Content warning: Indigenous Residential Schools
An at once gripping, heartbreaking and beautiful documentary made its way to the big screens this August. “Sugarcane” is a personal film that follows an investigation into unmarked graves found on the grounds of an Indigenous residential school run by a Catholic church in Canada.
When the film’s co-director, Emily Kassie, first heard about the unmarked graves uncovered at Indigenous residential schools across Canada, she knew immediately that she wanted to do a documentary. She enlisted the help of fellow filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat, a member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen and descendant of the Lil’Wat Nation of Mount Currie.
Throughout 2021 and 2022, investigations uncovered unmarked graves across a number of Indigenous residential schools in Canada — these investigations also pointed to the abuse and mistreatment Indigenous young people faced at the hands of the Catholic church after being stolen from their homes.
Across what is now known as Canada and the United States, hundreds of schools were supported by the government and run by the Roman Catholic Church. What followed was generations of horrific abuse and forced assimilation faced by hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people across Turtle Island. The lasting trauma of the schools still impacts Indigenous families today.
After seeing an article in The Williams Lake Tribune about a search underway at the St. Joseph’s Mission residential school near the Sugarcane Reserve of Williams Lake First Nation, Kassie called Willie Sellars, chief of the Williams Lake First Nation, to see if he might be interested in working with her to tell the story of a nationwide problem in a more focused way. It turned out, her timing could not have been better.
“The creator has always had great timing,” Sellars told her. “Just yesterday, our counsel said, ‘We need someone to document this search.’”
After talking to Sellars, Kassie called NoiseCat to share the news.
“There was a long pause on my end of the line,” NoiseCat said. “And then I said, ‘Wow, that’s really crazy. Did you know that’s the school that my family was taken to where my father was born?’ So out of 139 Indian residential schools in Canada, Em happened to choose the one school that my family attended and where my father’s life began. So what are the odds of that?”
NoiseCat’s father and grandmother are both survivors of St. Joseph’s.
What followed was two and a half years of shooting a documentary. For both directors, this meant immersing themselves within the community and the story. For NoiseCat, it was personal.
During the filming of “Sugarcane,” NoiseCat moved in with his father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, who hadn’t been around much growing up. His relationship with his father, and learning about his family’s history, is central to the documentary that NoiseCat not only co-directed, but starred in as well.
“That was an incredibly important and transformative experience,” NoiseCat said, about living with his father at William’s Lake after over a decade on the East Coast and not living with his dad since he was very little. “And I think that was the core of our ability to grow, to heal, and for him to really trust me and for me to trust him in working on this documentary.”
“Sugarcane” looks into the impacts of the St. Joseph Mission residential school, following the experiences of survivors and detailing some of the horrors that Native students faced at the hands of the Catholic church.
The story of NoiseCat’s dad is a particular focus. Ed Archie NoiseCat was born in the school.
“It’s pretty fucking secretive stuff when you were born in a mission school and thrown away,” Ed NoiseCat says in a conversation with his son on screen.
Not only an incredibly personal story for Ed Archie NoiseCat, and his mother who also appears in the documentary, Julian Brave NoiseCat and his dad also have hard conversations about their own relationship on screen.
“Your story is someone who was abandoned, but also who abandoned,” Julian Brave NoiseCat says to his dad.
Working through heavy themes, and the addition of his own family connection in the case of NoiseCat, Kassie and NoiseCat found solace in bonding with the Sugarcane Reserve community. This meant often participating in ceremony with them.
NoisCat participated in weekly sweats and community members also hosted sweat lodge for the film crew throughout their time.
One scene shows NoiseCat is his regalia dancing at a powwow. His connection to culture and spiritual connection felt particularly important to NoiseCat when working on this documentary.
In part, that stems from a central theme of the documentary which is about the spiritual genocide that took place in residential schools.
“Their purpose was to convert our people to Christianity and to make us Catholic. So at its core, [the documentary] is about a spiritual kind of colonization,” NoiseCat said. “Colonization was many things including a spiritual thing.”
By participating in ceremony and connecting to culture in his community, NoiseCat is in direct defiance of what the Catholic church tried and failed to erase.
With current showtimes at theaters across Canada and the United States, “Sugarcane” will be released to streaming services in December.
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