When documentary filmmaker Emily Kassie asked her colleague and friend Julian Brave NoiseCat to co-direct a film about the abuses in Indigenous residential schools in Canada, they didn’t realize that NoiseCat would become a crucial part of the story.
After news broke in May 2021 that 215 unmarked graves had been discovered at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia—a discovery that shed a clearer light on the abuses committed against students at Indigenous residential schools in Canada and the US over the past decades—Kassie felt compelled to dig deeper.
The Canadian filmmaker wanted to find another boarding school that was also looking for unmarked graves. She thought NoiseCat, a journalist who covers indigenous issues, could also help her research this topic.
After a series of unlikely coincidences and an unexpected connection with NoiseCat’s family, the pair’s project was Sugar cane, which hit theaters this month to critical acclaim and will hit Hulu and Disney+ later this year.
“Did you know this is the school my family was taken to?”
Before the project began, Kassie did some preliminary research on which boarding school she wanted to feature. She had found an article about the Williams Lake First Nation, based on the Sugarcane Reserve, and its leader, Chief Willie Sellers.
“I sent [Sellers] “a cold email,” Kassie explained, “and he called me back… and he said, ‘The creator always has great timing. Just yesterday our board said we need someone to document this quest.”
When Kassie told NoiseCat she had been granted access to follow the search at St. Joseph’s Mission, near the Sugarcane Reserve, where 93 unmarked graves had been discovered, there was a long silence on his end of the line.
“Wow, that’s really cool,” NoiseCat, who is a member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen and a descendant of the Lil’wat Nation of Mount Currie, told Kassie. “Did you know that’s the school that my family was taken to and where my dad was born?”
“So out of 139 Indian boarding schools in Canada,” NoiseCat explained to Yahoo Entertainment, “Em happened to choose the school where my father started his life and where my family was sent to. So what are the odds?”
‘Something much darker had happened in these schools’
Sugar cane follows an investigation into the deaths and abuses at St. Joseph’s Mission, a former Catholic boarding school for indigenous peoples that closed in 1981 near a sugarcane reserve in British Columbia.
The film follows multiple threads, including the stories of alumni and the descendants of alumni. NoiseCat’s story is one arc.
His grandmother attended St. Joseph’s but had not spoken much about her experiences there. She had shared few details about the birth of NoiseCat’s previously estranged father, artist Ed Archie NoiseCat, who was born while she was still in school. In the documentary, it is revealed that his father was rescued from the infanticide that took place at St. Joseph’s, a discovery discovered during the investigation.
Another unexpected thread involves the late former Williams Lake First Nation Chief Rick Gilbert, whose mother was a student at St. Joseph’s and whose father may have been one of the priests at the school. (Gilbert died in 2023, after filming on the documentary wrapped.)
“What we realized was that the unmarked graves weren’t really the story at all,” Kassie said, “but that something much darker had actually happened at these schools.”
Interwoven are the stories of two estranged fathers, one known and one unknown. For NoiseCat, who grew up in the US with his mother and younger sister, the opportunity to film Sugar cane On both sides of the camera there was a kind of reckoning, but also an opportunity.
“[My dad and I] were actually roommates for two years [while] “I made the documentary,” said NoiseCat, “and it gave us the opportunity to really spend meaningful time together for the first time since I was a little kid and really heal.”
Gilbert’s own journey of healing took him, along with a contingent of native Canadians and the documentary crew, to the Vatican. There, the pope offered a formal apology, and the former chief — himself a devout Catholic — spoke to a priest there about his DNA findings and what they meant to him as the son of a boarding school victim.
For NoiseCat, “seeing the courage of the late Chief Rick Gilbert, who entrusted us with the toughest and most personal story imaginable, was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen a human being do in my entire life.”
Gilbert’s meeting at the Vatican inspired NoiseCat to take action herself and create a vulnerable path to healing.
“I just thought, oh my God, if this man is willing to trust us with this story, and I know that my family has their own story, a story that is at the heart of the child murder that happened at St. Joseph’s Mission, and I’m not willing to go there … then I’m not giving this story all it deserves,” he explained. “This is the story that deserves my everything.”
Both NoiseCat and Kassie hope that other Native boarding school survivors will feel called to share their own experiences, if they choose, as many in the U.S. have done with Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.
They also hope the film will open more eyes to the abuses that occurred in residential schools for indigenous peoples in Canada and the US.
“This is a fundamental story about North America, a conversation that started in Canada but has only just begun in the United States,” Kassie said. “Our hope is that the film is a catalyst for dialogue in the broader world. It’s a history that is the history of everyone who lives in North America, and it’s essential that people know about it.”
