We Survived the Night

By Julian Brave NoiseCat

WINNER OF THE TADEUSZ BRADECKI PRIZE - A stunning narrative from one of the most powerful young writers at work today, and the director of the Oscar(R)-nominated documentary, Sugarcane, We 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 NoiseCat seamlessly connects true tales of identity and betrayal, love and abandonment, clarity and confusion. We Survived the Night is a whirling, radiant gift to the reader." --Louise Erdrich, author of The Night Watchman

Julian Brave NoiseCat's childhood was rich with culture and contradictions. When his Secw pemc 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 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 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 a restoration--of 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. A soulful, formally daring, and indelible work from an important new voice.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0593320786
• ISBN13: 9780593320785
• Release Date: October 2025
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Length: 432 Pages
• Weight: 1.48 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.7" x 6.7" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

An intimate memoir and familial history I couldn’t put down

“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 this father before him, was a trickster in the vein of coyote and to know I am his son.”