We Survived the Night

On one hand, this is, like many memoirs, the story of a curious, ambitious child and a flawed, fascinating parent. The son of a white American mother and a father—a brilliant, larger-than-life, and often absent artist—from the Canim Lake Indian Reservation in British Columbia, NoiseCat was raised largely in the Bay Area but with close ties to his father's family and heritage, which he continued to cultivate not only by reconciling and reckoning with his dad's trickster legacy but by working as a reporter across Indian country. The result, in his first book, is a bit of a hybrid, half Dreams from My Father and half Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, at once intensely personal and nearly encyclopedic in his first-hand profiles of Indian successes and struggles from North Carolina to Quebec to Washington, D.C., making clear that for this young writer there is no separating the personal and the communal.