Four years ago, a ground-penetrating radar study commissioned by the Tk’emlups te Secwépemc First Nation identified evidence of about 200 child-size graves on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.
After the discovery, I received a phone call. It was from a friend and former colleague, Emily Kassie, asking if I’d be open to co-directing a documentary about the legacy of the 139 government-funded and church-run boarding schools that operated across Canada and forcibly separated six generations of Indigenous children from their families.
The idea behind the schools, in the words of one of their administrators, was to “get rid of the Indian problem.” In 2008, the Canadian government established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to document their destructive legacy, and the commission concluded that these institutions committed a “cultural genocide” against the country’s First Peoples.
The news of the grim discovery in Kamloops hit close to home for me. All my adult life, I’d heard rumors that my father was born at or near one of those residential schools and that he’d been found, just minutes after his birth, abandoned in a dumpster. Those few details were all he or I knew. The silence, shame and guilt that hid this history from broader society rippled across generations of Indigenous families like my own. Our communities continue to suffer from cycles of suicide, addiction and violence, instigated by the experience at these schools.
When Emily, a filmmaker and tenacious investigative journalist who’s covered human rights abuses from Afghanistan to Niger, asked me about joining her in documenting the legacy of these schools — a system that most likely nearly took my father’s life and remained an unspoken horror for my family — I agonized over the decision.
While I stewed, Emily forged ahead. She’d found an article in The Williams Lake Tribune about Chief Willie Sellars and the Williams Lake First Nation, whose community was about to embark on its own inquiry into a former school down the road from the Sugarcane Indian reserve. Emily wrote the chief an email and the next day he called her back. “The creator has always had great timing,” Chief Sellars said. “Just yesterday our council said we needed to document our search.”
Two weeks later, I told her I was open to directing alongside her. That’s when she let me know she’d identified a First Nation that was opening its own investigation and that the investigation was happening at St. Joseph’s Mission.
There was a long pause on my end of the line. “That’s crazy,” I said. I told her that St. Joseph’s was the school where my family was sent and where my father was born nearby and abandoned in a dumpster. “And that’s all I’ve ever known,” I said.
Out of 139 Indian residential schools across Canada, Emily happened to choose to focus our documentary on the one school my family was taken away to and where my father’s life began.
Four years later, that documentary, “Sugarcane,” is up for an Oscar on Sunday night. The investigation at the heart of our film found evidence that babies born to Native girls, including some fathered by priests, had been adopted or even put in the incinerator at St. Joseph’s Mission to be burned with the trash. “Sugarcane” is, to our knowledge, the first work in any medium to uncover evidence of infanticide at an Indian residential or boarding school in North America. In addition, we learned this was, in part, my father’s story. Born to Native parents and found by a nightwatchman after his birth, he is the only known survivor of infanticide at the school.
The findings in our film raise a question: If such things were covered up at one school, what might be true at the other 138 Indian residential schools across Canada? And what remains hidden at the hundreds of Native American boarding schools that operated across the United States — where, unlike in Canada, there has been scant inquiry and even less reckoning with this history?
It’s an honor to be the first Indigenous filmmaker from North America to be nominated for an Academy Award. But I better not be the only one for long. Some might see this nomination as historic and proof that Hollywood has come a long way from the time when studios portrayed Indians dying at the hands of swaggering cowboys. That era of western movies coincided with the heyday of the residential schools, which were designed to kill off Indigenous cultures and which led, in some cases, to the death of children themselves.
These foundational chapters in North American history — a cultural genocide that spanned over 150 years — have remained largely obscured and suppressed. Currently, right-wing parties in both Canada and the United States are trying to shroud the historical record. We must redouble our efforts to collect and preserve the memories of the elderly survivors of this system and tell their stories before they’re gone and it’s too late. Because it can, and is, happening again.
Policies like the separation of families, many of them Indigenous, at the southern American border, along with the return of explicit calls for land grabs and ethnic cleansing, are not imported — they’re homegrown. Hollywood, like so many industries, appears on the brink of cowing to revanchist attacks on pluralism and difference.
For most of North American history, Indigenous peoples lived under a devastating form of authoritarianism, confined to impoverished reservations and denigrated as inferior outsiders in the only place we’ve ever known as home. Through the residential schools, we were even deprived of the right to raise our own children.
But those schools failed. And Indigenous peoples are still here. “Sugarcane” is a testament to the stories yet to be told — stories of a people who survived a genocide, who have urgent things to say and unique stories to tell. We maintain a way of seeing the world that is deeply familial, communal, spiritual, rooted in place and tradition, and in that sense, human and universal. And we’ve only begun to tell our stories.
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