The stories about abuse happening in Canada’s Indian Residential schools are shocking not only for the sexual, physical, and psychological abuse those children endured piled on with neglect, missing children, and infanticide but also because only in recent years has the country acknowledged these stories, the role the Catholic Church played on it and how the state and secular institution avoid taking accountability for the deeds of its past, some dead, members. The well-executed National Geographic documentary ‘Sugarcane,’ which won the U.S. Documentary Competition Directing Award at Sundance this year, is a courageous film by Julian Brave Noisecat and Emilie Kass that sheds light on this dark chapter of Canadian history.
Noisecat acts as a point-of-view character who deals with generational trauma inside Indigenous peoples’ communities as his father, Ed Archer Noisecat, grew up at the St. Joseph Mission, an Indian Residential School that served as the scenario to many stories of abuse against Indigenous children.
The documentary also follows the Indigenous woman, Charlene Belleau, who investigates these stories to give a closer look at those who were members of their community in the past and present. We also see the story of Elder Chief Rick Gilbert, who, although wronged by the Catholic Church, is still attached to this faith and struggling to process what happened during his childhood. At the same time, he travelled alongside other Canadian Indigenous leaders to the Vatican to meet Pope Francis. Another passage we follow is the uphill battle of Chief Willie Sellars, who has organized and led the inquiry into St. Joseph’s history.
A scene that helps understand how systematic and normalized the violence is propagated by such institutions is when an interviewee reveals how the abuse happened to generations of Indigenous peoples at these boarding schools because his grandmother was abused by Catholic priests, as was his mother. He couldn’t escape the same fate.
The image of a crumbling statue of the Virgin Mary holding baby Jesus serves as an allegory to the story presented in this picture, as the Catholic religious structure has not only failed Canada’s Indigenous peoples but has also violated them sexually and emotionally living asunder those who are attacked, their communities, and future generations without any sort of reparation beyond expressing regret.
The Indian Residential schools started to operate back in 1894, most run by the Catholic Church, in a way to “get rid of the Indian problem.” 193 schools were funded in Canada, and the last closed in 1997. In the current cultural scenario, there is a demand that those who should tell the stories in such cases are members of said communities. This line of thought pays in ‘Sugarcane’ as the viewer can follow the process of Julian Brave Noisecat working the painful narratives that affect his life, in particular those from his father, and how they weigh in the way the documentary unfolds before the eyes of the viewer.
The author’s presence avoids Indigenous experiences falling under the condescendence of a “tourist” visiting these people’s worst moments while aiming for an empty prize in a film festival and making empty posts on undead social media handles.
The footage from a 1962 CBC documentary on the Indian Residential Schools from the past serves as a stark reminder of how appearances can be kept for decades. It becomes darker when involving minority groups that the middle class can’t “adopt” as a news flag to not feel bad for previous sins. Julian Brave Noisecat’s natural reactions as the narrative unravels make ‘Sugarcane’ a more vital experience than it already is.
The acclaimed Emilie Kass’s cinematography composes another character. Its languid shots of nature and the Canadian vastness help further the narrative, and the sensorial and emotional experiences proposed by ‘Sugarcane.’ They also give a dimension to how lost the people in this documentary can feel when they are in their privacy, staring into nothingness and trying to deal with the worst days of their lives.
‘Sugarcane’ is an example of how diverse voices producing their art and products can benefit the landscape and make people care about the ordeal of others.
The cop drama series ‘Three Pines’ (2022) brought to the mediatic attention the abuses happening in Canadian Indigenous Schools through fiction in a similar way that ‘Watchmen’ (2019) presented the mainstream public to the bombing of and the massacre of its Black denizens in 1920s Tulsa. However, ‘Sugarcane’ is not a work of fiction where good-looking samaritans will come to put an end to injustice, the documentary shows the lingering pain brought by decades of abuse and acts as not only a denouncement of how the Canadian state erodes Canadian society but also as a reminder of what lay ahead and how it can be normalized within a society and its values.
Rating: 
(5 / 5)
Also Read: Three Pines: The Unsung Detective Series Shedding Light on Indigenous Pain
