SUGARCANE – Review by Loren King
Mixing a gutting grassroots investigation with personal and collective reckoning of heinous crimes committed by Catholic priests at St. Joseph’s Mission Indian residential school in British Columbia, Sugarcane is unforgettable storytelling and a compassionate testament to resiliency.
Co-director Julian Brave NoiseCat has a personal stake in exposing the ongoing trauma and injustice that has destroyed and damaged generations living on the Sugarcane Indian Reserve in Williams Lake. His grandmother can’t even talk about what happened to her as a child after she was forced like other indigenous children to attend the school. Her son, Julian’s father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, was born at the school but knows little else except the pain that’s swallowed much of his life. Father and son grapple with how the unspeakable has scarred their relationship; the film is also a road movie as they travel, literally and metaphorically, to confront the past and try to heal.
Stories of abuse of children by priests is sickeningly common. But where some church scandals had teams of investigative reporters earning Pulitzers, such as depicted in the Oscar winner Spotlight, demanding accountability for victims of Indian residential schools has little institutional support. It is investigator and survivor Charlene Belleau, a compelling figure in the film, who for decades has been fighting for accountability for the crimes committed at St. Joseph’s.
In one riveting scene, Julian and Belleau discover initials and dates, some going back a century, carved by children into the walls and beams of a boarded up, dusty barn on the site of the school which closed only in 1991. Most were sexually and emotionally abused by priests who ran the school and nuns who were complicit. Children died, some while trying to escape, and were buried in unmarked graves. Girls raped by priests gave birth shrouded in secrecy and shame, the newborns tossed into incinerators as witnessed by a survivor still haunted by the memory.
In another searing moment, survivor Rick Gilbert, the former chief of Williams Lake First Nation, is among the Indigenous who travel to the Vatican to witness an apology from Pope Francis that seems too little and much too late. Gilbert then shares his harrowing story with a priest who’s part of the order that ran St. Joseph’s. The priest listens and offers sympathy; Gilbert leaves with little more than his dignity.
Sugarcane is layered with voices of the survivors and the silenced. Like last year’s powerful and poetic documentary Lakota Nation vs. the United States which exposed and countered history’s lies, it is at once a reckoning and a plea for reconciliation.
