An Evening With Julian Brave NoiseCat

Name: An Evening With Julian Brave NoiseCat
Start: 2025-10-23T19:00:00-05:00
Location: Magic City Books

Schedule

Thu, 23 Oct, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

Magic City Books | Tulsa, OK

Magic City Books is thrilled to welcome Julian Brave Noisecat for a free in-store event to celebrate his debut, We Survived the Night, on Thursday, October 23, 2025 at 7:00pm. This event will take place in the Algonquin Room at Magic City Books, 221 E. Archer Street in the Tulsa Arts District.
“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
Julian Brave NoiseCat will be in conversation with acclaimed Cherokee curator and musician, Kalyn Fay Barnoski.
We Survived the Night will be published by Knopf on October 14, 2025, and you can pre-order a copy through Magic City Books: https://magiccitybooks.com/item/rbwr187Wris0baDWZ07Aww

About We Survived the Night
A stunning debut work of narrative nonfiction from one of the most powerful Indigenous story-tellers at work in Canada today, We Survived the Night combines investigative journalism, colonial history, Salish Coyote stories and a deeply personal father-son journey in a searing yet uplifting portrait of contemporary Indigenous life.
Born to a charismatic Sécwepemc artist from a tiny reserve in the interior of B.C. and a Jewish-Irish woman from Westchester County, N.Y., Julian Brave NoiseCat grew up in a swirl of contradictions. He was the spitting image of his dad, but was raised mostly by his white mother in the urban Native community of Oakland, CA. He became a competitive powwow dancer, travelling the North American circuit, but despite being embraced by his family, he felt like an outsider when he spent time on his home reserve—drawn to his father's world, his Indigenous heritage and identity, but struggling to make sense of his place in it. Struggling also to make sense of the swirling damage his alcoholic father—who could turn into "a brawling Indian super vigilante in the mould of Billy Jack" out to kick colonialism in the ass—had caused to those he loved.
So in his twenties, NoiseCat set out to uncover and tell the story of his father, of his Coyote People—the Interior Salish nations almost extirpated by the apocalyptic horsemen of colonialism—which soon rippled out, in five years of on-the-ground reporting, into the stories of other First Peoples in the United States and Canada, as NoiseCat attempted to counter the erasure, invisibility and misconceptions surrounding them. We Survived the Night paints a profound, inspiring and unforgettable portrait of Indigenous life, entwined with a deeply powerful reckoning between a father and a son seeking a path to a future full of possibilities—for himself and all the children of Indian Country.
About the Author
Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, filmmaker and student of Salish art and history. His first documentary, Sugarcane, directed alongside Emily Kassie, follows an investigation into abuse and missing children at the Indian residential school NoiseCat’s own family was sent to near Williams Lake, B.C., and won the prize for best direction of a documentary at the 2024 Sundance film festival. NoiseCat is a proud member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq'escen and descendant of the Lil'Wat Nation of Mount Currie; his journalism has appeared in dozens of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Walrus and Canadian Geographic and has been recognized with many awards including the 2022 American Mosaic Journalism Prize. Before turning full-time to writing and filmmaking, NoiseCat was a political strategist, policy analyst and cultural organizer. We Survived the Night is his first book.
About the Moderator
Kalyn Fay Barnoski is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, curator, and educator from Oklahoma. Centering Indigenous and decolonial methodologies, their work focuses on self-location, community-building, collaboration, and empathy through the use of music, publication, storytelling, and contemporary craft. In every endeavor, they see their practice as a way to find the ways in which we all intersect and to build bridges of understanding between. Their practice is “for you, for me, for us, for we.”