The documentary, exploring atrocities at St. Joseph’s Mission, brought one filmmaker closer to home.
“For something so important to our literal existence, I think I want to know the whole story.”
So begins a conversation between Julian Brave NoiseCat — writer, filmmaker and member of the Canim Lake Band — and his father, Salish artist Ed Archie NoiseCat.
That conversation, explored haltingly in the years that followed, forms a thread that weaves through Sugarcane, an award-winning documentary about the Williams Lake First Nation’s investigation into atrocities at St. Joseph’s Mission.
As the film begins, NoiseCat senior asks his son if he’s learned details about NoiseCat senior’s 1959 birth at the residential school. “It’s pretty fucking secretive stuff when you were born in a mission school and thrown away,” he says. As the filmmaker presses his father, their story becomes an endearing and, at times, lighthearted touch point in a film that explores some of the darkest recesses of Canada’s history.
Sugarcane, which opened Aug. 23 at the VIFF Centre and screens this Friday, Sept. 6, at the Rio Theatre, emerged from a serendipitous connection between Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, an Emmy- and Peabody-nominated filmmaker and investigative journalist raised in Toronto and based in New York City.
When Kassie first reached out to her longtime friend, NoiseCat, to suggest they collaborate on a documentary about searches at former residential schools, neither imagined that the outcome would be a deeply intimate portrait and a journey of discovery for NoiseCat’s family.
For his part, NoiseCat was raised in California but frequently returned to his father’s home of Canim Lake, B.C. The film shows him speaking Secwepemctsín with his Kyé7e, grandmother, and winning a traditional dance competition at the Kamloopa Powwow.
NoiseCat and Kassie combined their strengths to co-direct the film, with Kassie also acting as producer and cinematographer. Also featured are Williams Lake First Nation Chief Willie Sellars, investigator and community member Charlene Belleau, survivor and former Chief Rick Gilbert, and Whitney Spearing, an investigator and archeologist working on the search.
The film is dedicated to all the children sent to St. Joseph’s Mission, in particular Gilbert, who died in September.
It is beautifully told, offering an intimate and, at times, deeply unsettling portrayal of the devastating truths held in the history of St. Joseph’s Mission.
The camera makes space for that discomfort — holding the gaze of a high-ranking Catholic priest asked to acknowledge the hurt, or silently witnessing a survivor’s tears. The audience becomes active participants in this deeply troubling chapter in North America’s history.
Sugarcane premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the directing award for documentary. It has since received 14 international film festival awards and has been picked up by National Geographic.
The Tyee recently caught up with NoiseCat and Kassie — who have been busy touring with the film — for an interview. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
The Tyee: Sugarcane is such a beautiful and powerful film. How does it feel to see it out in the world?
Julian Brave NoiseCat: Are you asking as a filmmaker or as a person who’s in it? It’s complicated. But it mostly feels amazing. It’s been so well received. We couldn’t have asked for a better entrance in the world. Personally, I just feel so grateful to Nat Geo, our team, my family, our community and all the audiences who perceived it in this way. It’s a very vulnerable, personal story.
Emily Kassie: This is a story that some people have been fighting to tell for their whole lives, people like Charlene Belleau. Then there are some who have been unable to speak because of generations of oppression and dismissal from the church and government and authorities who were responsible for answering to the crimes and claims that Indigenous people were reporting for decades.
This film feels like an opening. It feels like an opportunity for the truth to finally be heard. Obviously, these conversations have begun across Canada, but there are conversations that are just beginning in the United States, where the system was three times as big, where there were at least 417 federally funded schools.
Before we can get to this question of reconciliation in Canada, it’s imperative that we first know the truth, and the whole truth. As we learn from Sugarcane, we’re not yet there. This is the first time that testimony of potential infanticide at one of these schools has been reported, where there is an incinerator where babies are being discarded. We’ve heard whispers of these stories across other schools, and so this is really an opportunity for people to demand that the government and the church open their records so that Indigenous communities can finally at least know what really happened.
Some of the scenes from the film are incredibly intimate. Can you share a bit about how much time you spent in the community and how you built trust with people?
Kassie: We shot 160 days of footage over 2 1/2 years, and really spent a lot of time living in community and just attending, you know, the Elders dance, different community events, and being with people as they live their lives — as Willie tucked his kids into bed at night and the many games of Snakes and Ladders that they played. Rick and I spent a lot of nights watching American Idol, which was his favourite show. Just really showing up in an open-hearted and compassionate way to create the space for people to share and discover their truths over time.
NoiseCat: I didn’t grow up in Canim Lake, but this is a place I’ve been going back to my entire life. I have a godson there. I have a bajillion family members. It’s where my dad grew up. It was very special to get to spend so much time in the place that I come from. I’m really grateful that the documentary brought me closer to home. It gave me new responsibilities among our people, new ceremonial commitments and those sorts of things. It also gave me the opportunity to help bring my dad home, who has a much more complicated relationship to this place, for very understandable reasons.
