Sugarcane depicts the importance of breaking a generational cycle of trauma and exposing the truth
If you’re unfamiliar with “Indian residential schools,” which were boarding schools run by the Catholic church for Indigenous children in Canada and the United States, their existence marks a horrific chapter in North American history with repercussions still being felt (and investigated) to this day. Sugarcane is a new documentary by co-directors Emily Kassie and Julian Brave Noisecat that brings us into the emotional fold of these repercussions. Sugarcane shines a specific spotlight on the Canadian residential school system and the traumatic impact they’ve had on generations of Indigenous families. It’s a troubling and devastating documentary, but all the more important viewing for the strength and resilience it represents.
Julian Brave Noisecat is the son of a residential school survivor, Ed Archie Noisecat, so while Sugarcane explores the wide-ranging impacts of the residential school system, the film’s primary focus is the particular school his father survived, St. Joseph’s Mission. The school operated from 1867 to 1981 and became the main subject of a Williams Lake First Nation investigation in 2021 when unmarked graves were discovered on the property. The investigation is still ongoing. This discovery brought a century of Indigenous disappearances and child abuse to light. In the wake of these disturbing revelations, Kassie and Noisecat set out to document the investigation and confront the trauma head-on with a few of the survivors and regional leaders. In many heartbreaking scenes, survivors are directly asked to recall what happened to them and their peers at the schools. We see the survivors shake and tremble as the pain creeps back into their present-day consciousness as they attempt, and often fail, to speak about it. Throughout the film, some begin to tell their stories, and they are frequently as awful as you’d imagine.
The intimate filmmaking approach in Sugarcane– the title is based on the local term for the Williams Lake Indian Reserve–is what makes the film so effective. From within the mystery and atrocities that the film explores surrounding St. Joseph’s Mission, the story mostly follows a few individuals. Some, like the current Williams Lake Nation Chief Willie Sellers, are fighting for the truth, for acknowledgment, and for reparations. Others, like former Chief Rick Gilbert, are in an emotional fight with themselves to confront what happened to them as children. In a deeply upsetting but powerful moment, Gilbert reveals the abuse he experienced at St. Joseph’s Mission to a priest at the Vatican after a group from the Williams Lake Nation seeks apologetic acknowledgment from Pope Francis. As the audience, we are also entrusted with Gilbert’s story, and, in doing so, are asked to recognize Gilbert’s courage and perseverance. The same goes for the other survivors who are reluctant to revisit painful memories. To know that there were nearly two hundred of these schools in Canada and around five hundred in the United States is a horrifying statistic when we understand the atrocities of the one school at the center of this film. Ultimately, Sugarcane reckons with the idea of breaking the cycle of trauma, a powerful sentiment and movement worth the attention of all audiences.
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Sugarcane will be released in select theaters throughout August.
