Recommended Watch // Sugarcane

The acclaimed documentary chronicles a community’s investigation into the Canadian Indian residential school system that ignites a reckoning in the lives of survivors and descendants.

In May 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc community in the southern interior of British Columbia announced the results of a ground penetrating radar survey of the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School. The survey found probable remains of 215 children, likely all of whom were students at the school. The news made international headlines.

Previous research and interviews conducted by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada between 2007 and 2015 had documented deaths and disappearances among the estimated 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children who were forced to attend Canadian residential schools. The commission had also documented evidence of unmarked graves at the former sites of many of the 130+ schools that operated throughout Canada between 1893 and 1996.

Nonetheless, the 2021 news confirming likely burials at Kamloops—which had been the largest school in the Indian Affairs residential school system—sent a shockwave through Canada. The reverberations were felt in the US too, where at least 526 government-funded schools also dedicated to forced assimilation operated until the end of the 20th century. Both countries’ systematic removal of Indigenous children from their communities has been condemned by global bodies like the United Nations as an act of cultural genocide, and accounts of physical and sexual abuse of the children who attended these schools, many of which were run by the Catholic Church, are legion.

In the wake of the news from Kamloops, many Indigenous groups in Canada called for a nationwide search for mass graves at other residential school sites, and some communities initiated their own ground penetrating radar surveys to identify unmarked graves. One of the communities that began its own investigation into the deaths and disappearances of children at a nearby residential school at this time was Williams Lake First Nation (WLFN). Sugarcane, a documentary released in 2024 co-directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat (Canim Lake Band Tsq'escen) and Emily Kassie, is in part a chronicle of the First Nation community’s geophysical and archival investigation of the former St. Joseph’s Mission school operated between 1886 and 1981. It’s also a record of a community contending with the lasting impacts of residential schools on survivors and their families.

Early on in the film, viewers learn that this is also a deeply personal story for one of the filmmakers. Julian’s father was born at the school and apparently abandoned there by his then-20-year-old mother who delivered the baby herself and placed the newborn into an ice cream carton destined for the trash incinerator. According to the local newspaper at the time, a dairyman heard the crying infant inside the furnace before he could be burned alive. Julian’s father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, is both a widely respected Indigenous artist and the only baby born at St. Joseph’s known to still be alive. But, as we learn, it’s not because there weren’t other births at the school.

We learn from interviews with other survivors, including one of the investigators, Charlene Belleau (also Julian’s auntie), that there was a known practice of burning babies born to students whose pregnancies were a result of rape by clergy members. While Ed’s birth occurred after his mother’s time as a student at St. Joseph’s, it suggests that current and former students were aware that the mission’s grounds were a place where infants could disappear without notice.

With all the secrecy that has surrounded the history of residential/boarding schools for decades, it’s impossible to say if the pattern of infanticides associated with St. Joseph’s is unique. What is unusual, however, is the ample documentation of it that the team of Williams Lake investigators obtain access to through eyewitness interviews, old newspaper articles, and even records held by Canada’s national police service (aka the RCMP).

The spate of infanticides is disturbing, but it’s just one example of the many atrocities documented at assimilation-based schools in both the US and Canada. Some of the recurring themes in the stories of survivors throughout North America include violent punishment for speaking their language, random beatings, malnutrition, hard labor, and children being roused from their dormitory-style beds at night to be taken to rooms where they’d be molested behind closed doors by school staff, sometimes priests.

The fact that many of these schools had cemeteries with marked graves (to say nothing of the untold number of unmarked graves) on the grounds for student burials says a lot about their purpose: The conditions were calculated to aid the destruction of Indigenous cultures and families. And children, the manifestation of the present and future in family and community structures, were seen as disposable.

