09/09/2026
We're back with Native Book Club this Saturday, 9/12! 📖
Join us for a lively discussion of We Survived the Night by Julian Brave Noisecat at the Northeast Branch of the Reading Public Library at noon.
📍Address is 1348 N 11th St, Reading, PA 19604.
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About the book:
A stunning narrative from one of the most powerful young writers at work today--We Survived the Night interweaves oral history with hard-hitting journalism and a deeply personal father-son journey into a searing portrait of Indigenous survival, love, and resurgence.
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, he 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 voice as a storyteller and artist in his own right.
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 artform nearly annihilated by colonization back to life on the page. Through a dazzling blend of history and mythology, memoir and reportage, NoiseCat unravels old stories and braids together new ones. Virtuosic, compelling, and deeply moving, this is at once an intensely personal journey and a searing portrait of Indigenous survival, love, and resurgence. 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 and deeply powerful reckoning between a father and a son. Soulful, formally daring, indelible work from an important new voice.
