This New Film Confronts A Haunting History That We Rarely Talk About

Scenes of revelation and reckoning weave together in “Sugarcane,” a documentary that probes Canada’s shameful history of separating Indigenous children from their families to live in residential boarding schools.

The film, which premiered in January at Sundance Film Festival and is now streaming on Hulu, Disney+ and National Geographic, delves into the stories of survivors of widespread abuse at the Catholic-run schools, where children were subject to rape and physical abuse. Some students disappeared — and some were even killed.

The film is anchored by the discovery of unmarked graves at the Catholic-run St. Joseph’s Mission school on Sugarcane Reserve near Williams Lake, British Columbia, in 2021.

In “Sugarcane,” audiences watch as the filmmakers grapple with generations of trauma and cultural degradation wrought by Canada’s over 100 federally funded residential schools. The nation believed it had a duty to “solve the Indian problem,” a phrase coined by a Canadian official who once ran the residential schools and that would be repeated by others in the government.

Children were separated from their families and stripped of their native languages and cultures in an attempt to “civilize” younger generations and assimilate them into the world of white Canadian settlers. The system was in place from 1848 until Canada’s last remaining residential school closed in 1996.

After co-director Emily Kassie was offered the opportunity to follow the investigation, she reached out to former colleague Julian Brave NoiseCat. Initially, NoiseCat was unsure if he wanted to work on any project about Canada’s residential school system because of his family members’ own history as survivors.

When Kassie had approached NoiseCat with a chance to scrutinize the history of St. Joseph’s, she had no idea it was the exact school that haunted two generations of his family, including his father, who was born at the mission.

The circumstances seemed surreal to NoiseCat, who told HuffPost how the “strange coincidence” was both fortuitous and frightening.

“I felt a little bit scared because I was now looking at not just the general subject, but the specific story that my family had not talked about right in the face in a sense,” he said. “In time, I started to think about the circumstances that brought us together and wondered about forces in our world greater than ourselves and beyond ourselves.”

Instead of leaning on the ethos of objectivity and distance that traditional journalism and documentary demands, NoiseCat and his family became key characters in the story.

During the course of the film, the director and journalist embedded himself in the life of his father, carver Ed Archie NoiseCat, by becoming his roommate. The living situation gave NoiseCat an intimate look at his father as he wrestled with how he went from an abandoned child to an absentee parent himself.

“I made the decision to move in with a man who had more or less left my life when I was 6 years old,” NoiseCat shared. “We have had and still have many challenging chapters to our relationship, but it felt really important to me.”

“To me, if we were going to tell a story about my dad and the legacy of the school and my relationship, then there was no version of this where you could half do that,” he added.

As “Sugarcane” unfolds, we learn that Archie is the sole survivor of something horrific: St. Joseph’s students say they witnessed babies born from sexual abuse being burned like trash in the school’s incinerator. Other infants were reportedly cast into the river to drown or left at the bottom of lakes, according to survivors.

The gruesome truth was something Archie had been unable to fully face until participating in the film.

“It became very clear when we were living together that he had all these unaddressed questions from the circumstance[s] of his birth and his childhood and that I was in a position to help him ask. And that through asking those questions, we could also address the legacies of that history that lingered in our own relationship,” NoiseCat explained. “So it became an act of intergenerational not only documentation and storytelling, but also of healing.”

Along with NoiseCat’s family, “Sugarcane” follows former Williams Lake Chief Rick Gilbert, who was both a devout Catholic and the progeny of a priest who raped his mother during her time at St. Joseph’s.

In the film, Gilbert travels to Vatican City as part of a delegation of people invited to hear the pope apologize for the church’s role in the residential school system.

For the filmmakers, witnessing Gilbert’s unwavering faith as he came to terms with his origin was complex but not a contradiction.

“I think that there is sometimes a desire for things to be straightforward and simple for an institution to have done a bad thing, and then people to turn against that institution and reject it,” NoiseCat told HuffPost. “And the reality of human entanglements and relationships is that they’re rarely, if ever, that straightforward.”

In bringing “Sugarcane” to life, Kassie and NoiseCat felt the film had to convey the stark reality of life existing as a “postapocalyptic world for Indigenous peoples” in its visuals as well as its story.

Scenes of trees engulfed in flames, closeups of shovels digging graves and haunting messages from children scratched into the school’s long-abandoned walls helped capture what Kassie described as “what it feels like to live on the edge of death.”

“These are communities facing the highest rates of abuse and suicide and addiction, and as a direct result of these schools,” she explained.

Following its premiere, the filmmakers were able to bring “Sugarcane” directly to communities still wrestling with that trauma, taking it on a tour through Indigenous reservations in both Canada and the U.S.

Sharing “Sugarcane” with the people whose lives were touched by the residential school system has helped pave a path toward healing, according to the directors.

“We’re seeing a real movement in Indigenous communities creating a dialogue around what happened,” Kassie told HuffPost. “Because, though there needs to be accountability and a reckoning with the institutions that perpetrated this, there’s also, and more importantly, a reckoning within Native communities who are still traumatized by what happened and need the space and resources to start dealing with the pain and secrets within their own families.”

In exposing “Sugarcane” to wider audiences, the filmmakers found an ally in one of Hollywood’s most prominent Native American talents.

Earlier this fall, actor Lily Gladstone joined the film as an executive producer. The project was deeply personal for the star, whose own grandmother was a survivor of the Indigenous boarding school system in America.

“There’s no mincing words. There’s nothing edited out,” Gladstone, who was raised on Montana’s Blackfeet Reservation, told Vanity Fair in October. “You’re talking to survivors and you’re confronting that grief and you’re confronting that reality in a way that needs to be done because it’s a hard thing for people to palate.”

As Canada continues to expose its brutal, still-lingering legacy of colonization, the United States is also in the midst of its own reckoning with Indigenous boarding schools that peppered the country.

When President Joe Biden formally apologized for America’s 150-year legacy of forcing children into federally run Indian boarding schools in October, Kassie and NoiseCat joined the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona to witness it.

“We should be ashamed,” Biden told an emotional audience of survivors, descendants and tribal leaders. “A chapter that most Americans don’t know about. The vast majority don’t even know about it.”

But truly making amends will take much more than a formal apology, according to NoiseCat.

As he told HuffPost, “An apology is not enough. There needs to be more action.”

“There was two nations worth of resources and efforts put towards annihilating Indigenous cultures,” he went on. “And that has resulted in language, death and loss all across this continent, of immense cultural loss, of a deep soul wound shared across hundreds of nations of Indigenous peoples.”

“I think it’s reasonable to ask what it would look like to have a policy that did the opposite … What would it look like for those cultures to be built up through national policies of repair?”

“I think that before we can get to questions of reconciliation, we are still at the question of the truth,” Kassie said.

“Sugarcane” is now available to stream through Disney+ and Hulu.