Once an open, shameful secret across North America, residential and boarding schools that were used to force Christianity and assimilation onto Indigenous children have become a prominent subject matter in popular culture. Episodes of Reservation Dogs and True Detective: Night Country deal with the phenomenon, as does Tommy Orange’s most recent novel, Wandering Stars. However, all of these works have the distance of fiction to ease the truth. Sugarcane offers no such escape. NoiseCat and co-director Emily Kassie do not flinch from the details that get uncovered after the discovery of an unmarked grave outside of St. Joseph’s Mission in Williams Lake, BC, Canada. Even though the school closed in 1981, the horrors committed there linger still, most directly in the form of NoiseCat’s troubled father Ed.
Sugarcane begins with NoiseCat phoning Ed on his birthday and inviting him to come along on the investigation. In particular, Ed hopes to close what he calls a gap in his childhood, some explanation for why his father abandoned him and his mother left him at St. Joseph’s. A soulful man, rarely seen without his stylish hat, ever-present cigarettes, and a braid across his chest, Ed strikes viewers as an aging hippie or punk rocker, someone with a cynical smile who will suddenly start singing a Neil Young number. Yet when faced with memories of what occurred, not just to him, but to other survivors he meets, Ed’s facade breaks. Despite his best efforts, the tears come quickly, reminding us that the scars of the past have yet to heal.
Across Generations
Shortly after the visit with Martina Pierre, NoiseCat confronts his father about his own childhood. NoiseCat tries to tell Ed that he too was abandoned by his dad, that he and Ed share this quality, even if Ed was the perpetrator. NoiseCat cannot stop crying enough to make a more impassioned charge, and while Ed sputters out a defense and offers an apology, tears quickly drown his words. The moment doesn’t end in any sort of resolution. We see the two separate to work through their feelings. The next day, they travel on, avoiding the subject.
But lest any of us watching from the outside feel compelled to judge Ed, Sugarcane puts his life in larger context. For their next stop, the father and son visit Ed’s bully at the school, a boy who broke his cheekbone. Instead of finding a brute, the two find yet another man broken in childhood, left at the school by his mother and molested by the same priest to whom he gave confession. There’s no anger in Ed’s response. He just bows his head as he listens, understanding that the two of them are victims.
This ability to circle beyond Ed and NoiseCat’s experience gives Sugarcane its strength. We also see Rick Gilbert, a former Williams Lake First Nations Chief and true believer in Catholicism, despite the abuses he endured, visit Vatican City for a reconciliation event. Likewise, we see current Williams Lake First Nations Chief Willie Sellars, who uses the news of the unmarked graves to gain attention for continued mistreatment of Indigenous peoples in Canada.
Gilbert and Sellars manage to get responses from people on the top, folks like Pope Francis and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. These are institutional leaders who, at last, will admit to Indigenous people that their institutions did a grave and profound wrong. But the Indigenous never hear the word “reparations” uttered, nor about concrete actions to help the victims.