Even if this is new information to you and you have to pace yourself, it’s important to take it in because the trauma from these schools is still unfolding within Indigenous communities in Western colonized countries today. Because much of this information was intentionally concealed or distorted for decades by the governments that funded the schools, and the various Christian denominations that ran many of them, we’ve likely only seen the tip of the iceberg. Consider that alongside what we know to be true for many survivors of sexual abuse, and rape in particular: People may go years without disclosing that they’ve experienced sexual violence, if they ever share their experience at all. Even former WLFN chief Rick Gilbert, who appears prominently throughout Sugarcane but passed away just months before its 2024 Sundance premiere, confides that he kept his own abuse secret for 30 years.

In a scene from his 2022 visit to the Vatican as part of an Inuit, Métis, and First Nations delegation from Canada, Gilbert is shown telling a priest that three or four generations of most families, his included, were abused at St. Joseph’s. He says:

My grandmother—she was abused at the mission, and she tried to run away. I was also abused by a priest at the residential school. And I kept that a secret for about 30 years after I left. And my mother was abused by a priest. And that’s how I was born.

Because sexual abuse is such a common theme in the experiences of residential/boarding school survivors, because guilt and shame were so ingrained in the culture of church-run institutions, and because Christian denominations like the Catholic Church aren’t exactly world-renowned for promoting concepts like safe sex and consent, many more reports are likely to emerge as more survivors speak out and as the wider public becomes more informed about this dark chapter in the colonization of North America that—no exaggeration—has touched every living Indigenous person on this continent in some way. That’s not entirely what Sugarcane is about, though.

One of many things to recommend about the film is that it doesn’t present these horrors as if they’re the big reveal that the story is building up to. It’s the backdrop of everything, certainly–and sometimes it becomes the foreground. But many of Sugarcane’s most memorable images represent the survival of Interior Salish lifeways that have existed for millennia, and still do, in the face of forces that sought their eradication. As Julian said in a 2024 interview:

Our film is about what happens when the world breaks open, the memories of the departed return, and the truth finally gets its day…And it’s about how returning to deeply Indigenous and human connections — to family, place, community, and culture — can pull the shards of these broken worlds back together.

Granted, Sugarcane does show us survivors reflecting on the devastation they experienced and witnessed at St. Joseph’s. From their strained voices and sparsely worded accounts, it’s evident that some are sharing what they saw and felt for possibly the first time, and maybe the last. But we see more than that. We see WLFN’s Chief Willie Sellars taking his young children to net salmon, processing their catch from the shore in the waning light of dusk as steady river water flows beside them. We also see Chief Sellars digging the grave for a WLFN member who took his own life on Canada’s first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation (aka Orange Shirt Day, now observed every September 30).

We see Julian packing regalia into a car after dancing at the Kamloopa Powwow while insisting to a young relative he didn’t perform well, only to hear his name and number announced as the winner in his category for men’s traditional dancing. In the scene immediately following, we see him preparing salmon at the home of his Kyé7e (Secwepemctsín for grandmother), the same woman who reportedly left her newborn baby for dead in an ice cream carton over 60 years prior. Even our first glimpse of Ed is not tied to his stunning birth story, it’s him in his studio working on a wood carving piece. We later see Julian and Ed passing a joint as they stand on a hill overlooking the Williams Lake Stampede, their backs to the camera, both outfitted with cedar hats while Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama” blares from the rodeo arena below.

We see the late Rick Gilbert’s devotion to his Catholic faith, even as he recounts the abuse he and his family suffered in a school run by the church without reluctance, even as he tells a Vatican priest in his unfailing gentle timbre that years of empty apologies and pleas for forgiveness need to be followed with action that communities like his have yet to see.

“We’ve heard apologies,” Gilbert says. “But still nothing has happened really.”

Put simply, Sugarcane isn’t trauma porn. Without downplaying the impact St. Joseph’s still has on and beyond the Williams Lake Reserve (known in the community as Sugarcane, the film’s namesake), this is a story about people who’ve emerged from generations of deliberate, large-scale harm to bear witness to each other, tell their stories, reclaim the traditions that were taken from them, and dismantle the shame and secrecy that still drives so many in their community to addiction and suicide. It’s about Secwépemc people exercising their sovereignty as nations, and pushing for accountability from powerful, close-mouthed institutions. As trite as it sounds, there’s also so much beauty in Sugarcane—beauty in the landscape, the people, the traditions, and the stories that have withstood the onslaught of settler violence. There are several endearing moments of joint-passing and buddy road trip vignettes between Julian and Ed (both of whom are effortlessly stylish in this editor’s opinion), and Neil Young seems to hold a healthy place of significance in their lives. There’s also plenty of Tim Horton’s coffee and donuts to go around (because Canada).

