In the beginning, there was a child, Julian, the son of a white woman, Alex, and a Secwépemc and St’at’imc man, Ed. In the beginning, Ed was a baby who nearly died in an incinerator at St. Joseph’s Mission in British Columbia. In the beginning, Ed’s father was a charming multilingual St’at’imc man named Zeke who had at least 19 children by seven different women. In the beginning, there was Coyote, Creator’s apprentice, and the three dead sons he made before he finally had one, Stump, who survived the night.
“In the Beginning” is also the first chapter of We Survived the Night, by filmmaker and writer Julian Brave NoiseCat, which is fitting not only in a literal sense but also because, despite the book’s epilogue being called “In the End,” NoiseCat is not really interested in endings. After all, the white colonizing forces of North America spent centuries trying to (more or less overtly, depending on the era) wipe out the continent’s varied Indigenous populations—and yet many are still here. The territories called the United States and Canada remain home to millions of Native Americans, Kānaka Maoli, First Nations, Inuit, and Métis.
NoiseCat’s book blends recognizable genres such as memoir, reportage, and traditional storytelling, and versions of its chapters were originally published in venues like the New Yorker, Indian Country Today, the Assembly, Politico, the Nation, and more. But We Survived the Night is more than a collection of genre-bending essays, for NoiseCat is also using forms far older than what many readers might recognize as journalistic nonfiction: “I have turned to the silenced narrative traditions of the Coyote People,” he writes in the prologue. “Like other Indigenous peoples, the Salish divide oral narratives relating to our history, philosophy, and environment into two categories: lexéy’em and tspetékwll. Lexéy’em are oral histories of recalled events, often from the storyteller’s own life and genealogy. Tspetékwll are stories about the creation and transformation of the world, often dealing with the more distant past and the supernatural.” NoiseCat writes into both of these categories to achieve his ends.
Divided into four parts—“The First Day” through “The Fourth Day”—the work finds NoiseCat tracing his own family’s lineage, starting with those closest to him, like his father, artist Ed Archie NoiseCat, and a surrogate father, Koko, who took Ed’s place when he left. NoiseCat works his way back to his grandfather Zeke and even further, to his great- and great-great-grandparents’ generations, tracing their stories as fully as he can, bringing in the historical wrongs done to them—from Canadian land theft (“Across British Columbia, vast territories were taken from First Nations without treaties or any other legal agreements”) to forced attendance in the routinely abusive Indian-residential-school system—as well as the bravery and trickery with which they fought back against the forces of colonization.
One of the remarkable strengths of the book is how NoiseCat manages to hold emotional complexity at the core of his storytelling. He acknowledges the emotional pain he’s suffered at the hands of both of his father figures, for example—Ed left him and his mother when he was only six years old, and Koko threatened to kill his mother in a fit of rage—as well as how the fathers of generations prior failed the women and children in their lives through abandonment and/or philandering. And at the same time, he is capable of loving them, even with their flaws, and recognizes where their behaviors might have emerged from: “Of course he didn’t know how to parent,” he writes of Ed. “No one knew how to parent after the children were taken away to mission schools.”
This is not simply a product of the author’s emotional intelligence developed or encouraged in therapy (he mentions having seen a therapist after his father left); rather, he demonstrates how such complexity is embedded in the narratives of those of his lineage who are descendants of the famous trickster Coyote. The histories he shares of Coyote’s various deeds often show Coyote providing for his people on the one hand and making a fool out of himself on the other: For example, Coyote weaseled his way into getting adopted by two witches and then freed the salmon that became the bulk of his Salish descendants’ diet, but along the way, he died (and came back) several times because he kept disobeying the witches’ commands to keep his paws out of their various baskets. As NoiseCat explains, “even this Robin Hood–esque act was driven by the trickster’s self-interest. Because as soon as Coyote liberated the salmon, he used his newfound wealth and notoriety to broker as many marriages to as many wives in as many villages along the rivers as he could.”
The Coyote stories, in other words, are far from hagiographic; instead, they’re raucous tales of a deeply flawed being with a penchant for mischief and fun who gets knocked down countless times yet always bounces back up, and whose chaos is reflective in so many ways of the inconsistent nature of humanity.
NoiseCat returns again and again to the notion of trickery being, ultimately, a useful creative force. In some of the more reported chapters, like “Red Herring” (about the Tlingit in Alaska fighting the Board of Fisheries over matters both ecological and financial) and “Indian in the Cabinet” (about the swift political rise of the Laguna Pueblo politician Deb Haaland to the role of secretary of the interior in former president Joe Biden’s administration), NoiseCat presses this point. Haaland, for instance, rose to prominence in part owing to her support of white Democrat Elizabeth Warren following the latter’s controversial claim to Indigeneity and the resulting backlash from Native Americans. Although Warren lost her bid for the presidential nomination, those who supported her were seen as potential allies and recruits for the Biden administration, and thus “Haaland was now positioned to take what would be another historic step up the political ladder. Because once every long while, white absurdities become Indian opportunities. It’s an old trick.”
We Survived the Night is a dense book that holds a truly astonishing number of narratives—personal and/or reported, completed and/or ongoing—but they intertwine and connect to one another at every turn. This is in part because NoiseCat intentionally weaves them together, of course, but it also mirrors a larger truth that the author lives and that his book demonstrates: Interconnectedness is key to our literal survival alongside one another on this earth, and storytelling is one of the best ways we have to remind ourselves of that.•
Ilana Masad is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism. Masad is the author of the novel All My Mother’s Lovers and is co-editing a forthcoming anthology about The Bachelor franchise. Her new novel, Beings, comes out in September 2025.
