Chris Knipp
08-15-2024, 01:43 AM
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/%20sgrc.jpg
JULIAN BRAVE NOISECAT, EMILY KASSIE; SUGARCANE (2024)
Native children abused and erased for generations at a reservation school in Canada: the fallout continues
This is a powerful documentary. Not only is its subject matter deeply distrbing, but it is handled with courage and tact that results in a gradual accumulation of awareness in the viewer that is more intense and personal. These are not talking heads but people discovering hard truths and deep emotions with each other. The place is St. Joseph’s Mission residential school which used to be near the Sugarcane Reservation of Williams Lake in British Columbia.
Indigenous children in Canada were sent away to boarding schools, a practice four times as numerous in the US, as well as for aboriginal people in Australia. 130 residential schools operated in Canada between 1831 and 1996. They were mills designed to solve "the Indian problem", i.e., to wipe out indigenous culture by depriving the younger generations of their native languages and customs. In Canada, this task was assigned to Catholic schools run by priests and nuns. The effect was not just to erase culture but to erase human beings and deeply traumatize them. This is about one group of Canadian indigenous people who were so abused, at least three generations of them. The film's co-director, Julian Brave NoiseCat, is the son of a father abused at the school who barely survived.
It was known that children were disappearing from that school. Some died trying to escape; many committed suicide, but their families never heard of them again and did not know of their fate. Three years ago graves of several hundred children were found there, and when news of this story came out, a number of Catholic churches in the area were torched. The filmmaker Julian Brave Noisecat's father was abused there; so was Julian's grandmother. We meet them, other victims, and their families.
There were rapes of both boys and girls. Later we hear accounts that resulting unwanted babies were routinely thrown in an incinerator. Ed, Julian NoiseCat's father, was the only known survivor of such an attempt who was rescued. His knowledge has long colored and tainted his relationship with his son. Their growing reconciliation is one of the film's emotional threads. A family of eleven is mentioned of whom seven committed suicide. Substance abuse is another lasting legacy. A system aimed at wiping out indigenous culture would up wiping out the people as well. These places were like prison camps (they were given numbers instead of names), and St. Joseph's was as bad as they could get.
We hear of unspeakable punishments. Small boys were forced to hold a large, heavy book aloft over their heads for an hour. Others were strung up in a separate building and beaten. When these stories come, they shock.
In an old film we hear and see a nun. Mostly what we hear about are priests, and a series of principals who would have had to know about the abuses taking place. This is where Charlene Belleau and Whitney Spearing come in. An important strand of the film is their dogged investigation of the St. Joseph’s Mission residential school abuses and the perpetrators. Belleau ad Spearing are trawling the past. They have a wall of names of fathers and principals who were connected and would have known of and participated in the atrocities.
This documentary adds to the cinematic lore about abusive Catholic schools, which must be voluminous by now, while awareness of Native abuse may be at a new high as a result of Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon. One thinks of François Ozon's excellent 2019 By the Grace of God (https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4300). It's about a handful of men who come together to expose a notorious French pedophile priest who abused them as boys, which unreels rather like a legal thriller. Perhaps even better is the nearly forgotten two-part 1997 Canadian television film The Boys of St. Vincent's (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106473/reference/), which dramatizes the abuses by brothers at a remote Newfoundland school, the boys growing up, and revisits them fifteen years later.
People in Sugarcane on the other hand are exploring the raw facts of the awful past and while there is no finality, more is being revealed. (Julian's father and grandmother don't want to talk, but eventually they do tell what they had not told before.)
Another important thread is of Rick Gilbert, former chief of Williams Lake First Nation, who despite being abused, as his mother was abused, as his grandmother was abused, maintains, with his wife Anna, their Catholic faith. They even protect religious objects from the current round of arson. Rick Gilbert it is who is invited to go with a group of other indigenous leaders to visit the Vatican for an audience with Pope Francis. He learns elementary Italian, how to say "per favore," please, online in preparation.
The film follows to Rome the sedate, distinguished Gilbert, who was probably fathered by one of the priests (his Irish DNA shows it, which by Rome he comes to admit). The Pope indeed says he is sorry, reading a prepared speech in flowery Italian, and then he says "bye-bye." The Priest in charge of Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the order that ran the school, whom Gilbert also seeks out in Rome, meets with him in English, and says he's sorry too after a moment of horrified silence that reminded me of Ozon's By the Grace of God. As Gilbert tells the priest, being sorry is known to be only a beginning. How much is the Catholic clergy sorry, and how much is it merely humiliated and terribly embarrassed? We know how when any priest gets in trouble the Church just sends him to another assignment where he can do it again.
