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From 2021 to 2022, the remains of hundreds of children were discovered in unmarked graves at former Catholic-run, government boarding schools for Indigenous children in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Saskatchewan. This documentary from Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie explores how NoiseCat’s own community, the Sugarcane Reserve, was impacted by the nearby St. Joseph’s Mission residential school, which from 1886 to 1981 forcibly indoctrinated Indigenous children into Anglo-Canadian culture to take care of “the Indian problem.”

Archival footage in Sugarcane

For co-director NoiseCat, the story is particularly personal. His own father was found as a newborn in a dumpster on the school property and his aunt describes attending the school as a nightmare in which she was constantly made to feel dirty. Incorporating archival photos and video, the film makes it clear that Indigenous people were stereotyped as stupid, lazy and subhuman, and that Catholic priests and other school staff members were knowingly abusing, starving, molesting, raping and impregnating Indigenous children. Suicides were prevalent. Bounties were offered for runaways. Newborn infants were thrown into incinerators. It is shocking and horrific.

Willie Sellars in Sugarcane

The film poignantly handles this sensitive subject, showing the heartache experienced by those who survived the abuse in the residential schools while also illustrating the daily life of today in this First Nation community. Most telling – the nice but empty public apologies by the Canadian government and the Vatican that have been followed up with no restitution or action to help those traumatized by the generations of systemic abuse.

REEL FACTS

Sugarcane has been nominated for a 2025 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

• In 1978, U.S. President Jimmy Carter signed the Indian Child Welfare Act, which gave Native American parents the legal right to refuse their child’s placement in a boarding school.

U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland speaks with Russell Eagle Bear at the third Road to Healing stop in Mission, South Dakota in October 2022.

• During her tenure as Interior Secretary, Deb Haaland, the U.S.’s first Indigenous cabinet secretary – whose own grandparents as children had been forced to attend residential schools, embarked on a months-long “Road to Healing” tour throughout the U.S. In December 2024, U.S. President Joe Biden issued an official apology on behalf of the federal government for the abuse suffered at these schools and criticized the government for not apologizing sooner.

 

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