Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, filmmaker and student of Salish art and history. His 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 they won the Directing Award in the U.S. Documentary Competition, and the film was nominated for an Academy Award. His journalism has appeared in dozens of publications including New York Times, Washington Post, and New Yorker, and has been recognized with many awards including the American Mosaic Journalism Prize, which honors
“excellence in long-form, narrative or deep reporting on stories about underrepresented and/or misrepresented groups in the present American landscape.” In 2021, Julian was named in the TIME100 Next list of emerging leaders alongside the starting point guard of his fantasy basketball team, Luka Doncic.
Before turning full-time to writing and filmmaking, Julian was a political strategist, policy analyst, and cultural organizer. He helped lead a grassroots effort to bring an Indigenous canoe journey to San Francisco Bay to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Alcatraz Occupation. Eighteen canoes representing communities from as far north as Canada and as far west as Hawaii participated in the journey, which was covered by dozens of local and national media outlets. He helped lead the campaign appoint Deb Haaland as the US Secretary of the Interior, which made her 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. 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. While at Mesa Refuge, he finished his first book, We Survived the Night. You can learn more about Julian here.
As a 2024 Writer-at-the-Edge, Julian wrote:
“The Mesa Refuge will always have a special place in my heart because it’s where I finished the first draft of my first book, We Survived the Night, which will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2025. Kamala told us we would get more writing done at the refuge than we anticipated. I didn’t believe her and then there I was, two days before the end of my residency with a full first draft of my book.”