Sugarcane: Devastating Doc about Canadian Residential Schools Should be Required Viewing

By Liz Braun

Rating: A+

Sugarcane is a new National Geographic documentary about cultural genocide. The film concerns the on-going trauma experienced by the Indigenous population forced to attend residential schools in Canada.

Residential schools, often run by the Catholic church and staffed by priests and nuns, were boarding schools where Indigenous children were taken, ostensibly to be educated and assimilated into white culture. The schools were billed as a chance at a better future. In fact, the children were removed from home and family against their will and then subjected to physical, sexual, and emotional abuse.

The schools operated from 1831 until 1996. The National Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada has determined that some 6,000 children died from mistreatment and neglect at the schools.

This history has long been ignored, glossed over or covered up. That may finally have changed with the recent discoveries of more than 2,000 unmarked graves near several of these former schools.

Sugarcane focuses on the St. Joseph’s Mission School in British Columbia and looks at the lives of former residents. The film is directed by Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat, with NoiseCat a viewer’s guide throughout. His father, Ed Archie Noisecat — a residential school survivor, and different spelling of name deliberate — is featured in Sugarcane.

The documentary begins with a brief history of the residential schools and then jumps into the aftermath of the discovery of unmarked graves at St. Joseph’s. Chief Willie Sellars of Williams Lake First Nation talks about how the school experience continues to impact his community and calls for someone to be held accountable.

Very few have ever been held accountable.

The stories from survivors of the St. Joseph’s school are beyond harrowing — missing children, violent punishments, sexual assault, suicide, infanticide. Some of the Indigenous girls raped by priests became pregnant; their infants were often killed or given away by clergy. Throwing these inconvenient newborns into the school furnace appears to have been a regular solution.

Among those interviewed in the film is the handyman who had to clean the furnaces at St. Joseph’s, as well as one survivor, the product of rape, who was given away in infancy to a family with 11 children — seven of whom committed suicide.

Years later, the shattered survivors still weep when they speak of what happened to them. Others still cannot bring themselves to talk about their experiences at all. Here is intergenerational trauma writ large.

Rick Gilbert, late former Chief of Williams Lake, is featured in Sugarcane as he joins other Indigenous leaders in a special 2022 trip to Rome to meet Pope Francis. In Rome, Gilbert speaks to a representative of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the Catholic order that ran half of Canada’s residential schools. Gilbert talks about how the priests who abused children were never punished, just moved around. He is product of such abuse and knows, via DNA testing, which priest fathered him.

Those priests and brothers, most of whom are dead now, are named by some survivors. Their pictures are also on a wall put together by Indigenous researcher Charlene Belleau and others who are helping investigate what happened at St. Joseph’s. And what happened is that people were marginalized, brutalized, and then convinced that they were to blame for all that befell them. Meanwhile, the harms continue.

Sugarcane is not an inherently political film but given the residential school denialism that exists in Canada, people should know that places such as Winnipeg's Frontier Centre for Public Policy (FCPP) still exist. The FCPP is known for whitewashing what happened to Indigenous kids at residential schools.

Just last year, career politician Pierre Poilievre — who stated publicly that Canada’s Indigenous people need to learn the value of hard work more than they need compensation for abuse suffered in residential schools — gave a talk at the FCPP.

One hopes Sugarcane will be shown in schools all over North America.

Sugarcane. Directed by Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat. With Julian Brave NoiseCat, Charlene Belleau, Rick Gilbert, Chief Willie Sellars, Ed Archie Noisecat. Returning to theatres September 27 in honour of Orange Shirt Day.