Emilie Kassie

The title Sugarcane suggests a sweet indulgence. That is decidedly not the case in the identified location, the Sugarcane Reserve, where investigation uncovers Indigenous men’s and women’s unmarked graves discovered in 2021 at the nearby Indian residential school. At facilities run by the Catholic Church, physical and sexual abuse, deaths, and murders were common and ignored when reported. In their poetic documentary, directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie pursue the truth of the horrendous circumstances that prevailed at British Columbia’s St. Joseph’s Mission, a place intended, as the founder of U.S. Native American boarding schools, Richard Henry Pratt, proclaimed, “to kill the Indian, and save the man.”

Sugarcane is a hard-hitting documentary about the abuse of Indigenous children at the St Joseph’s Residential Mission School in Williams Lake, British Columbia. Run by the Catholic Church from 1891 to 1991, the school housed children whom government officials removed from families that were dwelling in some 40 native communities. The objective was to teach the children to abandon their own culture and language and to indoctrinate them to behave and think like White people. Unfortunately and unforgivably, that indoctrination often entailed unacceptably cruel punishments like isolation, brutal beatings, sexual abuse and, even, infanticide. The children had absolutely no recourse and the suffering they endured at the hands of the government’s rigid bureaucrats and the mission’s twisted prelates has lasted until today.

Directors Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat chronicle an investigation into a Canadian, Catholic run, Indigenous boarding school of ‘horror’ and those affected by the suffering, murder and abuse inflicted on young innocent children who were being held there against their will under racist conditions. Taken from their homes in an attempt to convert them to a white ideology, the young children were stripped from their cultural identity. The filmmakers follow the investigation specifically into the lives lost at St Joseph’s Residential Mission School in Williams Lake, British Columbia from 1891 to 1991 as they search to uncover burial sites where the victims of infanticide were disposed of.