“Personal Stories”
Tyson Stewart (Nipissing University)
In recent years in Canada, much news coverage has focused on a landfill in Winnipeg searched in the hopes of finding remains of Indigenous women killed by a modern-day serial killer (Skibicki). In March 2025, the remains of Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran were located north of Winnipeg. In other news, Canadians are confronted by a Conservative Party candidate in the federal election campaign who is an outspoken Residential School denialist and apologist. Released within this context, Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat’s documentary Sugarcane (2024) is a portrayal of an Indigenous community’s pain. The worst thing you can say about this film is that sometimes it treats the material as if it were the first film on this topic. And in this case, you can easily forgive it for covering familiar ground.
St. Joseph’s Residential School, located near Williams Lake, BC, has left a legacy of irreparable harms and unclear answers. Even though the main building that the school operated out of was torn down in the late 1980s and only a barn remains at the site today, there is no forgetting it. The national radio service of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) is heard in the film as NoiseCat (Secwepemc/St’at’imc) drives around the reserve. The announcer reports on the 215 unmarked graves found at Kamloops in early 2021. Later in the film, Orange Shirt Day (or the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation) is mentioned at a community gathering. Chief Willie Sellars of Williams Lake First Nation declares, “The first Truth and Reconciliation Day in the history of Canada. A National holiday. Can you believe it? We need to continue to tell the truth. We need to continue to hold each other up.” Canada puts out constant reminders that it is doing the work of reconciliation. Too often, however, what pops up in our news cycles are stories of racism, abuse, excessive/fatal use of police force, Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), serial killers targeting Indigenous women, and the long-term destructiveness of the Residential School System (RSS). The list goes on.
This grim news cycle in Canada forces us to ask some difficult questions about whether things have substantially improved for Indigenous peoples and about the value of reconciliatory efforts: Are we witnessing a step back for reconciliation? Or was reconciliation ever even really taking place outside of symbolic gestures like land acknowledgements? Sugarcane offers an interrogation of our media landscape, which seems to waver between genuine attempts to raise awareness of Truth and Reconciliation efforts and the continuing manifestations of our genocidal history. During this fraught time, Sugarcane draws attention to the destructive legacies of the RSS and, in particular, of Saint Joseph’s.
The filmmakers expend great effort to shed light on all the modern and traditional ways in which the community members tell the story of their experiences as survivors. Alongside testimony, other reminders of the damage wrought by the RSS included in the film are photographs, footage from a 1962 CBC documentary, and even DNA tests showing that one survivor (Rick Gilbert) shared DNA with a priest from St. Joseph’s. All these disparate parts come together within the film to tell the community’s story of colonial crimes.
In the past several years, there has been a turn toward true crime and crime narratives in Canadian media with podcasts like Connie Walker’s Missing & Murdered and Stolen, TV series like Tribal (2020 – 2022) and Three Pines (2022), as well as other documentaries like nîpawistamâsowin: We Will Stand Up (2019), a close community examination of the Gerald Stanley trial. While true crime elements are present in Sugarcane, solving a crime is not the overall purpose of the film. Rather, one storytelling method brings the pieces of the St. Joseph’s school story together more than others: oral storytelling or oral testimony.
Brenda Longfellow has written critically about earlier depictions of residential school life that feature interviews with survivors:
[P]ersonal testimony, particularly that which relates to egregious sexual violence, provides a powerful testament to the horror of residential schools and a deeply compelling retort to national myths around the benevolence of Canadian colonialism. But as Audra Simpson and many critics of the TRC have noted, the solicitation of extreme emotional vulnerability and of singular modes of affective display can also have deleterious impacts that include the perpetuation of the myths of Indigenous peoples as victims and the occlusion of considerations of the harms of colonialism beyond…residential schools.
