From the 1880s until the 20th century’s final years, the Canadian government funded a system of residential schools for Indigenous children. Administered by various Christian churches, these boarding schools purported to be purely educational institutions. In reality, their central functions were internment and indoctrination. Children were displaced from their families, communities, and culture, subject to pervasive physical and sexual abuse, and forced to adopt Euro-Canadian and Christian ways of life in order to become more assimilable to white Canadian society. Approximately 150,000 Indigenous children were placed in residential schools nationwide over the course of the system’s existence.
The ultimate objective, as the Canadian government and involved churches later acknowledged, was to “kill the Indian in the child.” And to some degree, this objective was accomplished. Students often lost their legal identity as Indians through forced enfranchisement. Ripped from their heritage, they would find themselves unable to fit in where they came from while still being looked down upon in mainstream society. The system successfully disrupted Indigenous practices and beliefs getting passed down across generations. Increased rates of PTSD, alcoholism, substance abuse, and suicide haunt those who survived the ordeal to this day. As for the students who perished, the true number of residential school-related deaths remain unknown. The best estimates range from 3,200 to more than 30,000.
Near the closed St. Joseph’s Mission residential school on the Sugarcane Reserve in British Columbia, unmarked graves are discovered that resurrect the traumatic legacy responsible for scarring the region. Sugarcane‘s co-director Julian Brave NoiseCat strives to excavate this buried past and help his father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, learn about his own parentage. Other primary figures have their own plotlines, including Willie Sellars, the current chief of the Williams Lake First Nation, Charlene Belleau, an investigator looking into these unresolved deaths, and Rick Gilbert, the former Williams Lake First Nation chief seeking out official acknowledgment of these atrocities.
Channeling this brutal history, Sugarcane often carries a constant air of menace. You hear it in the foreboding reverberation of the score’s strings and drums. You feel it in Christopher LaMarca’s tremulous cinematography, the jerkiness shifting in velocity to intense or destabilizing effect. You can see it in the archival footage from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s 1962 documentary The Eyes of Children, essentially a propaganda film showing daily life within the residential schools. These black-and-white clips, heavy with a tragic dissonance, appear like unwanted specters throughout the runtime. Their saccharine falseness curdles into subdued horror, as we know that the children they depict are all victims of a pernicious cleansing. These moments are perhaps the most frightening in a film that wades into some pretty harrowing territory.
But Sugarcane, which NoiseCat directed with Emily Kassie, doesn’t tastelessly wallow in trauma for drama’s sake. It frequently oscillates between a tender tone and a rebellious one. It effortlessly builds intimacy with its subjects, now being granted the grace of fuller representations. The tearful moments arrive amidst instances of quiet dignity, jocular abandon, and domestic bliss. A current of resistance flows through the film, determined to emphasize the humanity of those who’ve had it deliberately stripped from them. The glimpses we receive of the Williams Lake First Nation’s culture are demonstrative and proud, punctuating the film’s airless silence. In this way, Sugarcane is a firm rebuke: the colonizers failed to truly “kill the Indian in the child.” Indigenous communities live on, one generation to the next, embattled but worthy of respect.
Sugarcane’s gut-wrenching complexity offers no easy answers. Juggling multiple threads that could each sustain an entire film on their own, it can at times be difficult to follow and fully appreciate the incremental progress made in one plotline or another. Yet, in a way, this somewhat convoluted quality works, communicating the dizzying scope and conspiratorial nature of the evil that is the film’s true antagonist. It’s an evil that cannot be simply confronted and exposed, let alone cast out. For what the film also reveals are the sobering limitations of truth and reconciliation. Engaging the past is required to move from conflict to peace. But engaging the past is not an end in itself, only a beginning step. Apologies and acknowledgment are often stand-ins for a fuller acceptance of responsibility. The work toward healing, toward repaired relationships, and toward a better future is meant to have its grueling, uncomfortable chapters. As Sugarcane suggests, that burden often falls on the victims rather than the victimizers. And given this unfortunate reality, every moment of triumph, large or small, is made all more compelling and precious.
DIRECTOR: Emily Kassie & Julian Brave NoiseCat; DISTRIBUTOR: National Geographic Documentary Films; IN THEATERS: August 9; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 47 min.
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