In their documentary Sugarcane, directors Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat investigate decades of child abuse and missing children at St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School. It uncovers cases of infants thrown in incinerators and buried in unmarked graves. Although the film provided some answers, the filmmakers say the government still is concealing important records.
President Biden publicly apologized for the U.S. boarding school policy in October, after the film premiered at Sundance this year.
“That was so profound to hear,” Kassie said of the apology, speaking on a panel with NoiseCat at Deadline’s Contenders Documentary event. “At the same time, they haven’t opened the records. They haven’t opened the records to Indigenous communities so that at the very least, the truth can be known. And there’s a question of what justice or reparations might look like. That’s a question that Indigenous communities obviously will need to lead.”
Kassie said she never heard about residential schools growing up in Canada. NoiseCat had heard stories but dismissed them as scary urban legends. NoiseCat’s father and grandmother both attended St. Joseph’s, and NoiseCat said he recognized the names of families children etched into a barn while hiding from abusive nuns and bishops. That barn also might hold more mystery.
“I think it’s worth clarifying that this barn actually is in certain senses still in use,” NoiseCat said. “This land is actually still part of multiple working ranches nearby and alongside those structures where there may in fact be potential unmarked burials.”
NoiseCat added that St. Joseph’s Mission was not the only boarding school to abuse Indigenous students or infants. He hopes Sugarcane prompts more inquiries.
“There’s still so much for us to learn about these institutions,” he said. “We feel that our documentary can be part of a broader effort towards more truth-telling, particularly about the unreported parts of the story, including what happened to the babies born at some of these institutions like St. Joseph’s Mission, where we found a pattern and investigators found a pattern of infanticide that had never been documented or reported before.”
Sugarcane also can be part of the healing process, NoiseCat hopes. His father, Ed Archie Noisecat, is in the film. Ed and Julian lived together for two years while Julian was making the movie.
“We went from him leaving when I was 6 years old and me barely seeing him in the years since to living across the hallway from each other and cooking each other breakfast and hanging out and playing games and sharing so many stories about our life,” he said. “We really became, I would say, best friends. We really enjoy hanging out and each other’s company.”
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Julian said the film and living together promoted healing between him and his father. He also facilitated a reconciliation between Ed and his mother, a healing that continues after the film.
“Just a month and a half ago, he actually drove all the way up to Cannon Lake, which is not a short journey, to go visit his mom, which is not something that I think he would have done before the events in this film,” he said. “So we hope that that story can encourage other families like ours, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, also to seek their own reconciliation because that’s really important.”
Sugarcane opened in theaters over the summer and debuts December 9 on National Geographic Channel, followed the next day by a streaming launch on Disney+ and Hulu.
Check back Monday for the panel video.