For instance, Abenaki filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin’s Honour to Senator Murray Sinclair (2021) features testimonials of residential school survivors that are so sad and raw that I was relieved by how sparingly they were used. Even though this footage was shot for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Obomsawin said she would not have used it had she not received consent from the survivors themselves to include it her film. Arguably, to not include the testimonials in these films would be a disservice to the survivors.
The deeply personal stories told in Sugercane are likewise raw and emotional, shared by people still very much affected by the RSS, including NoiseCat himself. One of the most resonant storylines in Sugarcane is the strained and complicated relationship between the director and his father, Ed. Wanting to understand why his father left him when he was a child, Julian confronts Ed in one scene: “I guess I just feel like I’m here to help you when you don’t really fully recognize the thing that we share. Your story is someone who was abandoned, but also who abandoned.” Ed, who was abandoned as a baby at St. Joseph’s, tries to explain the pain he was going through at the time, but emotions soon take over and we get a moment of silence.
This emphasis on intergenerational trauma is not unique to Sugarcane. Intergenerational conflict is the topic of another exceptional residential school documentary made by Jules Koostachin for the NFB. In WaaPaKe (2023), the personal dimension of how multiple generations in the same family are affected by RSS history is explored through a series of self-reflexive interviews where the role of filmmaking is foregrounded through various techniques, including direct address and green screen effects. A grandmother, a mother (the director), and a son speak in turn to the pain caused by cultural separation and the lack of love growing up.
Sugarcane captures a mood I find uniquely compelling. The scenes of multiple, ongoing investigations into RSS abuses and crimes and the stories from pained individuals that seek answers in the beautiful yet sorrowful setting of Williams Lake are shot with a noir sensibility. The subtle shifts in tone highlight the role of mourning in Indigenous communities, which suggests a radical closeness to people who are no longer present. From quiet rage to feelings of alienation and resentment mixed with denial and exhaustion, there is so much darkness that the lighter moments of celebration and ceremony seem to be the result of a herculean effort.
“Sugarcane’s Poetics of Indigenous Investigation”
Joanna Hearne (University of Oklahoma)
Sugarcane brings Indigenous truth-telling to the screen while conveying the lasting damage of stories long unheard. At one point, the film’s co-director and subject Julian Brave NoiseCat says, “For something that important to our literal existence, I think I want know the whole story,” but is answered by his father with a hard truth: “We don’t have the whole story. Cause I don’t know it.” Ed Archie NoiseCat continues, “It’s pretty fucking secretive stuff when you were born in a mission school and thrown away.”
State intervention in Indigenous family and community life, especially through separation of children from their families, has been one of the most devastating forms of settler colonial oppression experienced by Indigenous peoples. Across the US and Canada, Native children were sent to residential schools far from home starting in the late 1900s and continuing throughout most of the twentieth century—139 federally funded schools in Canada and over 400 in the US. In Canada, Native children were required to attend segregated residential schools starting in 1894 and the last school closed in 1996.
The loss of language, culture, family and identity and the trauma across multiple generations of families raised in institutional settings is immeasurable and has been the subject of extensive historical research and testimony, including through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which described the residential school policy as “cultural genocide.” The UN Article II of the Geneva Convention includes in its definition of genocide “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.” And in fact the policy’s goal was elimination, or as the film’s opening intertitle describes it, to “get rid of the Indian problem.”
While K-12 curricula in the US and Canada still do not adequately teach this devastating history, there is a significant visual record from early cinema through the present, including actualities, western Indian dramas and silent features, and – in the late 20th and early 21st centuries – many documentaries. The visual records of the residential schools themselves are also extensive, including propaganda films and the notorious “before and after” pictures from the Carlisle Indian School, showing Native students on their arrival at Carlisle and months or years later stripped of all visual markers of Indigenous identity, in their military uniforms. Many recent documentaries narrate or even dramatize elements of the residential schools, often through re-enactments or narrative exposition.
