The last residential school, the abusive Christian-run institutions created to assimilate Indigenous children across North America into the white world, closed in 1997. I was five years old, starting first grade in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, a city named by Creek people, who had arrived after being forced to walk the Trail of Tears from Alabama. My elementary school’s mascot was the Pioneers, which is a polite way of saying “colonists,” which is a polite way of saying “thieves.” Of course the residential schools lasted until the late ’90s, and of course the harm they caused still resonates throughout Indigenous communities. The last few years especially have seen both fiction and nonfiction reckonings—ranging from the poetic reeducation of Lakota Nation vs. United States to the genre work of the late filmmaker Jeff Barnaby—with the brutal, federally-mandated violence of residential schools. Few cinematic takes have been as beautiful and compassionate as Sugarcane. From subject/director Julian Brave NoiseCat and director/journalist Emily Kassie, the documentary gives faces, names and histories to those affected by the residential schools—and looks, bracingly, towards a future where healing is possible.
The impact of these schools is so pervasive and lasting, that even this couched optimism can feel impossible. This is especially true when zeroing in on the members of the Williams Lake First Nation. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone in the WLFN, whose main reserve is British Columbia’s Sugarcane, who wasn’t affected by the violence and sexual assault at the notorious St. Joseph’s Mission residential school. This school in particular featured such rampant, prolific abuse that an anecdote of its evils led to the Canadian holiday National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Sugarcane allows the full extent of this tragedy to play out in details, like Chief Willie Sellars buying an awareness-raising box of orange donuts, and in asides, like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau facing criticism after he speaks at a local event.
While the investigation into St. Joseph’s—both in searching for missing children (in mass graves through ground radar or elsewhere) and in drawing lines of accountability through the various principals in charge of the school—allows longtime expert and advocate Charlene Belleau and her team to share context about the massive scope of this sin, Sugarcane hits hardest when staying personal. We’re well aware of the Catholic Church’s reputation. So aware, in fact, that we can be numb to each new horror story about it. NoiseCat and Kassie put us through targeted treatments to return our sensitivity, starting at home.
NoiseCat and his father Ed are our two closest subjects during Sugarcane. Their confrontational yet loving trip through the latter’s past embraces the double-edged joy and pain of intimacy. They goof around, singing Neil Young and quoting Eminem songs, and hurt each other deeply. As Ed, born at St. Joseph’s under circumstances so painful that his own mother won’t speak about it, recalls his endurance of a complicated childhood, his son bristles at the hypocrisy. A father who left, concerned about an absent parent? But things are finally getting candid, which means the wounds have a chance to close. Anger melts into empathy, as what first looks to be hypocrisy reveals itself as a predictable point in a cycle.
The other two men we spend the most time with are Chief Sellars and former Chief Rick Gilbert, who act as perfect symbols of their eras as well as endearing individuals. Sellars maintains and preserves this history while dealing, on a community level, with its continued fallout. He politely responds to viciously racist hate mail and, when it rears its head, talks seriously with his young children about suicide. Directly after this conversation, NoiseCat and Kassie cut to footage of a trio of drunk seniors waiting for the bus. We get the message: Statistically, these are the two common endpoints for the Indigenous road. It’s not shot through with pity, nor with outsized dignity. Just the sad facts, given faces.
On the other side is the elder Gilbert, who, perhaps unsurprisingly, is still a devout Catholic despite surviving St. Joseph’s abuse. The whole goal of the residential schools was indoctrination, after all. Gilbert ships off to the Vatican to listen to the Pope apologize for the terrors inflicted by these schools while still in denial about his own parentage. Confirmed by one of those genealogy companies’ DNA tests, Gilbert is about half Irish…and second cousins with an awful lot of McGraths, who share a name with one of the priests at St. Joseph’s. But it’s all still too close for Gilbert—too terrible to fully believe. The legacy of that crime existing in your own blood is too much to bear.
Alongside these men, others share their pasts, the trauma weaving a nearly visible web between the community members. NoiseCat and Kassie bring us close enough to touch it through the images they shoot. So many documentaries dealing with crimes like these can be cold, clinical reporting assuming a tactful distance from the whole affair. Sugarcane, warm and sad, knows it all hits harder if we’re living there. Inside the dilapidated shell of the schoolhouse are carved messages in the wooden walls; upstairs, sunlight filters through an asteroid belt of dust motes. The remnants of the past are still physical, and still present.
With natural bursts of color, Sugarcane‘s fire, smoke and snow—shot with the same unexpected closeness as the film’s human subjects—combat harrowing black-and-white clips from the 1962 CBC doc The Eyes of Children. The stark, quiet repetition of Catholicism is drowned out by the loud, bright enthusiasm of powwow dancing. During a late, impossible conversation, a near-black sky serves as a staggering backdrop. It’s one thing to be able to express the emotional effects of an oppressive regime on a community, but another to transport us there in 100 minutes.
One of the best documentaries about trauma from the last decade is Robert Greene’s Procession. Similarly dealing with the atrocities committed by the Catholic Church, the unending power struggle to confront it and the still-resonant shockwaves destabilizing the lives of its survivors, Procession allowed its subjects to seek closure in their own way. Sugarcane‘s survivors find empowerment in each other. Ed and his son, Gilbert and his wife, Sellars and his family, Belleau and her team. “Did they think we’d be stupid?” Belleau asks of those covering up the crimes at the schools. “All of our lives, for the rest of our lives?” They’re indignant questions with a hopeful subtext: Life is long and, together, change is inevitable.
Director: Julian Brave NoiseCat, Emily Kassie
Release Date: January 20, 2024 (Sundance)
Jacob Oller is Movies Editor at Paste Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter at @jacoboller.
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