My Required Reading is CULTURED’s new column in which influential tastemakers reveal what’s on their bookshelves.
Four years ago, Julian Brave NoiseCat had just signed his first book deal. We Survived the Night would be part memoir, part community history, part reportage on the current state of affairs. A few months after the ink had dried on the deal, a friend reached out about the possibility of working together on a documentary. Filmmaker Emily Kassie was putting together a project about the abuse suffered and missing children from Indian residential schools. “I [had] never made a film of any length,” NoiseCat, an enrolled member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen and a descendant of the Lil’Wat Nation of Mount Currie, recalls. “Not even a TikTok.” He declined to join, until Kassie came back with the school she had chosen to be the focus of her investigation: Saint Joseph’s Indian Residential School near Williams Lake, British Columbia. “That’s the school my family was sent to and where, to the best of my knowledge at the time, my dad was born and found in a dumpster nearby,” says NoiseCat. “She ended up choosing that one school out of 139 across Canada.” He agreed to co-direct the film, Sugarcane, which would go on to be nominated for Best Documentary at the 2025 Academy Awards.
To work on Sugarcane and his book at the same time, NoiseCat moved in with his father, an artist who he had rarely seen since he left the family when NoiseCat was just 6 years old. In small-town Washington, “we suddenly found ourselves living across the hallway from one another. During the day, I would be working on We Survived the Night and Sugarcane, and he’d be in the studio carving,” says NoiseCat. Pouring over 100-year old ethnographies and historical records, then going out to conduct interviews for his film, Noisecat found himself stringing together a woven narrative in his writing—a nod to traditional weaving, considered the highest art form of his community, and the many touch points he became immersed in.
One such locus was the “coyote story,” a tale about a trickster ancestor “sent to the Earth by the Creator to set things in order [who] did a lot of good, but was also often up to no good,” NoiseCat explains. The character became the through line that ties the writer’s many divergent paths together. To mark the book’s publication this week, NoiseCat sat down with CULTURED to share how the coyote trickster came to remind him of his father, the communities he grew up in, and even the president, as well as his picks from the canon of Native literature that precedes his own.
I’m wondering how you thought about your audience for this project. People in your community are going to read it, who have some background on the touchpoints that you’re referencing, but then, you also have a glossary of terms in here that’s going to help a broader audience.
I simultaneously wanted the book to tell a story in a way that it hadn’t been told about my own people—in a way that was true to our own traditions, and that would reveal what I feel is a very expansive, interesting, and also entertaining world of of Native life that I’ve gotten to report on for a decade and lived in for my entire life. In the broadest sense, I feel that you can’t understand the story of North America without its First Peoples, and that by including us in the story, you don’t just include yet another group into the tapestry of this land—you also fundamentally can reshape your understanding of this place and how its story is told. There is a way that Indigenous life and Indigenous traditions have something to say to literature more broadly, to philosophy, to the humanities, that has been completely overlooked.
Besides your research, what other kinds of things were you reading while putting this together?
In nonfiction, I’ve always been drawn to the work of Evan Osnos, who, in his reporting, uses the details that he’s gathered up to say things without having to outright necessarily say them. In terms of the prose, Sherman Alexie and Ernest Hemingway. Alexie and his sort of tragicomic sensibility is something that I think just gets so much of the story of the world, broadly speaking, but also of Native life, right. And Hemingway because of the sparseness of his prose and its ability to communicate without too much convoluted structure or anything. In terms of people who are doing really interesting and innovative things with nonfiction, I read Hanif Abdurraqib’s work. He does these little interstitial poems and moments in his writing, and he also structured his most recent book around the four quarters of a basketball game. Writing like that was really helpful for me to think about all of the various, creative ways that you could structure a written text.
One of the last things to come into the book was the breaking apart in three sections with poetic reflections on the four years of my fasting, which was something that I did while I was writing We Survived the Night and working on Sugarcane. Journalism and memoir are often very secular art forms—they come from the search for social, scientific, and hard and historical investigative facts. Yet there are parts of the human experience and definitely parts of being a Native person that get at questions that are not necessarily just secular in their nature. If you’re asking about what it is to survive, what it is for your father to have been born at the precipice of death, for a people to live with that existential threat, and then to be trying to reconnect with and bring back to life the culture and traditions of our ancestors in the present. There are dimensions to trying to tell those sorts of stories that are inherently spiritual.
That sparseness you mention does feel like a very journalistic impulse, so it’s an interesting mix to bring in the poetry and the storytelling.
There were these new parts of my voice that I had to develop because I had never told a coyote story in my life. I had only heard one told by a member of my family once ever, and that was by an uncle who’s no longer with us and who was one of my grandfather’s many stray kids. I wanted [the book] to be able to shift gears into reportage about Native life today and also into memoir and some really heavy stuff, but then also to be able to be funny and to reflect on the dark humor in the fact that my people would say “we survived the night” to each other in the morning. Ultimately, the people and the way of life that I was trying to tell a story about is an incredibly expansive, capacious, sometimes contradictory, but always beautiful way of life. Native people rarely get to be seen that way. We’re often seen as the poster children of social misery.
