Julian Brave NoiseCat

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 writer to ever write about healing from the intergenerational trauma caused by a genocide by getting high with his dad in the pages of The New York Times Magazine. Julian's first book, We Survived the Night, a portrait of contemporary Indigenous life beginning with the familial and expanding outwards from there through a contemporary retelling of the Coyote epic, was an instant national bestseller in Canada and an indie bestseller in the United States. His first documentary, Sugarcane, directed alongside Emily Kassie, follows an investigation into abuse and missing children at the Indian residential school his family was sent to near Williams Lake, British Columbia. 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. He has played hockey for three of the oldest teams in the game: Columbia University, the Oxford University Blues and the Alkali Lake Braves. A champion traditional dancer, his powwow prize winnings include a horse.