People & Culture
The filmmaker and writer discusses his documentary Sugarcane, which investigates the abuse and missing children at St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School
When Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie set out to make Sugarcane, they had little idea of how personal it would become. Their film often appeared guided by fate: how Williams Lake First Nation came to be involved in the story; how the story took them to St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School, where NoiseCat’s father had survived against the odds. Sugarcane weaves the healing of a father and son into the story of Williams Lake’s investigation into abuse and missing children at St. Joseph’s Mission. A favourite for Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Oscars, the film is now guiding truth and healing efforts in both Canada and the United States.
When my co-director, Emily Kassie, asked me to collaborate, I told her I would take a couple of weeks to think about it. My family had a very traumatic connection to the Indian Residential Schools. I didn’t know the specifics, but I knew there was a story there, and I didn’t know if I was ready to touch that. In that time, she emailed the chief of [Williams Lake] First Nation, Willy Sellars, [who] called back and said, “The Creator has always had good timing.” When she told me she’d found a First Nation that [wanted to document their] search at St. Joseph’s Mission near Williams Lake, B.C., I was floored. Because, out of the 139 Indian Residential Schools in Canada, that was the school my family was sent to and where my father was born. It was like this story found them and then found us. And that made it something, ultimately, I couldn’t turn away from.
For the first year of filming, we didn’t record anything about my story or my family’s story. The agreement at the beginning was that Emily and I would be co-directors, not that I was going to be a participant. But as the story unfolded, it increasingly felt that the only right way to do this, given the other participants in this documentary were gifting us with their own traumatic stories, their own bravery in confronting this history of cultural genocide… The only right way — especially when you happen to be the son of the only known survivor of the incinerator at St. Joseph’s Mission — was to go there with my family’s story to reciprocate the bravery of people who did not have directing roles in this film. I will always be grateful for how I chose to live this moment of reckoning for my people and my family.
When the news came out about the potential unmarked graves at the Kamloops Residential School, it felt like it was an opportunity for the U.S., or at least the U.S. media, to go “My God, look at what Canada did.” Which is profoundly ironic because there were nearly three times as many Native American boarding schools in the United States as there were Indian Residential Schools in Canada. In many ways, the American system was the basis for the Canadian one. But there is no parallel reckoning yet happening in the U.S. The U.S. government arguably has more culpability because — unlike in Canada, where the schools were [mostly] run by the church — the schools were often run by the government. But there is now a proposal for a truth and healing commission that’s moving through the Senate. Our film screened in the Senate in December. This is a history that is just now starting to be a part of a national conversation in the U.S. We’re very lucky that our film has come out at a time when we can be part of that effort.
My dad had the opportunity to ask his mom some questions that have always been nagging at his soul. I had the opportunity to not just have some conversations with my father but also to live with my father for a couple of years. We took an unforgettable road trip back home to the rez and to the mission where he was born.
There have been so many instances of us screening the film where somebody comes up to us afterwards and says, “I saw so much of myself in this film. I saw so much of my father in your father. I saw so much of my grandparents in yours.” For those people to finally have the courage to ask those members of their family about what they endured… we’ve just now started to see that happening, and it has been the honour of my lifetime to play a small role in that movement. When we look at what these institutions did, it’s hard to see anywhere in Indian Country that was not deeply, deeply scarred by this history, where this history did not ripple across generations of families and communities. The first way to start getting around that is to start putting words to it, to start speaking the truth.
Listen to the full interview on the Explore podcast.
This story is from the March/April 2025 Issue
People & Culture
Directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie’s new film Sugarcane follows a very personal investigation into abuse and missing children at St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School that sparks a reckoning on the nearby Sugarcane Reserve
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