ST. GEORGE — A new film that turns its lens toward the intergenerational trauma of thousands of Native American children banished to boarding schools, “SUGARCANE” won this year’s Sundance Film Festival’s Directing Award for the U.S. Documentary category.
The film investigates abused and missing children at an Indian residential school near Williams Lake in British Columbia, which rocks the nearby Sugarcane Native American Indian Reserve.
Reporter-turned-filmmaker Julian Brave NoiseCat told St. George News it’s important to remember that the issue is not just a Canadian story or a story about one school.
“This was a system that existed across North America,” NoiseCat said. “There were 408 Native American boarding schools that were funded by the federal government across the United States. That took hundreds of thousands of children away from their homes.”
NoiseCat said U.S. Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland is leading an ongoing inquiry into American residential schools. Haaland made history when she became the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary. She is a member of the Pueblo of Laguna and a 35th-generation New Mexican.
Nevertheless, NoiseCat said there is nowhere near the kind of national conversation here in the United States about this history of assimilation and cultural genocide as there is in Canada.
“This is how North America was colonized. Colonial governments in North America did this to indigenous peoples and this is why so many of our communities are to this day still plagued by so many social ills that are the legacy of residential schools,” NoiseCat said.
This is the debut feature documentary from NoiseCat and co-director Emily Kassie. They hope people will understand this film about a particular community and set of survivors related to North America and the world.
Kassie explained that an additional 70 boarding schools and systems like it also existed worldwide, including Australia and New Zealand. And as late as 1997, a residential school was finally closed. She said she never learned this history in school.
“There have been systems like it on every continent,” Kassie said. “This is universal, not just in the horrors that it presents, but also in the universal themes.”
Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah, date unspecified | Photo courtesy of Sundance Institute and Emily Kassie, St. George News
Additionally to being investigative, the film is a character-driven narrative. Kassie said the production allows the audience to learn things about family and try to rebuild what’s broken.
“It’s about hope and healing. And we want people to see themselves in as well as the importance of this history,” Kassie said.
She added that they are eager for people to see the film as a rewrite of history and a piece of art that can move them, change them and resonate in their lives.
“These abuses at the school have been talked about in Canada, the sexual abuse and the horrible physical abuse and cultural genocide,” Kassie said. “This is really the first time infanticide and the burning of babies born to priests and to unwed mothers is being really exposed. So it’s pretty major.”
NoiseCat added that the film is a foundational story of how North America was colonized and what happened to Native people.
“It’s not just our story; it’s all of your story. And we believe that our film can help share that story with the broader world to understand that this is something that we need to know and we need to make right.”
The two directors met 10 years ago when they sat next to each other while reporting for the Huffington Post. When Kassie came across the news of the discovery of hundreds of potential unmarked graves of students in the apple orchard of the Kamloops Indian Residential School run by the Catholic Church in Canada, she approached NoiseCat, who is of Native American descent. They started collaborating on the film in the spring of 2021.
NosieCat said he had to consider whether he wanted to be involved since the film would cover a school that was a part of his family’s history.
“There’s a very painful story in my family about the residential schools. And so I needed to take some time to think through whether this would be something I felt comfortable taking on,” NoiseCat said.
His father was born in 1959 at St. Joseph’s Mission School under circumstances that his family still does not discuss. NoiseCat said there has been community lore and oral histories about babies born to unwed mothers for many years.
In some instances, children whom priests fathered were avoided or put into forced adoptions or “this is the darkest part of what happened; potentially being left in the school’s incinerator.”
Although the motion picture exposes the incredible traumas and horrors that this community experienced, there were also moments of joy and beauty.
“It’s also a celebration of the way of life that was taken away and is now being reclaimed because we believe that the native way of life is a cinematic and beautiful one and worthy of epic storytelling, and we hope that film does that,” Kassie said. “But we also know that there are so many more stories to tell that are worthy and ready to be told.”
The directors thanked the First Nations in Canada and the film’s production team’s “outstanding efforts.”
Photo Gallery
Julian Brave NoiseCat, co-director of "SUGARCANE" an official selection of the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah, date unspecified | Photo courtesy of Sundance Institute and Emily Kassie, St. George News
A still from "SUGARCANE" by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, an official selection of the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah, date unspecified | Photo courtesy of Sundance Institute and Christopher LaMarcaco, St. George News
Emily Kassie. co director of "SUGARCANE" an official selection of the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah , unspecified date | Photo courtesy of Photo courtesy of the Sundance Institute and Leslye Davis, St. George News
Ed Archie NoiseCat appears in "SUGARCANE" directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, an official selection of the U.S. Documentary Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah, date unspecified | Photo courtesy of Sundance Institute and Emily Kassie, St. George News
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