The PM Justin Trudeau turns up in scuffed jeans, with Chief Willie Sellars standing by him, to acknowledge that these abusive indigenous boarding schools "are part of what we are," seeking openness about evils of the past as part of understanding and healing. But he does not propose any concrete actions. He's trying to calm things down.
In such matters as these there is a chain of silence and omertà. As to why the kids didn't tell their parents what was happening (if they had the opportunity), one woman says she was sexually abused, and then tells the whole chain of authorities she reported it to, each of whom suggested she report it to another authority. Then she gave up and told her mother, and she beat her.
The film isn't a simple progression of logical argument but rather a gathering of emotions and revelations that come together later, becoming, as Joe Leydon says in his Variety review (https://variety.com/2024/film/reviews/sugarcane-review-1235892640/), "even more troubling" as you "replay it in your mind" and "reconsider" "seemingly throwaway details." He means partly Julian's surprise at winning first prize for traditional dancing at a Kamloopa First Nations powwow. This comes early on. Later it comes back to make you think how much Julian longs for his native culture - speaking words of the native language to elders - but feels cut off from, unworthy of it from the legacy of an abusive school that he did not attend, but still is haunted by.
The film weaves in levity, song and dance while never losing its intimate and personal touch,. The cinematography by Christopher LaMarca and Emily Kassie throughout Sugarcane is handsome, often celebrating the local landscape. But it's not a fun watch, or a story with a resolution. It's an important story and a film many critics have recommended as required viewing in schools because, as Alissa Wilkinson wrote in her recent New York Times review (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/09/movies/sugarcane-documentary-indigenous-communities.html), its "stories are not isolated"; it shows us that "people all over North America are living with the repercussions of truth suppressed and violence enacted in the name of love and faith."
Sugarcane, 107 mins., debuted Jan. 20, 2024 at Sundance, winning the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, and was included in over a dozen other domestic and international festivals. Opened Aug. 9, 2024 at Film Forum (NYC), Aug. 16 in the San Francisco Bay Area. National Geographic Documentary Films. Metacritic (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/sugarcane/critic-reviews/) rating: 93%.
JULIAN BRAVE NOISECAT, EMILY KASSIE; SUGARCANE (2024)
Native children abused and erased for generations at a reservation school in Canada: the fallout continues
This is a powerful documentary. Not only is its subject matter deeply distrbing, but it is handled with courage and tact that results in a gradual accumulation of awareness in the viewer that is more intense and personal. These are not talking heads but people discovering hard truths and deep emotions with each other. The place is St. Joseph’s Mission residential school which used to be near the Sugarcane Reservation of Williams Lake in British Columbia.
Indigenous children in Canada were sent away to boarding schools, a practice four times as numerous in the US, as well as for aboriginal people in Australia. 130 residential schools operated in Canada between 1831 and 1996. They were mills designed to solve "the Indian problem", i.e., to wipe out indigenous culture by depriving the younger generations of their native languages and customs. In Canada, this task was assigned to Catholic schools run by priests and nuns. The effect was not just to erase culture but to erase human beings and deeply traumatize them. This is about one group of Canadian indigenous people who were so abused, at least three generations of them. The film's co-director, Julian Brave NoiseCat, is the son of a father abused at the school who barely survived.
It was known that children were disappearing from that school. Some died trying to escape; many committed suicide, but their families never heard of them again and did not know of their fate. Three years ago graves of several hundred children were found there, and when news of this story came out, a number of Catholic churches in the area were torched. The filmmaker Julian Brave Noisecat's father was abused there; so was Julian's grandmother. We meet them, other victims, and their families.
There were rapes of both boys and girls. Later we hear accounts that resulting unwanted babies were routinely thrown in an incinerator. Ed, Julian NoiseCat's father, was the only known survivor of such an attempt who was rescued. His knowledge has long colored and tainted his relationship with his son. Their growing reconciliation is one of the film's emotional threads. A family of eleven is mentioned of whom seven committed suicide. Substance abuse is another lasting legacy. A system aimed at wiping out indigenous culture would up wiping out the people as well. These places were like prison camps (they were given numbers instead of names), and St. Joseph's was as bad as they could get.
We hear of unspeakable punishments. Small boys were forced to hold a large, heavy book aloft over their heads for an hour. Others were strung up in a separate building and beaten. When these stories come, they shock.