Sugarcane, nominated for an Oscar in 2025, is different from other documentaries about Indigenous residential school experiences produced over the last two decades; it is more expressive in its aesthetics, drawing together brief shots and glancing close-ups like so many shards of partial knowledge. Rather than laying out the history in an explanatory mode, the film proceeds in lyric fragments, mimicking aesthetically the elusiveness of the historical record. The film’s investigative story gathers evidence from interviews and testimony, archival documents and photographs, and ground-penetrating radar. The poetic editing style evokes a sharp, unfinished, unsettled feeling as the film conveys the emotional toll of secrecy and loss.
This lyric style extends a new documentary aesthetic for Indigenous media towards a poetics of Indigenous investigation. We follow not only Ed Archie and Julian NoiseCat but also other survivors of the Saint Joseph’s Mission and Cariboo Residential School, including investigator Charlene Belleau, former Chief of Williams Lake First Nation Rick Gilbert, and its current Chief, Willie Sellars. As Belleau and archaeologist Whitney Spearing interview survivors, comb through archival records, call the last living priest from the school, and assemble a database and evidence board, they reverse both the ethnographic gaze of documentary film tradition and the investigative judgments of the settler colonial state, which so heavily surveilled Indigenous families and communities, scrutinizing their bodies and regulating their behavior with controlling detail for more than a hundred years.
“Did they think we’d be stupid all of our lives, the rest of our lives? That nobody would ever find out these things?” Belleau asks at one point, incredulously. The persistence, competence and compassionate professionalism of these Indigenous women investigators stand out all the more sharply in contrast with footage of a hapless speech from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as well as Catholic church officials at the Vatican in a series of scenes featuring hasty, performative apologies. The awkward, sometimes grudging steps of those in power to take responsibility, or to hold institutions and individuals to account, is underscored as former Chief Rick Gilbert reminds a Vatican representative that being sorry for something is just a first step: “We’ve heard apologies, but still nothing has happened, really.”
While representatives of the Catholic Church and Canadian state do as little as possible, the investigators do everything they can. Their conversations with survivors and witnesses are remarkable for the care they bring to each person, acknowledging the difficulty of speaking about sexual abuse, about witnessing infanticide. The filming shows both the hard work of testimony and the burdens of going so long unheard. Bringing an elder to point out the areas where burials happened, they reassure her: “You are so brave.” Following these painful memories and testimonies are ceremonies and prayers to begin healing.
Sugarcane also draws on archival footage from documentaries about residential schools (for example The Eyes of Children, a 1962 CBC documentary), and the investigation into Saint Joseph’s comes alongside media coverage of new ground-penetrating radar evidence showing 215 unmarked graves on the former school grounds of another residential school, near Kamloops. Soon, the new technology reveals unmarked graves at Saint Joseph’s, too. The Williams Lake First Nation investigation reveals that the stories that survivors of the St. Joseph’s mission school told, which were so long discounted, were true. They find the clearest evidence of Ed Archie NoiseCat’s birth in the paper archives of the Williams Lake Tribune, “New Born Babe Saved from Garbage Burner” at the Cariboo Residential School, in an article dated September 28 of 1959. His mother was charged with abandoning her baby and sentenced to a year in jail, yet no one else at the school was investigated.
As Chief Willie Sellars confronts and contemplates the evidence board showing all of the principals involved with the abuse, the babies born, and the deaths at the school, we confront the shattering of lives—of whole families and communities—by actions of the church and state through practices of moving predatory priests from one school to another. For decades, the extent of the residential school holocaust was minimized.
But the history of film representations of boarding and residential schools reveal that the public knew much (though not all) about the abuses of residential schools. The surprise of these revelations is no surprise but instead reveals a public choice to forget and an Indigenous insistence that we remember. The feeling evoked by the film’s style and subject is the intense precarity of Indigenous survival in the face of systemic genocide—Ed Archie NoiseCat is the only known survivor of the incinerator at St. Joseph’s, his son Julian born because he lived; this film tells the story of that survival, by the slimmest of chances.
DOCALOGUE 