10/15/2025
Sounds like a great event!
Join Massy Books Events, SFU Indigenous Studies, Michelle Cyca, and Julian Brave NoiseCat for the launch of "We Survived the Night”!
Thursday, October 30 | 7PM | SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
Sign up at Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/we-survived-the-night-an-indigenous-reckoning-tickets-1720785478689?aff=oddtdtcreator
The Book:
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, NoiseCat 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.
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. A soulful, formally daring, and indelible work from an important new voice.
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.
The Moderator:
MICHELLE CYCA is an award-winning journalist and editor from Vancouver, Canada. She is the bureau chief of conservation and fellowships at The Narwhal and a contributing writer to The Walrus. You can also find her recent writing in Maclean’s, Chatelaine, The Globe & Mail and many other places. She is a member of the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation in Treaty 6, Saskatchewan, and lives and works on the ancestral, unceded homelands of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.
SFU Publishing, SFU Department of English, Massy Books
