We Survived the Night
An Indigenous Reckoning
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $3.99
Publisher Description
AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER
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 own 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. Through a dazzling blend of history and mythology, memoir and reportage, NoiseCat 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 shaping the future. He chronicles the historic ascent of the first Native American cabinet secretary of the United States and the first Indigenous governor general of Canada, probes the colonial origins and limits ofracial 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.
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, deeply powerful reckoning between a father and a son. A soulful, formally daring and indelible work from a virtuosic new voice.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist and documentarian NoiseCat's ambitious debut ruminates on generational trauma and resilience among Indigenous communities in North America. The book opens with a night watchman's horrific discovery at St. Joseph's Mission, an Indian residential school in British Columbia: a Salish newborn, NoiseCat's father, abandoned in the garbage, "the only known survivor of the school's incinerator." With this harrowing legacy at the heart of his narrative, NoiseCat traces his family's history, including his father's achievements as an artist and struggles with alcoholism, and reflects on Coyote Stories, the oral tradition centered on the famed trickster. This inventive combination generates moving parallels between myth and reality, particularly regarding the complicated relationships between fathers and sons—not only NoiseCat and his father, but also his grandfather Zeke, who fathered at least 19 children ("almost single-handedly bringing our people back from a genocide," NoiseCat quips). However, the account loses some steam as NoiseCat switches in and out of straightforward reportage on issues like Deb Haaland's historic appointment as first Native American secretary of the interior. While these sections are illuminating, they can feel lifted from another project. Still, NoiseCat's attempt to cover as much territory as possible so that "these places, stories, and ancestors come full circle to carry us back to where we belong" results in a powerful archive of Indigenous pain and persistence.
