A dilapidated barn where trapped kids once scrawled messages like “73 days more.” An elderly survivor of a priest’s abuse pinpointing the day during her youth when she first turned toward alcohol. An abandoned baby becoming an abandoning father, whose son won’t allow three generations to suffer in isolation.
“Sugarcane” tells a story — many stories — happening everywhere in Canada, about what is being done, and still going unsaid, regarding the trauma inflicted on Indigenous people by the white-settled country’s residential school system. Begun in the 19th century under the racist notion that Indians were a “problem” to be solved, this network of educational institutions preached assimilation but created lasting misery, from the compulsory separation that shattered families to the untold abuse that marked children’s lives there. The schools may be closed now — the last federally funded one shuttered in 1997 — but as filmmakers Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie show with compassionate determination, shame and pain are still doing a lot of grim work on First Nations survivors and their descendants, even when their confronting their past occasionally yields answers.
That reckoning takes many forms in the documentary’s carefully woven tapestry of lives on the Sugarcane Reserve in British Columbia, where, in 2021, the discovery of unmarked graves at St. Joseph’s, a Catholic Church-run residential school, makes headlines and sparks a vigorous in.