Content warning: this article deals with sensitive topics.
“Sugarcane” is a documentary investigation into a horrible moment in our shared history. But it also adds a personal component that opens the story up for more.
Directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, “Sugarcane” investigates patterns of abuse at St. Joseph’s Mission, an Indian residential school in British Columbia near the Sugarcane Reservation of Williams Lake. Throughout history, the governments of Canada and the United States sent Native people to residential schools in order to isolate them from their culture and assimilate them to a new one.
A few years ago, a number of unmarked graves were found at different residential schools across Canada, sparking a deeper look into the abuse and mistreatment that children suffered in these institutions. “Sugarcane” follows the investigation of the Williams Lake First Nation into St. Joseph’s specifically, focusing on the harrowing revelation that babies born to girls at the school were thrown into the incinerator.
Kassie initially approached NoiseCat with the idea to work together on a documentary after she heard about the discovery of the unmarked graves. While NoiseCat took time to think about it, Kassie got in touch with the Williams Lake First Nation and decided to make that investigation and St. Joseph’s the focus. When she told NoiseCat, he went quiet. He told her that St. Joseph’s was the school that his family had attended, and the place where his father was born.
The documentary reveals that Julian’s father was found in the incinerator at the school. However, the details of how he ended up there are unknown. “Sugarcane,” then, becomes part investigation, part interviews with survivors like Rick Gilbert, who learns via DNA test that his father might have been one of the priests at the school, and a story of a family – NoiseCat’s family – trying to come to terms with their painful history.
While the audience never learns exactly what happened to NoiseCat’s father – a choice that feels immensely sensitive and compassionately wrought – the journey is what’s most important. Rough Draft Atlanta recently spoke with NoiseCat and Kassie about the making of the film. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Julian, I know this is the first film you’ve worked on, so I wanted to start there. Could you talk about this as a first film experience, and if that was strange for you given how close you were to the subject? Do you think that made it different from a typical first film experience?
Julian Brave NoiseCat: Yeah, I think it was definitely different than the typical film experience in general, and definitely than the typical first film experience. Em and I both have backgrounds in journalism in part, and I think one way in which we’ve started to talk about this piece of it is that there were really two investigations happening, each which we were kind of leading on.
The first investigation is the investigative work more broadly into what happened at the school, to the missing children, the abuse, the archives, the documents, the police records, the testimony of survivors. Em, with her background in investigative journalism, multimedia journalism, was kind of leading on that part – parallel to, and in certain moments augmenting and doing her own investigative work alongside the Williams Lake First Nation investigation. At the same time, I set about my own personal investigation, in a sense, into the story of my father’s birth and what happened to the babies who were born and conceived at St. Joseph’s Mission.It just so happened that those two investigations ended up intercepting and overlapping – that the investigation into what happened at St Joseph’s Mission more broadly ended up leading us to a story that had gone untold and unreported until our film, of a pattern of infanticide, a pattern wherein babies born to unwed mothers and students – some of whom were fathered by priests at the school – were put into the school’s incinerators to be burned alive with the garbage. It just so happens that my father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, was found in that incinerator when he was a newborn infant and is the only known survivor of that pattern of infanticide.
I think that there’s a way in which vérité documentary in particular requires you to be deeply present for a story as it’s unfolding, and that called me to be with my family. I moved in with my dad for two years during the making the film, as well as my community, my broader family and community in … the Williams Lake area while we were making the documentary for an amount of time and at a depth that you would not need to be if you were doing the film in print, or in another . I think that was really, really important for me – you know, not just creatively and editorially, but also spiritually and personally. It called me to be present with my family and my people in a moment of deep reckoning. It turns out that that’s exactly where I needed to be. So in that sense, I’m incredibly grateful to Em and to the documentary and to the forces greater than ourselves that brought us together and made this thing happen, for leading me to the place where I needed to be. Not just to tell the story, but to be a full human being in this moment.
I had read that you moved in with your father throughout the making of this, and I know that Emily, you spent some time there as well, so you can probably speak to this experience as well from a slightly different perspective. Usually, when you’re making a documentary or writing something, even of this magnitude, you can go home for the day and you’re done with work – you can take at least a little bit of a mental break. How did you handle that balance when you’re making this, living with your father and spending all of that time in it? Is there ever really a break?
NoiseCat: Not really [laughs].
Emily Kassie: I was gonna say for me too. We lived and breathed this for … three years, both of us, fully. Obviously, it’s [Julian’s] life unfolding, but for me, this was the world that I chose to be present in for the making of this film, and fully engaged as the most important thing I could be doing in this period of my life. It consumed me. It was the only thing I thought about and did. To really get under the skin of something, you really need to know it, and the only way to know it is to be there and be present, and be thinking about the hard questions and the framing questions and perspective, and how to create a visual language.
So we were constantly in an artistic conversation. We were constantly grappling morally with the things we were seeing. We were investigating, and then we were also living the life of the community, and, in Julian’s case, also with his father. I also had the pleasure of bunking up with them many times and going on the road with them, and living with various characters in the film at various points. It was an incredible thing to witness and also participate in.
