Julian Brave NoiseCat is an American writer, filmmaker, and activist who is an enrolled member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq'secen of the Secwepemc (Shuswap) Nation in the Canadian province of British Columbia. [1] He is a public thinker and advocate on issues of climate justice and Indigenous rights in North America. [2]
Born in Minnesota, NoiseCat was raised by his mother in Oakland, California. [3] NoiseCat attended Columbia University and graduated in 2015 with a degree in history. [4] After being awarded a Clarendon Scholarship, he studied history at the University of Oxford and earned a graduate degree in global and imperial history. [5]
NoiseCat began his career as a political strategist and policy analyst. While working as vice president of policy and strategy at Data for Progress, NoiseCat was a prominent voice in the campaign to have Deb Haaland, an enrolled citizen of the Laguna Pueblo tribe and one of the first Native American women elected to the United States Congress, nominated and later confirmed as the 54th United States Secretary of the Interior. [6] [7] He also served as a key policy thinker behind the Green New Deal movements in both the United States and Canada, with a particular emphasis on centering Indigenous communities in environmental justice work. [8]
Beyond the policy world, NoiseCat has participated in cultural organizing work. He developed the 2019 Alcatraz Canoe Journey alongside a group of veteran Native American activists, including LaNada War Jack and Eloy Martinez. [9] During the canoe journey, 18 canoes representing dozens of nations and tribes encircled Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay to honor the history of Native activists occupying the island between November 1969 and June 1971 and to remember the many Native people who were incarcerated on the island as prisoners of war. [10] [11] [12] The paddlers planned their journey to roughly coincide with both the 50th anniversary of the island's occupation as well as Indigenous People's Day. Afterward, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art held a series of talks on Native histories of Alcatraz Island. [13]
In addition to his policy and organizing work, NoiseCat has worked as a journalist and a cultural commentator on Indigenous and climate issues. He has published articles, essays, and reviews in The New York Times , [14] The Washington Post , [7] The Atlantic , [15] The Paris Review, [16] Politico , [17] The Guardian, [18] and Canadian Geographic. [19] In 2021, Time magazine included him in their Time 100 list of next generation leaders. [20] The magazine commissioned environmental activist Bill McKibben to write the brief description that accompanied NoiseCat's inclusion in the list. NoiseCat was awarded an American Mosaic Journalism Prize in 2022. [21]
NoiseCat is signed with publisher Alfred A. Knopf to release a forthcoming book, We Survived the Night, focused on Indigenous peoples of the United States and Canada. [22] He is also co-director of the documentary film, Sugarcane , which investigates unmarked graves at Indian residential schools. Sugarcane was selected for an Enterprise Documentary Grant in 2022 by the International Documentary Association. [23] It had its world premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2024 where it won the Grand Jury award for Directing.
Alcatraz Island is a small island 1.25 miles (2.01 km) offshore from San Francisco, California, United States. The island was developed in the mid-19th century with facilities for a lighthouse, a military fortification, and a military prison. In 1934, the island was converted into a federal prison, Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary. The strong currents around the island and cold water temperatures made escape nearly impossible, and the prison became one of the most notorious in American history. The prison closed in 1963, and the island is now a major tourist attraction.
William Ernest McKibben is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. He is the Schumann Distinguished Scholar at Middlebury College and leader of the climate campaign group 350.org. He has authored a dozen books about the environment, including his first, The End of Nature (1989), about climate change, and Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? (2019), about the state of the environmental challenges facing humanity and future prospects.
The American Indian Movement (AIM) is an American Indian grassroots movement which was founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota in July 1968, initially centered in urban areas in order to address systemic issues of poverty, discrimination, and police brutality against American Indians. AIM soon widened its focus from urban issues to many Indigenous Tribal issues that American Indian groups have faced due to settler colonialism in the Americas. These issues have included treaty rights, high rates of unemployment, the lack of American Indian subjects in education, and the preservation of Indigenous cultures.
Environmental racism, ecological racism, or ecological apartheid is a form of racism leading to negative environmental outcomes such as landfills, incinerators, and hazardous waste disposal disproportionately impacting communities of color, violating substantive equality. Internationally, it is also associated with extractivism, which places the environmental burdens of mining, oil extraction, and industrial agriculture upon indigenous peoples and poorer nations largely inhabited by people of color.
Richard Oakes was a Mohawk Native American activist. He spurred Native American studies in university curricula and is credited for helping to change US federal government termination policies of Native American peoples and culture. Oakes led a nineteen-month occupation of Alcatraz Island with LaNada Means, approximately 50 California State University students, and 37 others. The Occupation of Alcatraz is credited for opening a rediscovered unity among all Native American tribes.
