We Survived the Night

By: Julian Brave NoiseCat

Narrated by: Julian Brave NoiseCat

A stunning narrative from one of the most powerful young writers at work today, and the director of the Oscar®-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’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 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.

*Includes a downloadable PDF with a partial family tree, a map, a selected bibliography, and the glossary from the print edition of the book

Interesting and covers a lot of ground

If you're looking for a straight forward memoir, this is not it. This is part memoir, biography, reportage, coyote stories, essay, history. I most liked the memoir and general history of indigenous people. I also like to read about the place I'm from (Oakland/SF area) and places I've been and this fit the bill. Well written and narrated.

Should be in Every Library

I loved this oral history of the Coyote People.It should be in every white library along with Black AF History; then we might get a less ethnocentric vision of history, our ancestors, and, potentially, their place in events we are now coming to fully understand.

The Best Indigenous Essayist

I love this book because it used Coyote stories as a framework for understanding our past, present, and future. The world is more understandable when seen through the eyes of Coyote. Julian Brave Noisecat is an accomplished essayist. He shares the knowledge and histories of First Peoples, his family, and himself with honesty and humor. He is a rising talent who must not be missed.

Good to hear in the author's own voice

The author uses a unique format that allows the reader to see his lifelong struggles with his identity as a half-white, half-indigenous person in Canada. Using stories of the coyote trickster as a framing device, he opens up the lives of the native men and women in his family for the reader. I really felt like I got to know each person. Intimate family moments--the good, the bad, and the ugly--show the terrible effects of colonization that continue to reverberate down through the generations. But he also shows how these individuals and communities are resilient and refuse to allow their culture to be erased.

I learned so much from this book that I didn't know. Athough the book focuses on the native people of Canada, there is also a long chapter about the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina, another on the Navajo, and another on the first-ever Native American cabinet secretary in US history. Those chapters, along with one detailing the political career of Canada's first indigenous governor general, were extremely well-researched. But I did find it a bit boring to listen to all those facts and ended up skipping to the end of those chapters. They felt like they belonged in another book, maybe something more like a history of the indigenous peoples of North America.

The parts of the book that really held my interest were the interwoven coyote stories and the tales of the life of the author, his relatives, and his friends.

[I listened to this as an audio book read by the author, which I highly recommend so you can hear him correctly pronouncing the people and place names.]

insight and perspective

such a beautiful story sharing history and culture and personal stories. I have a deeper understanding of indigenous people and the role of colonization, past and present, in their struggles and perseverance