In addition to being the filmmaker behind the award-winning 2024 documentary exploring his personal connection to the BC residential school system, Sugarcane, Julian Brave NoiseCat is a prolific journalist, and Salish art and history scholar (among many other things). He’s also the newly minted author of the memoir We Survived the Night: An Indigenous Reckoning (Penguin Random House Canada), a journalistic, personal-political work that’s being described as “a searing portrait of Indigenous survival, love, and resurgence.”

The book is taking him clear across North America, and on Thursday, October 30th he’ll be making a stop at SFU Harbour Centre for a conversation about the book with local journalist, Michelle Cyca (The Walrus). Whether or not you’re already familiar with his work, this is sure to be one insightful, thought-provoking and charged discussion. Plan on showing up, and get your RSVP locked in here. And in the meantime, for added context, read our new interview with the outspoken and multi-talented polymath below:

First of all, for readers who aren’t familiar with you and/or your work, please introduce yourself in your own words: who are you; what is your background; and what is currently keeping you busy?

Weyt-k xwexwéytep. Hey everyone, my name is Julian Brave NoiseCat. I’m a writer, filmmaker, powwow dancer, hockey guy, snowboarder, tennis player, Indian man with a manual transmission truck and a writer’s back. My people are the Secwépemc and St’at’imc and I’m a proud member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen.

Congratulations on We Survived the Night! What does the completion and publication of this memoir mean to you, personally? What have you gained from the experience and/or what do you hope to get out of it?

I have dreamed about the day I become an author ever since I was a kid writing my own Sherman Alexie fan fiction. So this feels like a real arrival, even more so than the Academy Award nomination for Sugarcane.

Personal gains aside, what do you hope that the reader will get out of We Survived the Night? What sort of impact do you hope to have – emotionally, but also more broadly and specifically – on individuals and communities?

I want my work to entertain and inform in equal parts. I think that it’s important for stories to make people feel things and laugh. But I also hope readers come away from this book with a new understanding of and appreciation for the vitality of Indigenous peoples all across the continent and how our stories get at big even universal questions about life, death, survival, family, parents, ancestors, culture, tradition, land, meaning, etc.

“…being Indigenous is a beautiful, complicated thing and I think our stories illuminate important truths about North American culture, history, and current affairs, and even more broadly than that, about universal questions and the human condition.”

The format of the book is portrayed in the style of a traditional “Coyote Story”. For those who aren’t familiar with the legend, can you please explain what it is, its parallels to your own experience, and why you chose it as your inspiration?

A Coyote Story is a traditional trickster narrative from my people’s culture. We account for the creation of the world and the way things are through stories about our trickster ancestor, Coyote, who was sent to the earth by creator to set things in order and while he did some good, he was often up to no good. After filling the rivers with salmon and populating the lands with descendants, Coyote turned around and used those fish to try to marry into every single village along the river that would have him. And after fathering all those kids, he abandoned his people. In every story told about Coyote, he was an example to our children of how not to be. And yet he was considered second only to Creator in the cosmology of Creation. An embodiment of the contradictions in our nature and of the paradoxes that drive and ride the metamorphoses of the world.

I had only heard a Coyote Story told once by a member of my own family before I set out to write this book, and yet, as I read Coyote Stories collected in 100-year-plus old ethnographies as part of the research for We Survived the Night, I saw so many parallels between the trickster and my father. And I saw the ideas running through the Coyote Stories reflected in so much of the Indigenous and non-Indigenous world more broadly. It is my hope that this tradition, which once stretched from Central America to Western Canada, comes back to life. Because it still holds immense truth. You can’t tell me that this isn’t a world still spun around by tricksters and their tricks. Just look around!

How did this process compare to your previous journalistic/creative work?

In We Survived the Night I’m bringing multiple different forms of nonfiction writing to the page: memoir, family history, reportage, criticism, and oral history. That is very intentional. I want to put my personal and family history in conversation with the observations in my reporting, and in turn to put both of those in conversation with the Coyote Stories to show how these different forms of nonfiction truth harmonize and build upon one another. I think about the book as a woven narrative because weaving is considered the highest art form by my St’at’imc family and all Salish peoples.

How is this an extension of Sugarcane (or was it the other way around)? How did one work influence or inspire the other?

Sugarcane is about the system that nearly wiped my peoples’ culture off the face of the earth. We Survived the Night – from the title, to the Coyote Stories, to the woven narrative structure – is honoring and bringing our storytelling traditions, which we have always considered nonfiction, back to life on the page. But you don’t have to watch one to read the other or vice versa.

In addition to writing, We Survived the Night also contains an inset featuring full colour photos. I’d love it if you can please hone in on one – for example, your “favourite” – image included, to describe to readers, and explain why it means so much to you.

I love that photo of Dad and me dressed up as Harry Potter on Halloween. Just gives you a real sense for the era, the size of his hand on my shoulder. And then when you think about the fact that my dad was truly the boy who lived — the only known survivor of the incinerator at St. Joseph’s Mission, I think the photo takes on even deeper meaning and significance. Honorable mention to the author Tom King’s photo of my dad and me in those Lone Ranger masks, though. That one is pretty cool too.

As well as being a filmmaker, you’re a journalist by profession, and have published a great number of articles over the years; however, this is your first book. Why the memoir form, and why now?

I’m a child of two worlds. My father is a Secwépemc and St’at’imc artist and my mother is an Irish-Jewish New Yorker. (You can hear it when she talks too. “New Yaw-kuh!”) My father left our family when I was a small boy and ever since I’ve been trying to understand the family, culture, and identity the man who left connected me to. So, I’d say I’ve always been looking out at the Indigenous world to look within at my own story, and looking within at my story to look out at the Indigenous world. Because being Indigenous is a beautiful, complicated thing and I think our stories illuminate important truths about North American culture, history, and current affairs, and even more broadly than that, about universal questions and the human condition.

Imagine someone picking up We Survived the Night a generation after its publication. Who, in particular, do you hope will pick it up? What do you think it says about the current political and cultural context? And where do you envision it fitting into history and the passing down of knowledge?

I hope my descendants pick this book up and learn about what it was to be Indigenous in my day. I hope my approach to nonfiction, which incorporates Indigenous traditions, catches on and that other writers and storytellers are inspired by that and incorporate similar things into their own work.

What’s next? Any other projects already in the works? Or ideas for another film or book germinating?

I’ve started on my next book, a novel, and have gotten an offer on it. Although I’m holding out and writing more. (Writers and our families have to eat too!) I’m also starting on my next documentary. I can’t wait to share those projects with the world.

Lastly, building a menu can also be viewed as a kind of “storytelling”. With that in mind, please describe to me your life in courses.

On both my Salish and my Jewish side, smoked fish is kind of where it’s at. I eat fish almost every single day. So here’s my life through salmon:

We Survived the Night is currently available from Penguin Random House Canada, and will be on-hand to purchase from his event at SFU Harbour Centre on Thursday, October 30th (at a discount!). Can’t attend? It’s also as well as locally from such local independent bookstores as Massy Books, Iron Dog Books, and Upstart & Crow.