An old barn stands on the grounds of the St. Joseph’s Mission in British Columbia, bearing silent witness to horrors that unfolded there over many decades. Beginning in the late 1800s and continuing for almost a century, Indigenous children were sent to a so-called Indian residential school at the mission, where they were dispossessed of their native language, culture, and indeed, of hope itself.
Many children – an untold number – never made it out of there alive. The Oscar-contending documentary Sugarcane investigates what happened at St. Joseph’s, which was part of a network of residential schools in Canada and the U.
S., most of them run by the Catholic Church. Kids attending the boarding school lived in that barn-like structure.
As documented in the film directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, children were routinely strung up by their arms and beaten by school staff. “You have these etchings on the wall,” Kassie recounted as she and Brave NoiseCat participated in a Q&A after a screening of Sugarcane as part of Deadline’s For the Love of Docs virtual event series. “Kids who went to the barns to hide, many of them were beaten there, and they etched their names and where they came from and how many days until they could go home, into the wood [of the structure] as far back as 1917 and even left messages.
One message read, ‘I don’t care about Lucy’s baby.’ We don’t know exactly what that means — tried to follow that thread — but there.
