We Survived the Night

Julian Brave NoiseCat’s childhood was rich with culture and contradictions. When his Secwépemc and St’at’imc father, an artist haunted by a turbulent past, abandoned the family, NoiseCat 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 father’s absence, NoiseCat immersed himself in Native history and culture to understand the man he seldom saw—his past, his story, where he came from—and, 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 own voice as a storyteller and artist. Told in the style of a “Coyote Story,” a legend about the trickster forefather of NoiseCat’s people who was revered for his wit and mocked for his tendency to self-destruct, We Survived the Night brings a traditional art form nearly annihilated by colonization back to life. Through a dazzling blend of history and mythology, memoir and reportage, NoiseCat 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 shaping the future. He chronicles the historic ascent of the first Native American cabinet secretary of the United States and the first Indigenous governor general of Canada, probes the colonial origins and limits ofracial 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.

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, deeply powerful reckoning between a father and a son. A soulful, formally daring and indelible work from a virtuosic new voice.