We Survived the Night

FINALIST FOR THE PEN/JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH AWARD FOR NONFICTION • FINALIST FOR THE BC & YUKON HUBERT EVANS NONFICTION PRIZE

“We Survived the Night is a book that holds a truly astonishing number of narratives, but they intertwine and connect to one another at every turn. . . . One of the remarkable strengths of the book is how NoiseCat manages to hold emotional complexity at the core of his storytelling.” —Alta Journal

“What an extraordinary read. . . . [We Survived the Night is] far-reaching, ever-surprising, funny, tragic, and written in what is almost certainly and unprecedented format.” —The Irish Times

“A deeply personal look at the historic efforts to erase Native cultures in Canada and the United States. . . . [We Survived the Night] is a love letter to the First Nations and to ‘the legends indigenous to this place,’ which NoiseCat has preserved for readers to learn from.” ­—Columbia Magazine

“Thoughtful, informative, often entertaining, and just as often saddening, [We Survived the Night] is a book to remember.” —Kirkus (starred review)

“NoiseCat gives readers the gift of his first book, a mash-up of memoir, journalism, and folktales. . . . All of it adds up to beautiful storytelling.” —Booklist (starred review)

“[We Survived the Night is] a genre-bending work of nonfiction written with immaculate composure. . . . NoiseCat manages to entertain and inform in equal measure. Every tale, whether myth or history, is imbued with a beautiful honesty that will surely move readers.” —Library Journal (starred review)

“A powerful archive of Indigenous pain and resistance.” —Publishers Weekly

“In We Survived the Night, NoiseCat embraces the ‘silenced narrative traditions’ of his ancestors to build both a personal story and an extensive history of his people. . . . These older stories are interwoven with the contemporary ones, a framework that lends the book a unique cadence and rhythm.” —BookPage

“Julian Brave NoiseCat seamlessly connects true tales of identity and betrayal, love and abandonment, clarity and confusion. We Survived the Night is a whirling, radiant gift to the reader.” —Louise Erdrich, author of The Night Watchman

“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

“Invigorating and soul-stirring, We Survived the Night is a book whose epic scale—encompassing explorations of history, language, land, and politics, as well as of family bonds, artmaking, and storytelling—astonishes me. It is a tribute, in the end, to love which is intimate and clear-eyed enough to see one’s own father and mother, and capacious enough to hold the whole world.” —Megha Majumdar, author of A Guardian and a Thief

“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!

“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

“Part mythopoetic yet literal memoir, part history, part cartography of vast and intricate cosmologies —interlaced with human wrongs—part love story and story of self-discovery—this gorgeously written, deeply courageous mini epic by Julian Brave NoiseCat is an essential guide to waking up in our new, yet ancient, human emergency. It’s not easy. It’s not always possible. But We Survived The Night is the book we need to read right now if we hope to survive this night.” —Jorie Graham, author of To 2040

“From its chilling opening pages, We Survived the Night grips the reader with a story that must be told: of crime and loss, of heartbreak and wonder, of death and survival, and of startling and inspiring resilience.” —Kathleen DuVal, author of Native Nations