NoiseCat’s father, a Secwépemc and St’at’imc carver, left when he was young, and NoiseCat grew up with his non-Native mother in the urban Native community in Oakland, spending time on the Canim Lake reserve in British Columbia. The book is him going back — to his father, to the reserve, and outward across the continent. It’s built as a Coyote story, the trickster who is both revered for his wit and mocked for wrecking himself, and it runs from the first Native cabinet secretary to the Lumbee in North Carolina to hauling herring roe with the Tlingit at Sitka. He also directed Sugarcane, and this is the book beside that film.
We Survived the Night