It’s been a groundbreaking year for Julian Brave NoiseCat. Earlier in 2025, Sugarcane, the film he co-directed with Emily Kassie, was up for an Academy Award. The documentary feature didn’t end up winning an Oscar, but NoiseCat, a 32-year-old member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen, is the first Native filmmaker ever to be nominated. Now Knopf is set to publish his first book, We Survived the Night, a memoir that Kirkus, in a starred review, calls “thoughtful, informative, often entertaining, and just as often saddening…a book to remember.” NoiseCat answered our questions by email.

Tell readers, briefly, what We Survived the Night is about.

At its core, the book is a family story about my father, his father, and myself. Told in the style of a Coyote story—a traditional narrative about the epic misadventures of my peoples’ rabble-rousing trickster forefather, a great creator and destroyer who makes and unmakes the world—the book interweaves memoir and mythology with hard-hitting on-the-ground reporting from Indigenous communities across North America into a dynamic portrait of contemporary Indigenous life.

Would you say something about the significance of the title?

“We survived the night” is the English translation of tsecwínucw-kuc,the traditional way to give the morning greeting in Secwepemctsín, an Indigenous language with just two remaining fluent speakers—my kyé7e (grandmother) and her sister—on the Canim Lake Indian reserve, the rez my family calls home in British Columbia, Canada. My kyé7e, who taught me our language, used to drink from a mug with tsecwínucw-k printed on the side. I often wonder what it meant for our ancestors to greet one another and the day with the simple yet profound acknowledgment. And then I chuckle at the Indian sense of humor that emblazoned that solemn word on Kyé7e’s cup.

What inspired you during the writing of the book?

Lots and lots of Coyote stories collected in dusty old ethnographic texts by the anthropologist James Teit, as well as more recent ones recorded and transcribed by Randy Bouchard and Dorothy Kennedy in Lillooet Stories and The Lil’wat World of Charlie Mack. St’at’imc storytellers’ oral histories are also held in the Royal BC Museum and Archives in Victoria,  where I traveled to listen. Ron and Marianne Ignace’s Secwépemc People, Land, and Laws was also an invaluable source, as were the many rez legends and tall tales spun around Indian living rooms by my aunties, uncles, dad, and others. Our people are world-class bullshitters and first-rate truth tellers.

Where and when did you write We Survived the Night?

I moved in with my dad, a Secwépemc and St’at’imc artist with whom I’ve had a complicated relationship ever since he left our family to chase alcohol and art-world fame when I was a little boy. For two years we were roommates in the little Washington state Navy town where I still live, sleeping across the hall, cooking each other breakfast, making art, trading stories, and repairing our formerly fraught relationship. After nights hanging out and playing games like cribbage and dad’s favorite, bong-hit Scrabble, I would sit down at my laptop and write what I learned: about dad, our relationship, our people, our tricksterly ways, our trickster’s world, and myself.

Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.