These books that you’re mentioning, is there a place and time you always read them?
On the West Coast, because I spend so much time in my truck going to visit my family, I actually do a lot of audiobooks now. I also do a lot of source reading for the work that I do, and I consume that in whatever way I can get the material, whether it’s a hard copy, a PDF, a book itself. In the course of writing We Survived the Night, my reading habits started to shift. I’ve started reading a lot more fiction and, in particular, this year I read Moby Dick, a couple times actually. The ways that novelists are liberated from every sentence having to be related to a hard fact and get to focus solely on narrative and prose and character, I’m always really interested to see the way that they do that.
I’m in awe that you managed to get through Moby Dick multiple times in a year.
I kind of love it.
Is there someone in all the research that you’ve done that deserves a biography, who hasn’t had one yet?
Deb Haaland will definitely be deserving of a biography by the time she gets towards the sunset of her political career. I’m not sure if anyone has written a biography of Mary Simon, the first Indigenous governor general of Canada. Beyond big leaders, I feel that there are in Indian Countries so many incredible life stories. I honestly think that if you just hang out in any res living room with some aunties and uncles, you’re gonna hear stories that are hilarious, that are really tragic, that are wild, that are deeply insightful, that have clever wordplay, all of these sorts of things. That tradition of people loving each other, and remembering each other in a full, complicated kind of a way, is what I feel I want to be part of uplifting.
Is there a book that someone should read if they want to get to know you?
I mean, hopefully they read We Survive the Night, but I would say that the voice in my head has always been Sherman Alexie. As a kid, I devoured his books. I would write fan fiction in his style. I grew up in the late 1990s and 2000s, and he was the Native writer of that era. I mean, we had Louise Erdrich and Leslie Marmon Silko and N. Scott Momaday, and there are definitely other incredible native writers out there, but to me, he was the one whose voice and stories were always in my head. I’d say that’s a big, complicated answer given subsequent literary controversy [Alexie was accused of sexual assault by several women in 2018]. Two other writers whose work I really love, would be Layli Long Soldier, who’s an Oglala poet, and if you really wanna get into people who are thinking way outside of the box in really brilliant ways about form and structure, her book Whereas, it kind of blew my mind the first time I read it, [thinking about] what words can do on the page and the shapes that they can take. And across her body of work, I would say, Louise Erdrich. I really love The Night Watchman.
Do you have a book that helps you understand the world we’re living in right now?
I think I’m still trying to understand the world that we’re living in right now. I would say that the coyote stories deserve a lot more credence as a way to look at and understand the world than they’re given. It’s totally reasonable to say that the current president is an authoritarian or a fascist, or at least a part of him wants to be. But I would also offer up that another way to understand him is as a trickster figure, who is constantly out there trying to trick people and also sometimes getting tricked himself. He uses a sort of folksy humor in a way that rings true to the trickster tradition to me. I would humbly suggest that sometimes the way that we should interpret our current moment and the story of this land should be through the ideas and the traditions of the people who are from it, who have been doing that very thing for not just 250 years of American history, but thousands of years of history—stories that go back thousands of years before the Bible.
Julian Brave NoiseCat’s Required Reading
N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 1968
“He was the first Native to [win the Pulitzer Prize] and I still think that Momaday is one of the best writers of the American landscape, among other things. One thing about this book that I think people forget is that it is surprisingly steamy, actually. Momaday is not often remembered as a romance-y kind of writer, but there’s a lot of love stories in there that people don’t really talk about.”
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, 1977
“It’s a rumination on what I would describe as not just PTSD but also intergenerational trauma and questions of environmental harm—in the ways that spirituality and spiritual colonization and spiritual healing are really essential to life in general, but especially Native life.”
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
Sherman Alexie, Toughest Indian In the World, 2000
“The first short story in that collection [is] about this Spokane writer who picks up a guy who had just had a fight with the toughest Indian in the world, some Flathead kid from Arlee, Montana, and then they share one night at a motel. Just the way that he writes about Native men and masculinity in that moment of both these guys—who are brawlers, but also who are lovers—was mind-blowing to me when I first encountered it as a young teen.”
(AbeBooks)
Tommy Orange, There There, 2018
“It captures so much about the realities of being an urban Indian. I grew up in Oakland, so I was kind of amazed by this book because I had actually never met Tommy yet it was so obvious that he had been incredibly observant about the community and world that we had grown up in. I also think it has a really brilliant structure to it. It’s both a polyphonic novel; all of these characters converge on a cultural gathering like a powwow, and then there’s a shootout. To me it’s just such an incredibly intense and powerful, and also entertaining, way to talk about issues of intergenerational trauma.”
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman, 2020
“An incredible historical fiction work. The way that she brings you into the world of the Turtle Mountain reservation in the period of termination, the fact that there are these love stories, the fact that you follow these characters to the Twin Cities, where they’re being relocated to Washington DC, where they’re advocating for their rights, the swath of history and action in this book that also is getting at an incredibly consequential period in, not just Native history but American history, is a truly remarkable feat of literature to me.”
(Amazon, Barnes & Noble)
in your life?