In an old film we hear and see a nun. Mostly what we hear about are priests, and a series of principals who would have had to know about the abuses taking place. This is where Charlene Belleau and Whitney Spearing come in. An important strand of the film is their dogged investigation of the St. Joseph’s Mission residential school abuses and the perpetrators. Belleau ad Spearing are trawling the past. They have a wall of names of fathers and principals who were connected and would have known of and participated in the atrocities.
This documentary adds to the cinematic lore about abusive Catholic schools, which must be voluminous by now, while awareness of Native abuse may be at a new high as a result of Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon. One thinks of François Ozon's excellent 2019 By the Grace of God (https://www.chrisknipp.com/writing/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=4300). It's about a handful of men who come together to expose a notorious French pedophile priest who abused them as boys, which unreels rather like a legal thriller. Perhaps even better is the nearly forgotten two-part 1997 Canadian television film The Boys of St. Vincent's (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106473/reference/), which dramatizes the abuses by brothers at a remote Newfoundland school, the boys growing up, and revisits them fifteen years later.
People in Sugarcane on the other hand are exploring the raw facts of the awful past and while there is no finality, more is being revealed. (Julian's father and grandmother don't want to talk, but eventually they do tell what they had not told before.)
Another important thread is of Rick Gilbert, former chief of Williams Lake First Nation, who despite being abused, as his mother was abused, as his grandmother was abused, maintains, with his wife Anna, their Catholic faith. They even protect religious objects from the current round of arson. Rick Gilbert it is who is invited to go with a group of other indigenous leaders to visit the Vatican for an audience with Pope Francis. He learns elementary Italian, how to say "per favore," please, online in preparation.
The film follows to Rome the sedate, distinguished Gilbert, who was probably fathered by one of the priests (his Irish DNA shows it, which by Rome he comes to admit). The Pope indeed says he is sorry, reading a prepared speech in flowery Italian, and then he says "bye-bye." The Priest in charge of Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the order that ran the school, whom Gilbert also seeks out in Rome, meets with him in English, and says he's sorry too after a moment of horrified silence that reminded me of Ozon's By the Grace of God. As Gilbert tells the priest, being sorry is known to be only a beginning. How much is the Catholic clergy sorry, and how much is it merely humiliated and terribly embarrassed? We know how when any priest gets in trouble the Church just sends him to another assignment where he can do it again.
The PM Justin Trudeau turns up in scuffed jeans, with Chief Willie Sellars standing by him, to acknowledge that these abusive indigenous boarding schools "are part of what we are," seeking openness about evils of the past as part of understanding and healing. But he does not propose any concrete actions. He's trying to calm things down.
In such matters as these there is a chain of silence and omertà. As to why the kids didn't tell their parents what was happening (if they had the opportunity), one woman says she was sexually abused, and then tells the whole chain of authorities she reported it to, each of whom suggested she report it to another authority. Then she gave up and told her mother, and she beat her.
The film isn't a simple progression of logical argument but rather a gathering of emotions and revelations that come together later, becoming, as Joe Leydon says in his Variety review (https://variety.com/2024/film/reviews/sugarcane-review-1235892640/), "even more troubling" as you "replay it in your mind" and "reconsider" "seemingly throwaway details." He means partly Julian's surprise at winning first prize for traditional dancing at a Kamloopa First Nations powwow. This comes early on. Later it comes back to make you think how much Julian longs for his native culture - speaking words of the native language to elders - but feels cut off from, unworthy of it from the legacy of an abusive school that he did not attend, but still is haunted by.
The film weaves in levity, song and dance while never losing its intimate and personal touch,. The cinematography by Christopher LaMarca and Emily Kassie throughout Sugarcane is handsome, often celebrating the local landscape. But it's not a fun watch, or a story with a resolution. It's an important story and a film many critics have recommended as required viewing in schools because, as Alissa Wilkinson wrote in her recent New York Times review (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/09/movies/sugarcane-documentary-indigenous-communities.html), its "stories are not isolated"; it shows us that "people all over North America are living with the repercussions of truth suppressed and violence enacted in the name of love and faith."
Sugarcane, 107 mins., debuted Jan. 20, 2024 at Sundance, winning the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary, and was included in over a dozen other domestic and international festivals. Opened Aug. 9, 2024 at Film Forum (NYC), Aug. 16 in the San Francisco Bay Area. National Geographic Documentary Films. Metacritic (https://www.metacritic.com/movie/sugarcane/critic-reviews/) rating: 93%.