I’m glad you brought up the visual style of the film. Julian, I’ve listened to you talk a lot about the pacing of this world that you were living in, and finding those silences. And Emily, I’ve heard you talk about how that filtered into how you shot the film, which I think is really apparent. There are a lot of moments where you just sit there, and maybe a comment isn’t fully explained, but you let the audience feel it emotionally by sitting with the moment. I wondered if you could both talk about the shooting and editing process and finding those moments, and integrating that pacing into the film.
NoiseCat: Our background is in journalism, and in our prior work, you go somewhere for a few days – you know, a week was a long time to get to work on something like this – and you have to get answers to the questions that you’re looking for, and that sort of thing. One of the big things that we discovered in the field was that pacing of allowing silence to linger after things had really been discussed. So that was something that we learned and discovered in the field, and was also something that was really true, as I’ve said in other interviews, to the way in which this history is lingering and processed in this community.
At the same time, It was something that we really tried to hone in on and find the right rhythm of in the edit. It was something that we had articulated as being really important to us, but it was something that we had to try and fail over and over again in the edit to find the right rhythm. I would give a ton of credit to our editors, Nathan Punwar and Maya Daisye Hawke, as well as the rest of our team, who were also very active in giving notes and that sort of thing, to helping us discover that pacing, which is ultimately, I would say, one of the main things that people appreciate and experience when they watch “Sugarcane.”
Kassie: I think, from a shooting perspective, for me, I’m a very intuitive shooter, so I’m really looking for where the energy is moving in a room and how people are relating to one another. Something that was really special about the collaboration with Julian was that we would talk about something, and we would talk about these silences that had permeated his family, that his kyé7e [grandmother] wasn’t able to talk about yet. In the room, when I was filming with them, I could feel her, and I could feel where her breath would catch. I could see when her thumbs would start to … twiddle. There’s a moment, for example, where she says, “There’s stuff I should have talked about.” And Julian says, “What kind of stuff?” You can feel in that moment that he’s pushing just a little bit. And I could feel from spending time with her, spending time with Julian, that that was going to be it for her. That she was probably going to reach a wall there, and knew to stay on her so that that silence could speak louder than whatever she could possibly say. So I didn’t rack focus to Julian in that moment.
There’s another moment with Rick [Gilbert, another person in the film], where he’s on the bus and he hears the name of his biological father, a priest named Father McGrath. I knew Rick’s tics so well by that point and was and was so intuitively connected with him that I knew to tilt down to his hand movements when he heard the name, because as soon as I heard it, I knew how it would trigger him. All that to say, so much of the filmmaking came from these really incredible conversations about how people are living in this world, many of whom are living, as Julian would say, on the edge of death, and then trying to bring that into the visual language and the pacing, and the way that the camera relates to the participants.
I think there are a lot of moments in this film where people do start to push – I think of you specifically, Julian, with your father – but what I found really interesting, particularly toward the end of the film, is what was held back. The camera doesn’t follow your dad into the home when he’s finally having that final conversation with his mother. How was it for both of you balancing telling the story and finding those tough moments, but also holding back when you felt it might be more appropriate?
NoiseCat: I think that was also just governed by our conversations and the pace and texture of real human relationships. By that point, we knew exactly what my kyé7e was comfortable with and what my dad was comfortable with. Everybody knew how weighty that conversation would be, and so we intuitively, at that point, didn’t even really need to discuss that much about how we would approach that. We knew that the camera would not be going in, but that it was an important thing to document. We would have a choice to make afterwards about how much of it, if any of it, we would include. You know, there was a whole possibility that that conversation wouldn’t even exist within the film, and that it was just something that my dad needed to do for life. Then, in the edit, obviously there was more conversation than what happens in the film – all of the conversations were that way. But, you know, we tried to be very artful and compassionate in the way that we chose to represent that conversation. So what you see in the film is an accurate representation of the extent of the conversation. My kyé7e, to this day, can’t go beyond where she goes in the film. But the important thing, I think, was for him to get the opportunity to ask the question, and for him to also see and understand how this weighs on her … and the guilt that she continues to carry, despite the fact that everybody else has forgiven her.
I think that’s worth ruminating on for a moment here. She was the only person who was ever prosecuted for what we now know was a pattern of babies being put into the incinerator and a pattern of infanticide through other means as well – adoption out, through forced abortion. She was a very young woman at the time. She was like, 20 years old. And there’s no medical way, no biological way, that she could have done what she did alone. As the paper at the time raised questions about – you know, it raised questions about what might be the “routine procedure” at this residential school. And those are questions that linger, I think to this day. How would a young woman know that this is what was done to unwanted Indian children at the top? How did she know that this was the place to take the baby? It really pains me still, to think about the fact that she still carries so much guilt about it, when the institutions and the other people who are really responsible for this, never even faced a day of scrutiny in court, or anything like that.
Kassie: I think that those very human choices that were based on relationships and what was right also gave us an opportunity artistically to speak to what we wanted to say about the film. In that moment, we go to a shot of the sky kind of opening, and the light coming through. Part of that choice was we needed a really long shot there [laughs], and that was one option for it. The other part of the choice was that it spoke to kind of a timelessness, and time immemorial, and the opening of light and the possibility of a different future. It also kind of echoed the imagery of the river. There was just so much there that allowed you to kind of sit both with the pain in Julian’s kyé7e [grandmother’s] voice, and know in your body and in your heart that she had gone through something awful, and also to gain perspective on what this means for all of us who share this foundational history.