I think that it was really important that the Williams Lake First Nation had this conversation before Emmy reached out to them about wanting their search to be documented. I think we were really lucky to be working with the community that wanted to and was ready to tell their story.
Julian, you say the film was made with “a lot of love and a little bit of magic.” Can you share how you ended up connecting to work on this project?
Kassie: When the news of potential unmarked graves broke in May 2021, I felt gut-pulled to the story, and the first thing I did was reach out to Julian. Jules told me he’d get back to me.
In the meantime, I went looking for a nation that said they were going to do a search. I found an article in the Williams Lake Tribune about Chief Willie Sellars. I sent him [an] email that day. He called me back and said, “The Creator’s always had great timing. Just yesterday, our council said we need someone to document the search.” I spoke with council, I got my gear together and I got ready to go to Williams Lake. It was two weeks later when I heard back from Julian.
NoiseCat: When I called Em back and told her I would be open to collaborating, she told me she’d identified a First Nation that was leading a search, and that the search was happening at St. Joseph’s Mission. As you might imagine, I just about fell out of my chair. I said, “That’s crazy.” Out of 139 Indian residential schools in Canada, Em happened to choose the one school that my family was sent to and where my father was born, without even knowing it.
In our narrative traditions, in our oral history, in the way that we look at the world as Secwépemc people, as Salish people, we take the agency and presence of ancestors and those who’ve gone before very seriously. Sometimes they’re given explanatory power. If you happen to be a Native storyteller — and now filmmaker — who these things get put before, I think that you need to take those things seriously.
How did it feel as a journalist to play such an important role in how the story unfolded?
NoiseCat: Empowering. I think, very often, journalism says that the storyteller is not supposed to have agency, is not supposed to have presence in the story. But we always do in some way. When you bring a camera and put it in front of somebody, it says, “Hey, your story matters. We want to hear from you. We think that you deserve to be on a big screen.” I think that that called me to be the best version of myself as a storyteller, but more importantly to be the best version of myself as a human, in this moment, in the place that I come from, among my people reckoning with the thing that we survived and that’s so deeply impacted my family and myself.
Kassie: What’s interesting about Julian and I working on this together is there’s this dual perspective of someone who’s within the story and someone who’s outside of it. For me, there’s the objectivity of the actual journalism and investigation and then, of course, there’s getting at not just a journalistic truth, but an emotional truth. That comes through following particular characters, including Julian and Charlene and Rick, as they endeavour to find answers within themselves. I think that that’s one of the things that makes the film really special.
What do you hope audiences take away from this film?
Kassie: We hope that it catalyzes a conversation in the U.S. We hope that it calls on people to refuse to close the book on the residential school chapter, that it opens more questions for people to reckon with. Why were babies being put in the incinerator? Why did no one do anything about the babies who were being born to priests and adopted out into white families? What don’t we know about what happened at these schools? Why haven’t the records been released yet?
NoiseCat: The reason why you go about telling a story about Indian residential schools is, first and foremost, that people understand that this is a foundational story to North America. This is not just a story that happened in Canada. It’s a story that happened all across the United States, as well.
Beyond that, I think it’s really important for people to understand that the legacy of Indian residential schools — the death toll, the suffering that they ignited in our communities, in our nations and our families — is ongoing today. This is, on one hand, a historical documentary, but it’s a documentary that’s set in the present because the stakes are in the present. They did not end in 1997. They did not end in 1981 when St. Joseph’s Mission closed. I think that’s really important for people to understand.
This all started with a discussion within the Williams Lake First Nation about documenting the search. What are you hearing from the community?
Kassie: We’ve been really moved by the way that people have reacted to the film. We brought it back to Williams Lake and showed it to over 800 people, including hundreds of survivors who saw themselves in that story and were able to start speaking out in ways that they never have. That’s been incredibly profound.
A Nation’s Journey into ‘the Darkest Recesses of Human Behaviour’
I think that folks are looking for different things in these searches. One thing that has been challenging is that there was a kind of mass media focus on this idea of unmarked graves. I think what our film points to is that’s not really the full point. The point is that, for over a century, horrors were perpetrated at the school and that these investigations are looking at unearthing crimes that were committed against children [regardless of] how many remains they might find in the ground.
There are folks who are looking for accountability and compensation from the government and the church. There are people who are looking for a different sort of reconciling, which Julian has pointed to, within their own families.
The Williams Lake First Nation has taken very seriously pursuing every thread of wrongdoing at St. Joseph’s Mission. Concurrently, we were expanding on that by conducting our own investigation into Julian’s family history and, of course, into a pattern of potential infanticide at St. Joseph’s Mission
Amanda Follett Hosgood, The Tyee
Amanda Follett Hosgood is The Tyee’s northern B.C. reporter. She lives in Wet’suwet’en territory. Find her on X @amandajfollett.
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