“Sugarcane” is a harrowing documentary about the Canadian system of mission residential boarding schools for Native children. The 107-minute film was co-directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat, of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen and descendant of the Lil’Wat Nation of Mount Currie, and Emily Kassie.
Tell us about the boarding schools?
JULIAN BRAVE NOISECAT: “Sugarcane” follows an investigation into abuse and missing children at St. Joseph’s Mission, one of 139 federally-funded Indian residential schools across Canada. An amendment to the Indian Act in the 19th century made attendance at these Indian residential schools compulsory for all Indigenous children [starting 1894]. Those schools were designed, in the words of one of the people who oversaw them, to “Get rid of the Indian problem.”
While the assimilation, abuse, and potential unmarked graves at Indian residential schools has made international headlines in Canada, in the U.S. there was actually an older system of Native American boarding schools that were in some ways the model for Canada’s schools. They were setup by Army captain Richard Henry Pratt, who started a boarding school in Pennsylvania, the Carlisle Indian School [in 1879], and he described the mission of these [408] schools as: “Kill the Indian and save the man.”
They were a continent-wide system of schools that separated Indigenous children from their families that were enforced by law enforcement, the legal system, that if you did not send your children, you could face jail. There were actually Hopi elders from Arizona incarcerated at Alcatraz because they did not want their children to be taken away to these schools.
There was rampant physical, sexual and psychological abuse, and in some instances, even death. That is part and parcel to the story of how North America was colonized and what happened to First Peoples here.
EMILY KASSIE: The last school closed in 1997. They ran for over 100 years and took away hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children from their families across North America.
It seems like a sort of “Final Solution to the Indian Question.” The crimes weren’t just carried out by rogue priests; it was more part of institutional racism. Were these schools part of a coordinated genocidal plot to exterminate Indigenous culture and people – including systemic infanticide?
NOISECAT: Words like “genocide” and “systemic” – it’s really important that we get the terminology correct when we talk about this history. It’s accurate to describe what happened at the Indian residential schools in Canada, as well as Native American boarding schools, as a form of genocide. In fact, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada officially calls the Indian residential school system “cultural genocide.”
At St. Joseph’s Mission, in our documentary we uncover a pattern of infanticide where babies born to students at the school and in some instances to nuns, were forced into adoptions out of their family and community contexts, and were, in some instances, put into the incinerator to be burned with the garbage. Some babies were fathered by priests.
People can have a semantic debate how to characterize that. What we really wanted to prioritize with was an investigative truth and on top of that, an emotional truth. What is it for survivors of this history, which still has consequences in the present, to live in the aftermath of that genocide?
How many children were murdered, fathered by priests, etc.?
KASSIE: What’s so challenging and important about this story is how little we know. How few records have been opened to Indigenous communities and investigators looking for truth. The Catholic church, Canadian government and police have not fully opened their records to be able to find out what happened. “Sugarcane” uncovers testimony and evidence pointing to these horrific crimes. We’re just at the beginning of understanding the full truth… We don’t know how many children passed away at these schools… We now know through the investigation at “Sugarcane”, there were cases of babies born to girls who were thrown away.
Tell us about the investigation at St. Joseph’s Mission?
KASSIE: Charlene Belleau and Whitney Spearing are going through any archives and hundreds of interviews of testimony with survivors to try and piece together what crimes occurred at this school. First Nations across Canada are working with ground penetrating radar to detect potential graves, burials in the grounds of these schools.
Tell us about the film’s Ed NoiseCat?
NOISECAT: Ed is my dad … “Sugarcane” is as much a journalistic investigation into missing children and abuse at St. Joseph’s Mission, as it is a personal investigation into the circumstances around my father’s birth at that Indian residential school. And then the intergenerational impacts of that school on him and our family.
Because my father was – there’s no real easy way to say this – the only known survivor of the incinerator at St. Joseph’s Mission. He was abandoned as a baby and narrowly survived the pattern of infanticide at that school. Then he became a great artist, but carrying his own baggage … he unfortunately did not really raise me or my little sister. So, that cycle of abandonment that began with the Indian residential schools, which systematically kept Native parents from being able to raise their children, had effects on his life, on his parents’ life, and on my life. A big part of “Sugarcane” is about not just the wrongdoing at St. Joseph’s Mission, but also the present injustices that remain long after St. Joseph’s Mission closed.
”Sugarcane” is also a road trip movie and about father-son bonding.
NOISECAT: It is. Yeah, we go on a road trip back to the res we’re from, at Canim Lake, and the mission where he was born.
KASSIE: We wanted to capture a community’s experience of reckoning in a moment where the truth is coming out and the ghosts have come back to help the story be told. We decided to film it as a vérité film and follow events as they were happening and get the perspective and emotional truth of each character.
Is it possible for humans to overcome this trauma?
NOISECAT: It’s absolutely possible for people to overcome and also learn how to live with these truths. We can never rewrite what happened. We can let people know what happened and grapple with it. But what happened happened. People suffered and have died as a consequence and continue to, to this day.
“Sugarcane” is not just about these atrocities, it’s also about what has held people together and kept them attached to their place, community and culture, despite this massive, continent-scale, systematic effort to alienate people from each other and their selves, with violence. This film also points the camera at things that continue to bring us together, make us love each other, and help us endure …
At the same time, it’s about people who have been dehumanized, it’s also about people who are in deeper touch with things fundamental to who we are as human beings.
What would justice look like?
NOISECAT: Justice needs to be defined by the people who survived the injustice. The form that justice might take might not be through a court system, a settlement, policy, but might be through ceremony; Indigenous jurisprudence; and laws we define as sovereign people.
"Sugarcane" opened in New York and Toronto Aug. 9 and has expanded to additional theaters.
Ed Rampell is a film historian and critic based in Los Angeles. Rampell is the author of “Progressive Hollywood, A People’s Film History of the United States” and he co-authored “The Hawaii Movie and Television Book,” now in its third edition. An expanded version of this was originally published Aug. 16 by Truthdig. See the original version online.
From The Progressive Populist, September 15, 2024
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