The crimes committed by the Catholic Church are not a new discovery to most people in the western world. However, as it happens with many reminders, the information delivered tends to be centered around a ‘white’ narrative while people of color become background narrators. Most non Indigenous peoples are however oblivious to the existence of boarding schools in North America that were operated by Catholic authorities and funded by the federal government, and Mandatory attendance was enforced. “Sugarcane” demands otherwise. These segregated schools, aimed at “solving the Indian problem” through brainwashing and humiliation, became hotbeds for a lot of usurped power that created once hidden, unchecked atrocities.
Focusing in particular on St. Joseph’s Mission within present day Williams Lake, British Columbia, Canada (decommissioned in 1981), the documentary highlights events with former students and anthropological researchers to paint a picture of the macabre details of state sponsored violence that rendered trauma and death possible against a whole community for over 100 years. The aftermath of the events that follow is an excruciating, radical longing for oblivion of epochs long past.
Along with the co directors Emily Kassie and Julian Brave Noise cat, who appear in this documentary alongside his father Ed and grandmother, and who experienced historical pageants, abused by public opinion forged this monstrous scourge inhabited many victims’ of the terrorized American natives’ personal stories that active ignorance has tried to erase..
The meticulousness and caution with which both Kassie and Noise cat reveal and examine what has been and what lingers from St. Joseph’s Mission, elevates the film quite a notch. It is not merely a dossier, it is indeed an exploration of inter generational trauma. From numerous in situ fatalities and missing tomb stones to indiscriminate violence and illegal reproduction and heart wrenching infanticides of children by the teachers, these institutions seem to have immeasurable catastrophes. But these mentioned offences relate only with the period when students attended the schools. The legacies of these scars inflict casualties in other forms even today, which manifests itself through PTSD, over dependence on alcohol, or even suicidal tendencies in the ex-students communities. The film claims, “Indigenous peoples are still dying from residential schools. And still living, despite them.”
By having three personal pathways to unravel the ripple effect Noise cat’s bond with his father who all his life struggled with his own self and pain of his mother doing the same, religious and hereditary reconciliation of Chief Rick Gilbert, all inclusive criminal investigations by Whitney Spearing and Charlene Belleau “Sugarcane” keeps it very real human beings who have name and family who lived through trauma and history that is mostly overshadowed and generalized.
This calls for accountability which is often only symbolic rather than making reparations, as demonstrated by Trudeau’s and Pope Francis’ (who offered no apologies, no reparations, and no artifact returns) thin expressions of remorse.
‘’Sugarcane’ is a devastating work. It is moving in such an extreme that is instance, half forgotten scenes and half-heard scenes almost emotional voice fragments. The physical environment of the community’s history and folkloric music narration so painfully beautiful and expansive balances the unfolding of the disasters with the fact that the vivid and strong culture of the people survives.
While you can study the painful past of systemic violence, the film does not seem focused on the more fundamental concepts of the totalitarian control system. However, as ‘I love you’ goes into a folk song, ‘Sugarcane’ explodes with a feeling that most of the community members are focused on the emotional side on the survival and the recovery of communities which persist in spite of everything.
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