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If you value our coverage and want to support more of it, consider supporting us as a member. Join Us During the 19th and 20th centuries, government programs in both the United States and Canada forcibly separated Indigenous children from their families, relocating them to residential boarding schools to “civilize” them. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has acknowledged this as a form of cultural genocide.
In 2021, this awful history got a fresh round of public discourse when surveying work on the grounds of the Kamloops residential school in British Columbia identified around 200 unmarked graves . (Officially, 51 children are currently recognized as having died at the school.) These events spurred Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie to collaborate on Sugarcane (2024), a documentary about Canada’s residential school system.
It’s told from the perspective of now-elderly survivors of St. Joseph’s Mission, another such school in British Columbia, including Julian’s father, Ed. (The documentary gets its name from the nearby Williams Lake Indian Reserve, which is often called “Sugarcane.
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