DAVID FOLKENFLIK, HOST:
In Canada, Indigenous children from Native tribes were routinely sent to boarding schools well into the 20th century. Many of those children were physically or sexually abused and others did not return home. Now, a number of investigations are underway at several schools to determine if some children may have been buried there. Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat have made a documentary for National Geographic about the investigation about one school in British Columbia, and the reaction of the inhabitants of the nearby sugarcane reserve. The film is called "Sugarcane." They join us now. Welcome to the program.
EMILY KASSIE: Thanks for having us.
JULIAN BRAVE NOISECAT: (Non-English language spoken). It's great to be here.
FOLKENFLIK: Julian, I'm told you weren't sure you wanted to make this documentary in the first place. Why not?
NOISECAT: The real, like, heart of the issue was actually that I knew my family had a very painful connection to Indian residential schools, and I didn't know if I was ready to tell that story. So I felt when Em reached out to potentially work on a documentary together that I needed to really think about it.
FOLKENFLIK: So, Emily, let's pick up on that. This isn't a completely traditional documentary in any real sense. We see events unfolding in real time. We see Julian's search with you, but also his exploration of the legacy this has caused, the effects this has caused, in his own family. We see his arguments with his father, or a confrontation, a really kind of pivotal moment. It's all part of the action. How did you decide to take that approach?
KASSIE: I felt gut-pulled to the story. I'm Canadian, and I'd never done anything on my own country, and the horrors it committed against its first people. So when the news of potential unmarked graves broke in May of 2021, I just felt drawn. And I reached out to Julian. And Jules and I worked our first reporting jobs together almost a decade ago at the Huffington Post, and we were randomly sat at the desks next to each other. I come from a filmmaking practice. So it seemed like a natural fit for the two of us to work together on something like this. But of course, as Julian mentioned, he had to think about it. Meanwhile, I went looking for a nation that said they were going to do a search, and I came across the Williams Lake First Nation. And I reached out to Chief Willie Sellars, sent a cold email, and he called me back that day, and he said, the Creator has always had great timing - just yesterday, our counsel said we need someone to document this search. So it was a couple weeks later that I was geared up and ready to go after that. And that's when I heard back from Julian, and I'll pass it to him.
NOISECAT: When I called him back to tell her, she told me she'd identified a First Nation that was leading an investigation and that that investigation was happening at St. Joseph's Mission. And as you might imagine, I nearly fell out of my chair, and then I said, Wow. That's really crazy. Did you know that's the school that my family was taken away to and where my father was born? So out of 139 Indian residential schools across Canada, Em happened to choose the one school, without knowing it, where my father's life began.
FOLKENFLIK: I do want to take a moment and explain, what was the role of these residential schools? What was their stated mission and how did they actually work?
NOISECAT: So there were 139 federally funded Indian residential schools across Canada. And those schools were actually based upon a system that was created here in the United States of Native American boarding schools. The man who helped found the Native American boarding schools, and - his name was Richard Henry Pratt. And he described the schools' mission as to, quote, "kill the Indian and save the man." So these were schools to assimilate Native people by separating their children from their families and prohibiting them from participating in their culture, speaking their language, and even living at home with their families and parents.
FOLKENFLIK: You guys really emphasize more of the role of the Catholic Church than the federal government, which, of course, in some ways in Canada, really had helped enable the creation and propagation of these schools. Why was that important to do?
KASSIE: I think that there's culpability to go around for everyone at the societal level, government level and the church level. But it was the church who operated these schools. And as we point to in the documentary, there was massive abuse and atrocity carried out by these priests and clergy at the school that were then moved around to other schools. We've seen this in other cases with the Catholic Church. Regardless of complaints, both from parents and from concerned citizens, people ignored this on every level. There's a very powerful quote in the film from a survivor who says, I told the nun. She told me to tell the priest. This is about her abuse.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "SUGARCANE")
UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Nobody listened to me. I told my grandmother. She didn't want to hear me talk about it. I went to the nun. She told me to tell the priest. I told the priest. He told me to tell the Indian agent. I told the Indian agent, she told me to tell the RCMP. I told the RCMP. He went and told my dad, and my dad beat the [expletive] out of me.
FOLKENFLIK: Emily Kassie, what do you take from that kind of searing cycle of abdication of responsibility?
KASSIE: Well, I think that people ignored this for so long that communities themselves started to silence themselves. The shame became so great when you keep telling people, and they keep ignoring you, and then eventually beat you and turn it inwards, and we think that the silences in this film speak as loud as, you know, the confrontations with truth. But, of course, it was just incredibly heartbreaking that so many elders who are now at the end of their lives are only being heard now.
FOLKENFLIK: So about 16 years ago, the Canadian government sets up a truth and reconciliation commission to grapple with the true legacy of the residential school system. The question of unmarked burial sites surfaces at a certain point along the way. What transpires there, and what have we learned since?
KASSIE: So, essentially, in May of 2021, there was an announcement that at the Kamloops Indian residential school, ground-penetrating radar had detected what appeared to be child-sized graves in an apple orchard near the school. And that set off a national reckoning and searches that began on the school grounds of many other residential schools across the country. So that is what has been discovered across Canada - thousands of these potential graves. Of course, until an excavation is done, they won't know what's in each of these. And until they do DNA testing, they won't know who is in each of these. But our point is that what happened at these schools is so horrific and the focus should be on the horrors that were perpetrated within them regardless of how many of these potential graves are found.
FOLKENFLIK: So, Julian, to close out, what did you discover about your family and your nation in the making and reporting of this film?
NOISECAT: I learned a lot about - a lot more about my family's experience at St. Joseph's Mission. There are still many unanswered questions because it's frankly still too hard for members of my family. My father and I did not grow up together. He had to move on because of his own challenges with alcoholism and whatnot. But we had the opportunity to reconnect during the making of this documentary. I moved in with him for two years, and in a big way, this documentary helped bring me home and helped me live my life in the way that I needed to live it.
FOLKENFLIK: We've been speaking with Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie. Their film "Sugarcane" is open in select theaters in the U.S. and Canada, coming to others soon, and set to stream on Disney Plus and Hulu later this fall. Thanks so much.
KASSIE: Thanks, David.
NOISECAT: (Non-English language spoken). Thank you so much for having us. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
