coyote Story,” a legend about the trickster forefather of NoiseCats people who was revered for his wit and mocked for his tendency to self-destruct, We Survived the Night brings a traditional artform nearly annihilated by colonization back to life on the page. Through a dazzling blend of history and mythology, memoir and reportage, NoiseCat unravels old stories and braids together new ones. He grapples with the erasure of North America’s First Peoples and the trauma that cascades across generations, while illuminating the vital Indigenous cultural, environmental, and political movements reshaping the future. He chronicles the historic ascent of the first Native American cabinet secretary in the United States and the first Indigenous sovereign of Canada; probes the colonial origins and limits of racial ideology and Indian identity through the story of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina; and hauls the golden eggs of an imperiled fish out of the sea alongside the Tlingit of Sitka, Alaska. This is a rewriting and restorationof Native history and, more intimately, of family and self, as NoiseCat seeks to reclaim a culture effaced by colonization and reconcile with a father who left. Virtuosic, compelling, and deeply moving, this is at once an intensely personal journey and a searing portrait of Indigenous survival, love, and resurgence.

Drawing from five years of on-the-ground reporting, We Survived the Night paints a profound and unforgettable portrait of contemporary Indigenous life, alongside an intimate and deeply powerful reckoning between a father and a son. Soulful, formally daring, indelible work from an important new voice.

AUTHOR BIO:

JULIAN BRAVE NOISECAT is a writer, Oscar-nominated filmmaker, champion powwow dancer, and student of Salish art and history. His writing has appeared in dozens of publications, includingThe New York Times,The Washington Post, andThe New Yorker. NoiseCat has been recognized with numerous awards including the 2022 American Mosaic Journalism Prize and many National Native Media Awards. He was a finalist for the Livingston Award and multiple Canadian National Magazine Awards, and was named to the TIME100 Next list in 2021. His first documentary,Sugarcane, was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary. Directed alongside Emily Kassie,Sugarcanepremiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where NoiseCat and Kassie won the Directing Award in U.S. Documentary. NoiseCat is a proud member of the Canim Lake Band Tsqscen and descendant of the Llwat Nation of Mount Currie.We Survived the Nightis his first book.

“Thoughtful, informative, often entertaining, and just as often saddening, [We Survived the Night] is a book to remember.”–Kirkus(starred review)

“NoiseCat gives readers the gift of his first book, a mash-up of memoir, journalism, and folktales. . . . All of it adds up to beautiful storytelling.”–Booklist(starred review)

“[We Survived the Night is] a genre-bending work of nonfiction written with immaculate composure. . . . NoiseCat manages to entertain and inform in equal measure. Every tale, whether myth or history, is imbued with a beautiful honesty that will surely move readers.”–Library Journal(starred review)

“A powerful archive of Indigenous pain and resistance.”–Publishers Weekly

“InWe Survived the Night, NoiseCat embraces the ‘silenced narrative traditions’ of his ancestors to build both a personal story and an extensive history of his people. . . . These older stories are interwoven with the contemporary ones, a framework that lends the book a unique cadence and rhythm.”–BookPage

“Julian Brave NoiseCat seamlessly connects true tales of identity and betrayal, love and abandonment, clarity and confusion.We Survived the Nightis a whirling, radiant gift to the reader.”–Louise Erdrich, author ofThe Night Watchman

“Written in gorgeous, sparse prose,We Survived the Nightreads like a novel. Told with a blistering honesty, the truth and grit create a beautifully woven coyote story we haven’t heard before. This is a love letter to Oakland, to the Canim Lake Band Tsq’secen of the Secwepemc Nation, to a father from his son, to the act of being a Native person in the twenty first century finding ways to love even through all that wounds have opened and wrought. With this, Julian Brave NoiseCat has written a book I’ve been waiting my whole life to read.”–Tommy Orange, author ofWandering Stars

“Invigorating and soul-stirring,We Survived the Nightis a book whose epic scale–encompassing explorations of history, language, land, and politics, as well as of family bonds, artmaking, and storytelling–astonishes me. It is a tribute, in the end, to love which is intimate and clear-eyed enough to see one’s own father and mother, and capacious enough to hold the whole world.”–Megha Majumdar, author ofA Guardian and a Thief

“We Survived the Nightis filled with that thing I look for in all great art–love deepened by sorrow, sorrow widened by love. Survival, yes. NoiseCat is one of our great new Scheherazades–he keeps people alive in his stories. And people will want to stay alive because of them. “–Kaveh Akbar, author ofMartyr!