Sugarcane also doesn’t shy away from the hard dualities that seem irreconcilable. For many in Rick Gilbert’s generation—also Julian’s grandparents’ generation—they’ve chosen to hold onto Catholicism even as they criticize the church for the devastation it has inflicted upon their communities. There’s also lots to take in about the ways indigeneity interacts with a highly colonized modern overculture, reminding us that the legacy of settler colonialism is dense, and it’s something that Indigenous people all over the world are still negotiating constantly.

Probably the most important takeaway from Sugarcane for our purposes, though, and the reason we’re encouraging our readers to give this film a considered watch, is the importance of believing survivors. This praxis is unassailable in our work with survivors of sexual violence because we know reporting rates for it are incredibly low (less than 1 in 3 rapes are reported), and when rape or abuse is disclosed, false reports are the rare exception and not the norm (between 2-8%). Believing survivors is one of our field’s guiding principles, and it’s being stress-tested in a major way in Canada right now.

Without dignifying some of the rhetoric of residential school denialism in Canada—a discourse that is ahistorical at best, retraumatizing for survivors at worst—it’s worth briefly addressing it as an example of pretty much the worst possible way to react to anyone who discloses their experience with abuse. If “residential school denialism” sounds like Holocaust denial, it’s because it comes from the same playbook. The promoters of both try to negate the established facts of a genocide or minimize its extent, often by recycling the propaganda officials used historically to justify the state-sanctioned abuse and trying to discredit the accounts of survivors themselves. It’s an ugly, but predictable reaction to the Canadian government’s recent efforts to acknowledge the ongoing issues stemming from settler colonialism in general and residential schools in particular.

People desperate to maintain the status quo often double down and get louder when it’s threatened. Sugarcane has not been spared the wrath of this vocal minority in Canada who, by all appearances, seem to have endless time and resources to write long, detailed, credible-looking missives decrying the deceptive claims in accounts critical of the country’s residential schools. We are intentionally not including links to examples because, frankly, they’re harmful. Nonetheless, if the rabbit-hole of denialism in Canada piques your interest, indulging your morbid curiosity is just a Google search away. Whether or not you partake in the optional recon, we believe you don’t have to be versed in the tactics and language specific to residential school denialism to consider what we think are two pertinent questions:

• What would a vulnerable person—like an Indigenous survivor of childhood sexual abuse perpetrated by an authority figure that was seen as next to God in the Christian hierarchy—have to gain from sharing their most painful memories that, in some cases, they’ve kept secret for decades?

  Possibly, it could start a process of healing. Maybe, but less likely, a perpetrator could be held accountable for wrongdoing. But there would be a lot to fear, like dismissal, disbelief, apathy, retaliation, and any number of reactions that would only compound the original trauma, and reinforce the message that their suffering doesn’t matter, wasn’t real, or is only being recounted for “attention.”

• What would somebody else have to gain from discrediting a survivor’s account?

  Maybe protection from scrutiny of their own actions and beliefs. Maybe not having to endure the humiliation of admitting they were wrong or deceived by those in power. If they’re not a public figure with concerns about their own reputation, perhaps they enjoy the advantages of policies that serve the most privileged members of society, and they’re motivated to maintain a status quo that shields powerful institutions from accountability if that means they can continue to live with relative comfort, security, and belief in the notion that their prosperity is tied to their moral superiority.

We invite you to reflect on these questions, as well as this final one: If you believe in standing with survivors of sexual violence, and holding offenders accountable, is there any place for discrediting the accounts of residential school survivors? Our answer is emphatically no—not when there’s so much at stake.