The Red Power movement was a social movement led by Native American youth to demand self-determination for Native Americans in the United States. Organizations that were part of the Red Power Movement include the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC). This movement sought the rights for Native Americans to make policies and programs for themselves while maintaining and controlling their own land and resources. The Red Power movement took a confrontational and civil disobedience approach to inciting change in United States to Native American affairs compared to using negotiations and settlements, which national Native American groups such as National Congress of American Indians had before. Red Power centered around mass action, militant action, and unified action.
The Occupation of Alcatraz was a 19-month long protest when 89 Native Americans and their supporters occupied Alcatraz Island. The protest was led by Richard Oakes, LaNada Means, and others, while John Trudell served as spokesman. The group lived on the island together until the protest was forcibly ended by the U.S. government.
The Karkin people are one of eight Ohlone peoples, indigenous peoples of California.
Sarah Deer is a Native American lawyer, and a professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies and Public Affairs and Administration at the University of Kansas. She was a 2014 MacArthur fellow and has been inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2019.
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), also known as Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) and more broadly as Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives (MMIR) or Missing and Murdered Indigenous People (MMIP), are instances of violence against Indigenous women in Canada and the United States, notably those in the First nations in Canada and Native American communities, but also amongst other Indigenous peoples such as in Australia and New Zealand, and the grassroots movement to raise awareness of MMIW through organizing marches; building databases of the missing; holding local community, city council, and tribal council meetings; and conducting domestic violence trainings and other informational sessions for police.
Debra Anne Haaland is an American politician serving as the 54th United States Secretary of the Interior. A member of the Democratic Party, she previously served as the U.S. representative for New Mexico's 1st congressional district from 2019 to 2021 and as chair of the New Mexico Democratic Party from 2015 to 2017. Haaland, a Native American, is an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe.
A land defender, land protector, or environmental defender is an activist who works to protect ecosystems and the human right to a safe, healthy environment. Often, defenders are members of Indigenous communities who are protecting property rights of ancestral lands in the face of expropriation, pollution, depletion, or destruction.
LaNada War Jack, also known as LaNada Boyer and LaNada Means, is an American writer and activist. She was the first Native American student admitted to the University of California at Berkeley in 1968. She led the drive to create the Native American Student Organization and became its chair. As a leader of the Third World Strike at UC Berkeley in 1969, she was arrested but succeeded in obtaining approval for the first ethnic studies courses to be included in the university's curricula. A few months later, she became one of the organizers of the Occupation of Alcatraz in 1969. After the occupation, she completed her bachelor's degree at the University of California, Berkeley and went on to study law at Antioch School of Law in Washington, D.C. While in Washington, she participated in the takeover of the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in 1972.
Data for Progress (DFP) is an American left-wing think tank, polling firm, and political advocacy group. Until his dismissal in November 2022, the organization was headed by data scientist and activist Sean McElwee, who co-founded the organization in 2018.
LaTiesha Fazakas is a Canadian curator, filmmaker, and art dealer with a specialization in Northwest Coast Indigenous Art. She is the owner and director of Fazakas Gallery, a contemporary Indigenous gallery located in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Melinda Beth Coker Micco was an American filmmaker, scholar, activist, and educator. She was a professor of ethnic studies at Mills College, and the first Native American woman to earn tenure at Mills.
The American Mosaic Journalism Prize is a journalism prize awarded annually to two freelance journalists "for excellence in long-form, narrative, or deep reporting on stories about underrepresented and/or misrepresented groups in the present American landscape". The award is given by the Heising-Simons Foundation, a family foundation based in Los Altos and San Francisco, California.
This is a list of winners of the Sundance Film Festival Directing Award for documentary features.
Mildred E. "Millie" Ketcheschawno was an activist for Native American rights and a filmmaker who was one of the founders of Indigenous Peoples' Day. In the 1970s, Millie became the first woman president of the Intertribal Friendship House. She received her Bachelor of Arts (Honors) from the University of California at Berkeley in American Indian studies and film in the late 1990s. Millie's activism began when she provided leadership to an important pan-ethnic movement known as the Indians of All Tribes movement (IOAT). Her advocacy was extended to the film industry when she became one of the writers for the documentary "Alcatraz is Not an Island," which was directed by James M. Fortier and released in 2001. Through her activism, she facilitated the counteraction of Columbus Day with the creation of Indigenous Peoples' Day, that is celebrated across the United States till present.