Julian Brave NoiseCat

Join Bookworks, Los Poblanos, and AMP Concerts for an evening of exquisite literature in an equally exquisite setting.

Julian Brave NoiseCat will read from his lates book We Survived the Night and be in conversation with former United States Secretary of the Interior and current New Mexico gubernatorial candidate, Deb Haaland. The talk will begin at 6 PM and doors open at 5 PM with a cash bar provided by Los Poblanos.

Tickets are also available in-store at Bookworks (4022 Rio Grande Blvd NW, Albuquerque).

In the notes of your order, please indicate if the person attending the event is different than the person purchasing the tickets.

"We Survived the Night is filled with that thing I look for in all great art—love deepened by sorrow, sorrow widened by love. Survival, yes. NoiseCat is one of our great new Scheherazades—he keeps people alive in his stories. And people will want to stay alive because of them. "
—Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!

"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, author of Wandering Stars

"This powerful book is a journey by torchlight through Julian's own family story, and the torches are coyote stories and broader histories of Indigenous North America. Braided together, the three become one narrative of suffering, survival, love and its failures and successes, continuities and ruptures, so that most of all it's a book of loss and recovery. It's a beautiful, wrenching, important masterpiece, both a memoir and something that reaches far beyond the personal."
—Rebecca Solnit, author of No Straight Road Takes You There

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.

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.

Deb Haaland is a 35th-generation New Mexican, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, a small businesswoman, a working mother who’s lived paycheck to paycheck, a former congresswoman, and for the past four years, the United States Secretary of the Interior. Deb was confirmed as Secretary of the Interior with strong bipartisan support and is the first Native American cabinet secretary in our nation's history. As Secretary, she led nearly 70,000 federal employees and worked tirelessly for New Mexicans, securing thousands of New Mexico jobs, historic local clean energy development, and hundreds of millions of dollars of investments in the state. Deb announced her candidacy for New Mexico Governor earlier this year. If elected, she'd be the nation's first Native American woman governor.