“I grew up in a very Indian California, and it was under almost constant siege by a society habituated to extraction, displacement, and dispossession,” wrote Julian Brave NoiseCat in 2022. “I remember running around the Intertribal Friendship House with a bunch of other snot-nosed Native kids back when the nonprofit was borderline insolvent and the community garden was little more than a sandbox and jungle gym waiting to give you tetanus. The Native Bay Area and California that raised me was pocked with these invisible enclaves of Indian community: filled with love and holding on by a thread.”
NoiseCat, a member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen, is an Oakland-raised writer, journalist, and filmmaker—the first Indigenous North American filmmaker ever nominated for an Oscar. I wish I had access to writing like his when I was growing up in the Bay Area in the ’80s and ’90s. What I learned about Native culture and history, in both the bay and the US, felt locked away in past tense, in the static pages of history textbooks. NoiseCat’s writing reframes familiar terrain entirely—revealing a postapocalyptic Indigenous perspective on a California and a country that were always there, but never on the pages I was handed.
That perspective is at the heart of NoiseCat’s first book, We Survived the Night, which weaves memoir, Indigenous myth and oral tradition, and reportage. The title comes from tsecwínucw-k—a traditional Secwepemcstin greeting that doesn’t quite translate to “good morning,” but rather to “you survived the night.” For Indigenous people in North America, survival isn’t a metaphor; it’s a lived reality.
We Survived the Night is a bestseller in both Canada and the US, was named a best book across numerous 2025 lists, and is currently a finalist for the 2026 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. With PEN’s award ceremony on March 31, there’s no better time to add it to your bookshelf.
Where did you grow up?
Oakland, California, during the hyphy movement. I had four copies of E-40’s My Ghetto Report Card and could rap every word.
What places feel like home?
Currently: Oakland, California; Canim Lake, British Columbia; Bremerton, Washington; and Surrey, British Columbia.
Other than family members, who or what has shaped you the most?
Powwow dancing, the good ol’ hockey game, and Sherman Alexie.
What is your favorite time of day?
Dinner.
What are you really good at?
Telling stories, hopefully?
What’s the best gift you’ve ever received?
My first child, a son, who will be born in April.
Describe your favorite meal.
Fish and rice with seaweed and eulachon grease, or really any traditional food, but especially the seafood my Tsimshian in-laws eat.
Sound or silence? (And if sound, what sound?)
The sound of a household full of relatives.
Where do you do your best thinking?
In my truck, or on a run, or in my truck on the run.
What journey—physical, creative, intellectual, or otherwise—has meant the most to you?
I didn’t grow up with my father, he left when I was little. We reconciled as adults when I decided to move in with him to write my first book, We Survived the Night, and direct my first documentary, Sugarcane, alongside Emily Kassie. Both of those projects were, at their core, about our relationship and reconciliation. I’m really excited to become a dad. My dad was 33 when I was born and I will be 33 when my son comes into the world.
Where do you like to read?
In transit, on the beach, or in my truck in audiobook form.
What’s the last rabbit hole you disappeared into?
I was born in Minnesota, so I was proud to discover that four out of the five Team USA men’s hockey players who skipped the Trump White House visit and State of the Union were also from Minnesota, the “State of Hockey.”
Name three publications you enjoy reading these days.
Witi Ihimaera’s Substack, Sherman Alexie’s Substack, The New Yorker.
What’s one longread that you can’t stop thinking about?
I’ll never forget the first time I read Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold”or Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem. As someone who has worked exclusively in nonfiction until now, I have so much respect for the writers whose work redefined what this genre could be. I specifically want to shout out my own grandfather, Joe Roddy, lead writer for Look magazine back in the day, who profiled the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould for The New Yorker back in 1960. The piece is called “Apollonian” and it has recently been made available via the magazine’s website.
What was the last book you read?
I’ve been reading and rereading Moby Dick and some other classics: F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider. I’m currently a decent way into Keri Hulme’s The Bone People and loving it. Between those novels, I finally got around to Kathleen DuVal’s Native Nations: A Millennium of North America, one of the most remarkable works of history I’ve ever read.
What piece of nonfiction are you most proud of writing?
I’m proud of my first book, We Survived the Night, a portrait of contemporary Indigenous life across Canada and the United States that weaves together memoir, family history, and reportage, with a contemporary retelling of the Coyote epic. Indigenous peoples all the way from Central America to Western Canada used to tell stories about the trickster Coyote, who was sent to the earth by Creator to set the world in order, but those stories are now seldom told and have nearly died out among my people and many others. The Coyote Stories have never been taken seriously as nonfiction, even though that is how our own people regard them. I’m proud of the way We Survived the Night pushes the boundaries of nonfiction. And I also think that it’s only right that my first book is my own take on the greatest narrative tradition from my own Indigenous canon.
What’s your most reliable way to get creatively unstuck?
Honestly? Get stoned.
Who’s a writer you turn to when you need some inspiration?
Sherman Alexie’s tragicomic sensibility always did it for me. I’m drawn to Hemingway’s tight prose. The creative ways Hanif Abdurraqib plays with structure liberated my own. Layli Long Soldier does this visually and to the nth degree in her poetry. As a journalist, I learned a lot reading Evan Osnos, who does so much with reported details. I’ve always admired Bill McKibben’s combination of expert yet accessible commentary on perhaps the greatest challenge of our era, climate change. And then you have writers with such distinct style and voice: Tommy Orange, Jia Tolentino, Rebecca Solnit. I’m always blown away by writers like them because what they do is so distinctly them.
What words do you overuse?
In a recent draft: “got.”
What’s your favorite guilty pleasure?
Eating stuff my stomach can’t actually handle: Szechuan food and milk in all its many delicious forms.
What superpower would you like to have?
It would be pretty sick to fly.
What animal or nonhuman being do you most identify with?
Coyote.
If you have a free solitary hour in your day, what do you typically do?
Exercise—tennis, hockey, snowboarding, powwow dancing, gym. “Movement is medicine” as they say.
What five items would you place in a time capsule?
Jarred salmon, dried salmon, candied salmon, frozen salmon, salmon with wings (just making sure you’re paying attention).
What does your writing space look like?
I write whenever and wherever I can get it in, honestly. This week: American Airlines seats 8A & F, an Airbnb, Nemesis Coffee, the living room, Alaska Airlines seat 6A, the Mesa Refuge.
Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, filmmaker, champion powwow dancer, and student of Salish art and history. He is the first Indigenous North American filmmaker ever nominated for an Academy Award and the first Indigenous North American author to ever write about healing from intergenerational trauma by getting stoned with his dad in the pages of The New York Times Magazine. His first book, We Survived the Night, is a finalist for the 2026 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction.
