Julian Brave NoiseCat – We Survived the Night

Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes Julian Brave NoiseCat who will share his stunning debut We Survived the Night. 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.

This event is cosponsored by the American Indian Resource Center and The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz. It will take place at the London Nelson Community Center.

“Written in gorgeous, sparse prose, We Survived the Night reads 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

A stunning narrative from one of the most powerful young writers at work today—We Survived the Night (Knopf) 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 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, 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 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 voice as a storyteller and artist in his own right.

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, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The 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, Sugarcane premiered 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 Tsq̓éscen̓ and descendant of the Líl̓wat Nation of Mount Currie. We Survived the Night is his first book.