Julian Brave NoiseCat Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Julian Brave NoiseCat is an author, activist, speaker, journalist, champion powwow dancer, Oscar-nominated film maker, and a student of Salish art and history.

He has had his writing featured in a variety of publications. These include The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. The author has been given multiple awards throughout the course of his career. These include the 2022 American Mosaic Journalism Prize and various National Native Media Awards. He has also been a finalist for the Livingston Award and many Canadian National Magazine Awards. He was named to be part of the TIME100 Next list in 2021.

Julian is the force behind his first documentary. Sugarcane. It would go on to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary. The documentary was directed alongside Emily Kassie and premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. There NoiseCat and Kassie received the Directing Award in U.S. Documentary.

NoiseCat’s work may focus on environmental justice, public policy, or Indigenous rights. Regardless, all of the aspects of his work utilizes history lessons to look into how societies are able to put forth positive change.

His debut novel is We Survived the Night. It is an incredibly detailed portrait of contemporary Indigenous life set aside a reckoning between a father and son.

NoiseCat has long been a passionate storyteller. He is a member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq̓éscen̓ and is a descendant of the Lilwat Nation of Mount Currie.

We Survived The Night is a 2025 book by Julian Brave NoiseCat. This book was the winner of the Tadeusz Bradecki Prize and is an incredible work from one of the newest voices in fiction and most powerful authors out there today.

Oral history is intertwined with real journalism and the journey of father and son into a portrait that features survival, love, and resurgence. Author Louise Erdrich praises the work, saying that the author ‘seamlessly connected true tales of identity and betrayal, love and abandonment, clarity and confusion’ for a work that is a ‘whirling, radiant gift to the reader’.

The childhood of this author was full of contradictions and culture. When his father decided to abandon the family, NoiseCat and his mother (who is non-Native) were taken in and embraced by the urban Native community that existed in Oakland, California. They were also helped by family living on the Canim Lake Indian Reserve in British Columbia.

In the absence of his father, an artist who had a past full of turbulence, NoiseCat decided to learn more about Native history and culture in an attempt to learn more not only about himself but his father too. He wanted to know more about the man that he did not see all that often, from his past to his story to where he came from and ultimately know more about his own history.

It’s now been years later and the author has set out across the continent to try and do something about the erasure, the invisibility, and the misconceptions around the First Peoples of the land all as he works on developing his voice as an artist and storyteller.

Told in the style of a ‘Coyote Story’, which was a legend about the tricky forefather of his people who was looked up to for his wit as well as mocked for the tendency that he has to self-destruct. This book is able to bring a traditional art form that was almost taken out by colonization to come back to life through these pages.

The author combines history and mythology along with memoir and reportage. Through it all he is able to find old stories and weave together some new ones. NoiseCat also deals with the erasure of the First Peoples of North America and goes into detail about the trauma that goes throughout the generations while also shining a light on the Indigenous movements that are cultural, environmental, political, and reshaping the future.

NoiseCat is able to chronicle the historical rise of the first Native American cabinet secretary in the United States as well as the first Indigenous sovereign of Canada. He also looks into the colonial origins and limits of racial ideology and Indian identity as through his story of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.

He also takes the golden eggs of an endangered fish from the sea alongside the Tlingit of Sitka, Alaska. This is both a restoration and a rewriting of Native history and of family and self as the author does his best to take back a culture that has been affected by colonization and do his best to reconcile with the father figure who left his life.

The result is a book that is deeply moving and compelling. It is a journey that is very personal and a great portrait of Indigenous survival as well as love and resurgence. NoiseCat pulls as well from five years of reporting on the ground. It is able to paint an incredible portrait of Indigenous life as it exists in the contemporary age and pairs it with the reckoning that goes down between a father and a son.

We Survived the Night is a book that you won’t want to miss. Whether reading on your own or sharing with friends, this is a fresh new work that is worth looking into. Check out Julian Brave NoiseCat’s debut work and see what he has to say.