Mesa Refuge and Point Reyes Books are excited to co-present a screening of SUGARCANE followed by a conversation with author, filmmaker, and Mesa alum Julian Brave NoiseCat and Dr. Lyla June Johnston, about his recently released book, We Survived the Night. Julian completed We Survived the Night at Mesa Refuge, when he was a resident in 2024. SUGARCANE was nominated for Best Documentary Feature Film at the 97th Academy Awards.
Schedule of Events at the Dance Palace in Point Reyes Station
1-3 pm – Screening of SUGARCANE
3-3:30 pm – Q&A with Julian Brave NoiseCat
4-5:30 pm – Book talk with Julian and Lyla June Johnston about We Survived the Night
Books will be available for purchase for the duration of the event.
Ticket Pricing
$20 – general admission to film screening and book talk
$40 – general admission to film screening and book talk + a copy of We Survived the Night
$10 – 30 y/o and younger admission to film screening and book talk
$30 – 30 y/o and younger admission to film screening and book talk + a copy of We Survived the Night
No one turned away for lack of funds. Please email nkansky@mesarefuge.org if this pricing is a barrier to your ability to attend this event.
Purchase Tickets Here
About SUGARCANE
A stunning tribute to the resilience of Native people and their way of life, SUGARCANE, the debut feature documentary from Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, is an epic cinematic portrait of a community during a moment of international reckoning.
In 2021, evidence of unmarked graves was discovered on the grounds of an Indian residential school run by the Catholic Church in Canada. After years of silence, the forced separation, assimilation and abuse many children experienced at these segregated boarding schools was brought to light, sparking a national outcry against a system designed to destroy Indigenous communities. Set amidst a groundbreaking investigation, SUGARCANE illuminates the beauty of a community breaking cycles of intergenerational trauma and finding the strength to persevere. Rated: R
About We Survived the Night
Julian Brave NoiseCat’s childhood was rich with culture and contradictions. When his Secwépemc and St’at’imc father, an artist haunted by a turbulent past, abandoned the family, he and his non-Native mother were embraced by the urban Native community in Oakland, California, as well as by family on the Canim Lake Indian Reserve in British Columbia. In his father’s absence, Julian immersed himself in Native history and culture to understand the man he seldom saw—his past, his story, where he came from—and, by extension, himself.
Years later, Julian sets out across the continent to correct the erasure, invisibility, and misconceptions surrounding the First Peoples of this land, as he develops his voice as a storyteller and artist in his own right. Told in the style of a “Coyote Story,” a legend about the trickster forefather of Julian’s people who was revered for his wit and mocked for his tendency to self-destruct, We Survived the Night brings a traditional artform nearly annihilated by colonization back to life on the page. Through a dazzling blend of history and mythology, memoir and reportage, Julian unravels old stories and braids together new ones. He grapples with the erasure of North America’s First Peoples and the trauma that cascades across generations, while illuminating the vital Indigenous cultural, environmental, and political movements reshaping the future. He chronicles the historic ascent of the first Native American cabinet secretary in the United States and the first Indigenous sovereign of Canada; probes the colonial origins and limits of racial ideology and Indian identity through the story of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina; and hauls the golden eggs of an imperiled fish out of the sea alongside the Tlingit of Sitka, Alaska. This is a rewriting and restoration—of Native history and, more intimately, of family and self, as Julian seeks to reclaim a culture effaced by colonization and reconcile with a father who left. Virtuosic, compelling, and deeply moving, this is at once an intensely personal journey and a searing portrait of Indigenous survival, love, and resurgence.
Drawing from five years of on-the-ground reporting, We Survived the Night paints a profound and unforgettable portrait of contemporary Indigenous life, alongside an intimate and deeply powerful reckoning between a father and a son. Soulful, formally daring, indelible work from an important new voice.