Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, filmmaker, champion powwow dancer, and student of Salish art and history. He is the first Indigenous North American filmmaker ever nominated for an Academy Award and the first Indigenous North American author to ever write about healing from intergenerational trauma by getting stoned with his dad in the pages of The New York Times Magazine. NoiseCat’s first book, We Survived the Night, a portrait of Indigenous life beginning with the familial and expanding outwards through a contemporary retelling of the Coyote epic, was an instant national bestseller in Canada and an indie bestseller in the United States, reaching #1 for hardcover nonfiction in Oklahoma and Portland, Maine. The book received starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, and Library Journal and was named one of The New Yorker’s “Best Books of 2025,” NPR’s “Books We Love,” and was a finalist for the 2026 PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. NoiseCat’s first documentary, Sugarcane, directed alongside Emily Kassie, follows an investigation into abuse and missing children at the Indian residential school NoiseCat’s family was sent to near Williams Lake, British Columbia. Sugarcane premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival where NoiseCat and Kassie won the Directing Award in the U.S. Documentary Competition, was recognized with over 50 honors including Best Documentary from the National Board of Review, and was nominated for a Peabody and an Academy Award. In 2026, NoiseCat brought the art of the Coyote Story back to life onstage through a one-man show that premiered at the inaugural “The Dark” festival. Before turning full-time to writing and filmmaking, NoiseCat was a political strategist, policy analyst, and cultural organizer who in 2019 helped lead a grassroots effort bringing an Indigenous canoe journey to San Francisco Bay to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Alcatraz Occupation. In 2020, he was the first to publicly suggest that Deb Haaland should be appointed Interior Secretary, helping turn the idea into a sophisticated inside-outside campaign that resulted in Haaland becoming the first Native American cabinet secretary in United States history. Raised in a single-mother household in Oakland, California, Julian is a proud member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen and a descendant of the Lil’Wat Nation of Mount Currie.
Why their voice matters: Julian demonstrates that Indigenous peoples have narrative and storytelling traditions going back thousands of years on this continent—oral traditions thousands of years older than the pyramids and the Bible—and that refusing to be annihilated requires keeping those traditions alive through contemporary retellings like the Coyote epic woven through We Survived the Night. By directing the Academy Award-nominated documentary Sugarcane, investigating the Indian residential school his family was sent to, and writing about healing from intergenerational trauma, NoiseCat shows that survival demands both excavating painful truths governments and churches purposefully erased and understanding how survivors internalized violence by forgetting as a way to endure. His work as political strategist helping secure Deb Haaland’s appointment as first Native American cabinet secretary, and organizing the Alcatraz canoe journey commemorating Indigenous resistance proves that Indigenous sovereignty is not just historical memory but living political force, demonstrating that at this dire juncture we all need to remember who we are, how we are related, and how the other-than-human world gives us life.
