Families destroyed. Lives cut short. All in the name of assimilation. It’s a horrific chapter in the history of North America’s Indigenous people that’s only beginning to come to light. Thousands of mostly school-aged children were abused, raped, and killed by government-funded, Catholic-run school programs in Canada and the United States. The staggering impact over many decades is hard to conceive. But the new documentary called Sugarcane strikes at the heart of it.

Headlines of abuse at the hands of the Catholic Church are far too common. But an accounting and perspective from those who endured the abuse has been rare, until now. Both that reckoning and point of view are at the heart of Sugarcane. The documentary is co-directed by Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat, the latter of which serves as one of the film’s main subjects.

Call it fate, but someone or something saw fit to put both Kassie and NoiseCat together. While the pair worked at the Huffington Post, “We randomly sat at desks next to each other,” Kassie told Latina Media Co in an interview. “Jules and I became fast friends, and for years, we were trying to find something to work on together. So when the news broke, I texted him,” Kassie said.

In May 2021, headlines started appearing, chronicling recent archaeological discoveries in British Columbia. Some 200 unmarked graves were thought to be buried on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School. The institution was a state-funded church-run school that operated from 1890 until 1977. Such schools had long been rumored to be abusing and killing their students.

Kassie immediately contacted NoiseCat about a possible documentary. NoiseCat knew the residential schools would be a touchy subject in most Indigenous communities. Most never spoke of them. He needed some time to consider how to proceed.

A few weeks later, NoiseCat called Kassie back to discuss the project. It was then that Kassie shared she was already on-site at a school that was at the very beginning of their own investigation. As luck would have it, they need to have the project documented. The school was St. Joseph’s Mission in the Williams Lake First Nation.

NoiseCat recalls the conversation, telling his eventual co-director, “That’s insane. Did you know that that’s a school that my family was taken away to and where my father was born?” he asked. “Out of 139 Indian residential schools in Canada, [she] had chosen the one school that my family was sent to [and] where my father’s life began.”

It could have been a coincidence, but I’m leaning towards divine intervention.

NoiseCat was split between his faith and matters of fact. “I think that journalism and documentary are very secular genres traditionally,” says NoiseCat. “They usually don’t take questions of faith and creation and other forces in this world seriously. But, this film is also in conversation with an extension of the narrative and artistic traditions of my own people, where we do take the agency of ancestors and spirits very seriously. We think that those are actually central parts of our life and are responsible for a great deal of events today.”

Sugarcane follows NoiseCat along with others as they explore their own histories – both personal and community-wide. Community members walk their once-sacred and now hollowed-out land. We see barn walls, carved with the names of children. Their names are followed by their new school-issued numbers, which became their new identities. Cameras roll as community members travel to the Vatican to see the Pope about their nation’s genocide at the hands of his church.

We follow along as survivors pour over police records for any significant detail. Older newspaper articles offer up various stories of numerous Indigenous children up for adoption. One story in particular, about a newborn baby found in an incinerator, hits NoiseCat incredibly close to home.

Sugarcane uncovers information that shows the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Canadian government, and the Catholic Church were, at the very least, aware of the abuse. It is estimated that some 150,000 Indigenous children were separated from their families starting in the late 1880s when the residential schools began operating. The very last school didn’t close until 1989. By that time, 139 schools were scattered across Canada.

Here in America, there were four times as many.

“There’s an updated report from the Interior Department about how many Native American boarding schools there were in the United States,” says NoiseCat. “They now say that there were 417 federally funded Native American boarding schools, and that there were about 900 or nearly 1,000 students who are known to have died at those schools. There are likely more deaths than that.”

The United States government has begun its very own reckoning of sorts. United States Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland – the first Native American to serve as a cabinet secretary – has taken up this important cause. In 2021, she began the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. It started with a simple accounting of how many children were enrolled in these federally-funded schools. That task alone has proven difficult. Records for the children are spotty at best.

With Secretary Haaland in attendance, Sugarcane first made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in January of this year. Since then it has gone on to win numerous prizes at film festivals across the world. Its heavy subject has only recently been shown in popular media. Shows like 1923 have begun to tackle the story in fictional storylines and news programs like 60 Minutes have started covering the topic. Sugarcane, however, is the first documentary of its kind to be told from inside an Indigenous community during an investigation.

At its heart, Sugercane begs for one thing: the truth.

“I think the first thing is that we want people to know the story,” says Kassie. “We want to correct the record and our understanding of history. People are very eager to get to the reconciliation part of truth and reconciliation, and this film insists that we haven’t gotten to the whole truth yet.” She continues, “This is the first time evidence is being presented and testimony is presented that this did actually occur. We hope that that is a catalyst for more reporting on this.”

“It’s important for people to understand that while this is a heavy subject matter and deals with genocide – that is unaddressed to this day,” asserts NoiseCat. But, “ultimately the bigger part of that story is the love, resilience, and power in Indigenous families and communities themselves.”

Sugarcane is playing in theaters across North America now.