In scenarios where the power imbalance between victim and perpetrator is so obvious and well-documented, it’s especially important to take reports of abuse seriously. At the same time, it’s worth getting familiar with the full spectrum of reactions you’ll see to stories like the ones in Sugarcane because the brutal legacy of these schools in the US and Canada is still a present and consequential reality in communities across both countries. And, crucially, we all stand to heal from letting the truth be told.

Watch Sugarcane

You can stream Sugarcane at home now on Hulu or Disney+.

If you’re part of a faith community interested in hosting a screening of Sugarcane to spur conversations around truth and reconciliation, consider applying to be part of the film’s faith community screening tour running now through January 31, 2026.

Last but not least, if you’re looking for suggestions on further reading, listening, or learning about Sugarcane, the film’s directors, and the history of residential/boarding schools in North America, check out some of the links at the bottom.

Official Trailer for Sugarcane

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Check out our recommended media resource page to find reviews and recommendations for more books, podcasts, and other media highlighting the stories of survivors.

Sugarcane is about Indian residential and boarding schools and includes discussion of sexual violence, child abuse, suicide, murder, and colonial violence. It’s powerful and so important to engage with survivors’ stories, but we encourage everyone to watch with care. Consider checking out the trailer (provided above) before diving in.

Additional Links & Resources

• Indian Boarding Schools with Marsha Small | Marsha Small (Northern Cheyenne) joins the Extreme History Project’s podcast, The Dirt on the Past, to discuss her work locating unmarked graves in boarding school cemeteries using ground penetrating radar, GPS, and GIS, along with the work she has been doing to establish protocols to document boarding school cemeteries.

• Unmarked graves discovered at Chemawa Indian School | Smalls, now working on her doctorate, wrote her master’s thesis on her GPR survey of Chemawa, one of the last operating government-run Indian Boarding Schools in the US. Her surveys indicate there are possibly hundreds of unmarked burial sites on the school’s grounds. Thousands of Indigenous children from western states, including Montana, attended the school near Salem, Oregon.

• Playing for the World: 1904 Fort Shaw Indian Girls' Basketball Team | The Fort Shaw Indian Boarding School, located in the Sun River Valley outside of Great Falls, was one of the first schools in Montana to feature basketball as a recreational sport for girls. This PBS documentary, first aired in 2009, shines light on the earliest organized game of women’s basketball played in the state. The 1904 team from Fort Shaw was invited to play exhibition games at the St. Louis World’s Fair, where they defeated all their opponents.

• Missing Children of Indian Residential Schools | This interactive map offers insight into where Canada’s residential schools were, and where, to date, unmarked graves for missing children have been discovered throughout the country. As of early 2024, more than 1,700 unmarked graves had been discovered near the former sites of seven Canadian residential schools in the Northwest Territories, Manitoba, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan.

• Stolen Season 2: Surviving St. Michael's | If you read our June 2025 recommendation for the first season of Stolen, you know we greatly admire this podcast by Cree journalist Connie Walker. The second season is Walker’s investigation into her own family’s experience of sexual violence while attending a residential school run by the Catholic Church in Duck Lake, Saskatchewan.

• Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report | This 2024 report published by the US Bureau of Indian Affairs found that there were at least 973 documented student deaths across the Federal Indian boarding school system between 1819 and 1969, and acknowledges that because so many records are no longer available, or may never be found, the actual number of children who died and the number of potential burial sites in the US is likely much greater.

• We Survived the Night, coming October 2025, available for preorder | Sugarcane co-director Julian Brave NoiseCat’s forthcoming book continues exploring similar subject matter to his directorial debut. If you catch the last bit of dialogue in Sugarcane between Julian, his dad, and his Kyé7e, the choice of title might sound familiar.

• “This Is a Community Living on the Edge of Death”: Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie Build Trust in ‘Sugarcane’ | Sugarcane’s co-directors talk about the inception of the project, building trust with their subjects, and clandestinely filming in the Vatican in a Q&A for the International Documentary Association’s website.