Sugarcane
Directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie
Rated R
Runtime: 107 minutes
Airs December 9 on National Geographic, streaming on Disney+ and Hulu December 10

by Kate Beach, Staff Writer

“You can’t have the whole story because I don’t know it.” The Indigenous children forced into residential schools across the United States and Canada have been robbed, over and over again. They were robbed of their languages, their heritages, their safety and innocence. Residential school survivor Ed Archie NoiseCat doesn’t know his whole story, because no one has been able to give it to him. As a result, he can’t share it with his son, Julian Brave NoiseCat. Julian co-directs Sugarcane with Emily Kassie, a striking and infuriating documentary about the Canadian residential school system. What began as an investigation into one particular school, St. Joseph’s Mission in Williams Lake, British Columbia, becomes a deeply personal journey into a family and a community’s painful history. 

The horrors of the residential school system across North America cannot be overstated. For decades, hundreds of schools operating in the United States and Canada abducted and abused Indigenous children. The number of children who died under this system is still unknown, but some estimates place it in the tens of thousands. Every few years, unmarked mass graves are discovered on the property of a former residential school, uncovering more preventable deaths of children from disease, malnourishment, and abuse. Sugarcane follows the Williams Lake First Nation community, whose members primarily live on the T’exelc (commonly called Sugar Cane) reserve near St. Joseph’s Mission, as they investigate the school and search for evidence of mass burials. The landscape is serene and beautiful. Fog rolls off the hills as Julian Brave NoiseCat drives out to the site of the school, which didn’t close until 1981. His father Ed was born there, and found in an incinerator. He stares out at the site as he calls his father to wish him a happy birthday from the very spot he was born. 

The investigators find no shortage of evidence of abuse and death at St. Joseph’s Mission. Accounts of children running away and succumbing to the elements, of priests sexually abusing students, of babies born and tossed away, like Ed Archie NoiseCat. His conversations with his son throughout the film are wrenching. The circumstances of his traumatic birth are a painful topic not just for Ed and his mother, who is still unable to fully share her feelings about it, but to other girls at St. Joseph’s Mission at the time, who underwent forced examinations to determine who had given birth. Reporting these abuses did nothing. A woman at a survivors’ support group notes “I told a nun, who said to tell the priest, who said to tell the Indian Agent, who said to tell the RCMP, who told my dad, who beat the shit out of me. So I went to get a bottle of wine and got drunk.” After horrific treatment, all they were given was shame. 

Personal recollections and stories are woven through the film, highlighting just how close we are to this horrific history. The last residential school closed in 1997. Countless community members were sent to St. Joseph’s Mission, and survivors share deeply painful memories. Rick Gilbert, a former Williams Lake chief and devout Catholic who hesitates to place too much blame on the Church, reckons with DNA evidence that proves he was fathered by a priest. Horrifically, a man named Emile recounts seeing nuns throwing infants into an incinerator. Kassie and NoiseCat film their subjects with extreme care and compassion, allowing them to be silent or angry or devastated as the feelings come. Their take on the land is equally loving, with dreamy shots of the mountains, the water, and the homes on the Sugar Cane Reserve. 

Canada now has a national holiday, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, to memorialize and acknowledge the generators of abuse in residential schools. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau makes a tepid speech about accountability and healing. Pope Francis speaks slightly more compellingly about the Church’s shame. It’s nowhere close to enough. Kassie and NoiseCat have created an urgent, courageous documentary that demands more: more for the victims, more for the survivors, and more for the communities that are still feeling the repercussions of residential schools today.