The systematic abuse of Indigenous children at Indian Residential Schools barely received attention in North America despite going on for generations. That has finally changed in the past year in large part through the profound impact of Sugarcane, the Oscar-nominated documentary directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie.
“These were institutions that were actually founded in the U.S. with the idea to ‘kill the Indian and save the man,’ in the words of one of their original architects,” NoiseCat explained during an appearance with Kassie at Deadline’s Contenders Film: The Nominees. “For over 150 years, about six generations, native children were forcibly separated from their families and sent to these schools to be assimilated into white and Christian society. The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission has described this as a cultural genocide. It’s one of the most significant, foundational chapters in North American history. And yet people have heard very little about it.”
Children attending the schools were routinely subjected to physical and sexual abuse, deprived of their language and culture. An untold number of them wound up dead – some killed while trying to escape the schools, other under circumstances that remain unclear. Evidence suggests the possible presence of human remains on the grounds of some of the institutions.
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“I’ve spent a career looking at human rights abuses and conflicts all over the world from Niger to Afghanistan but had never turned my lens on my own country. I’m born and raised in Canada and knew next to nothing about the residential schools, even though the last one closed in 1997. This is such a present history,” Kassie said. “So, when the news broke of potential unmarked graves on the grounds of one of those schools, I felt gut-pulled to this story. I felt like this was the place in the world I needed to be to follow one of these searches from its onset.”
Kassie directed her attention to the St. Joseph’s Mission School in British Columbia, where Chief Willie Sellars of the Williams Lake First Nation had been pushing for an investigation into possible unmarked graves. She reached out to her friend NoiseCat – they had met early in their journalistic careers – about collaborating on a film, having no idea about his personal connection to St. Joseph’s Mission.
“When she said that, I was completely shocked. I had to make sure that I heard her correctly because of course, that’s a school that my family was sent to and where my father was born,” NoiseCat recalled. “So, out of 139 Indian residential schools across Canada, [Emily] happened to choose to focus our documentary on the one school that my family was taken away to and where my father’s life began, without even realizing that that’s what she had done.”
The documentary project became both an investigation into abuse at that school and a personal odyssey for NoiseCat as he tried to establish a stronger emotional bond with his father, Ed Archie NoiseCat. The legacy of shame and trauma for Indigenous people who went to the schools had harmed an enormous number of families, including NoiseCat’s.
“I chose actually to move back in with my dad, a man who left when I was a small child, who I hadn’t lived with since I was 6 or 7 years old,” he said. “At the age of 28, as a first-time filmmaker and author, I decided to move into the same house as him and live across the hall. And through that experience it became very clear that he had these questions about the circumstances surrounding his birth as well as his upbringing, which themselves went back to our family’s experience and his mother in particular, her experience at St. Joseph’s Mission. … Here I was with my own complicated relationship to my dad that was in large part caused by that history of, again, family separation. And I was in a position to help him sort through that and in so doing to help myself sort through my own questions of my relationship to my father and my culture.”
In addition to its Oscar nomination, Sugarcane has won numerous awards around the world including Best Director for NoiseCat and Kassie at the Sundance Film Festival, Best Documentary from the National Board of Review, and both Best Political Documentary and Best True Crime Documentary at the Critics Choice Documentary Awards.
“We screened at the Canadian Parliament,” BraveCat noted. “We screened in the White House, which was incredibly, incredibly special. It was actually in the Indian Treaty Room of the White House, which is obviously symbolically significant. And we were also, in many places, accompanied by the first Native American cabinet secretary, Deb Haaland, who as the Secretary of Interior [in the Biden administration] led a formal inquiry, a federal inquiry into the Native American boarding schools.”
One of the most powerful scenes in Sugarcane takes place in a disused barn where, over a period of decades, Indigenous children worked under the lash. Sometimes they escaped abuse by climbing up to an attic area.
“The kids were used as child labor … They would be taken and strapped to poles and brutally beaten until they passed out,” Kassie said. “The top of the barn is a place where kids would go hide out … So, this was a place of both horror, forced labor and of refuge. And when you take the ladder up to those kind of [rafters] of the barn, what you find on the walls is etchings of children — dating back to 1917 — where they would mark their names, what reservation they came from, and in some cases they would count down the days until they could go home.”
Kassie added, “The barns hold a very particular power because one of the central kind of ideas behind Sugarcane is this question of what happens when the ghosts come home to tell the story. And it’s here in these barns and these remaining structures of the Mission that some of those spirits still live.” Ascending to that haunted space, Kassie said, “It felt as if the world had broken open. It felt as if the film was connecting what we were experiencing — there was a portal to something else. And we talked a lot about how Indigenous storytelling and tradition takes very seriously the notion of the spirit world. And that became an integral part to how we told the story of Sugarcane.”
Check back Monday for the panel video.
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