“A place where ghosts are alive”: One community’s reckoning with Canada’s residential school system

“This is a community living on the edge of death,” Sugarcane co-director Julian Brave NoiseCat tells me over Zoom. 

A passionate activist, prolific journalist of North American Indigenous life, and newly-minted filmmaker, Julian is one of most credible people to make that conclusion mainly because the community he’s talking about is his own. 

Julian is a member of the Secwépemc (pronounced suh-Wep-muhc) people, spending summers in Williams Lake, British Columbia, on the reservation colloquially known as Sugarcane. 

In 2021, the Williams Lake First Nation launched an investigation into potential unmarked graves found on the land of St. Joseph’s Mission, a former Indian residential school.

The discovery of the potential gravesites began a process of formal inquiry that only confirmed what longtime residents of the neighbouring Sugarcane reservation already knew from lived experience – that there was a long history of abuse and death at the Mission, covered up by people in charge. 

At this fork in the history of the Williams Lake community, of Canada, and of the Secwépemc people, is where co-directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie jump into the current. Sugarcane, their debut feature documentary, follows this nascent investigation down unexpected paths, documenting and participating in the community’s efforts to build a way forward as they reckon with a past that continues to haunt. 

“I knew that there was a story there, but I didn’t know if I was ready to touch it.” 

Oddly enough, this team of co-directors, and the subjects of their documentary, met more by coincidence than by design. 

Emily, unafraid of complex stories, has a career of documenting tough subjects. She has produced films on the aftermaths of genocides in spaces as intimate as the home and family, and on conflicts and human rights abuses spanning Afghanistan and the Sahara Desert.

“I was really moved by the way that the camera could empower people and give them agency in the particular way that film and cinema can transport you and stir something deep within you,” Emily tells me. 

“That said,” she adds, “I had never turned my lens on my own country and the horrors that it has perpetrated against our First Peoples.” 

Williams Lake, Sugarcane, and St. Joseph’s Mission is only one part of a larger story. Since the beginning of European contact with the Americas, and the start of French and English settlement in what is now Canada, they have perpetrated a wide-ranging genocide against Indigenous First Nations. 

Starting in the 1870s, Indian residential schools were founded and funded by the Canadian government as a more subtle tool of genocide, accompanying the violence of wars, settlement, and land theft. Operated by various churches, residential schools sought to isolate children from their families and communities, systematically stripping them of their language, culture, and community ties, while also exposing children to horrifyingly high rates of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of priests and teachers. 

This practice went on for generations. The last residential school in Canada only closed in 1997 – “my first year of kindergarten,” Emily adds – and no First Nation escaped unscathed from this persistent and debilitating state violence. And this violence hasn’t ended. To this day, the sweeping legacy of European colonisation, residential schools included, continues to kill survivors and their descendants through cycles of poverty, trauma, alcoholism, and substance abuse. 

A fateful collaboration

Upon the very first discovery of more than a hundred unmarked graves, in Kamloops at the site of what was once the largest residential school in Canada in 2021, “I felt gut-pulled to the story,” Emily shares. “And the first thing that I did was text Julian.” 

Julian, Emily’s former colleague, was more hesitant about taking on a documentary project, having just signed a contract for his first book, We Survived the Night. 

“I didn’t know how to write a book, much less to write a film, and I definitely didn’t know how to do both at the same time,” he says. “My family’s connection to the residential school is very intense. I didn’t know exactly what that story was, but I knew that there was a story there, and I didn’t know if I was ready to touch it in any medium, especially in a medium like film.”

Yet, too many things had aligned for Julian to say no. When he committed himself to the project, Emily shared that she had identified the First Nation, school, and search that she wanted to work with: St. Joseph’s Mission on the Sugarcane reservation.

“When Emily said that, I was just completely floored. Out of 139 residential schools, Em had happened to choose the one school that my family was taken away to, and where my father’s life began,” Julian tells me.

Emily recalled Chief Willie Sellars of Williams Lake attributing this fateful twist to the creators having great timing, not only bringing this story to light at the right time, but having a member of their own community at the forefront of telling it. In this respect, Sugarcane fits itself into a rare niche of documentaries that feel homegrown, and are privy to a perspective from the inside that a “typical” documentary could never grasp. It becomes less nonfiction and more like a journey of self-discovery that ripples out to the community. 

“I have my own background in nonfiction and narrative and that’s sort of how I approach this stuff,” Julian adds. “I push things from a personal lens as well, and I’m usually a character in my work, which ultimately ended up happening here even though that was not what we planned on doing.”

Documenting an open secret

It seemed impossible, then, for Julian to avoid becoming a subject. The story of St. Joseph’s Mission and Sugarcane touched every aspect of life in Williams Lake, the NoiseCat family included. 

Sugarcane, this “community on the edge of death,” didn’t necessarily need the camera to understand its history – the residential school’s human cost has been an open secret of sorts for years. 

There are yearbooks, family photo albums, and archival footage featuring nativity scenes at the church, with Joseph, Mary, and the angels played by Indigenous children with their hair cut short. There are churches that stand, tended to by Indigenous people, and churches that have been burned as symbols of colonial, genocidal oppression. 

And there are the people, and their memories that still colour the life of the community. Among the moments the camera captures is an informal interview with three residents, drunk in the middle of the day at a bus stop, reminiscing about the school, and the people they knew there as children, long deceased. The viewer is left to fill in the blanks for themselves as to the impact their trauma continues to have on their lives. 

And the push to document this open secret predates Julian and Emily as well: Charlene Belleau, one of the subjects of the film, is a survivor and longtime documentarian of St. Joseph’s Mission’s history, using archival techniques and community testimony to fill in the gaps of this erased history. As she leafs through pages of reports, old student rolls, and records of missing and deceased Indigenous children, the clinical nature of her evidence collection is contrasted with the visceral memories that persist among the people of Sugarcane, and haunt the margins and gaps of the “official” history. 

“Rez Legends”

Evidence is a report of a priest that was removed from St. Joseph’s for a pattern of abuse, just to be moved to a different parish. The reality that it cannot and will not describe is the group of elderly survivors in their 60s, recounting his assaults, the indifference of the police when they reported it, and the continuing abuse they bore as children. 

Evidence is ground-penetrating sonar identifying sections of St. Joseph’s grounds where there were pits – potential unmarked graves. None of those ground readings can encompass the experience of a disabled Sugarcane resident and survivor joining Charlene at the mission, pointing out the places where, as a child, she had witnessed parish workers secretly burying the bodies of a boy and a girl.

The evidence that Charlene has compiled of abuses at St. Joseph’s mission has made its way to the Canadian government more than once – Emily and Julian look over boxes and boxes of paper in Charlene’s garage, including a printed report on abuse presented in 1993 to the Parliament – yet, it went unacknowledged for years, or dismissed as isolated incidents rather than a systematic pattern of abuse. 

Julian himself admits that stories of St. Joseph’s have been treated as “rez legends” by younger people, “You know I had heard when I was a younger person these stories – what I assumed to be ghost stories – about babies born at St. Joseph’s mission that were put in the incinerator, and I didn’t believe them at the time.” 

He continues: “Little did I know that not only were those stories true, but that was actually where my father’s life began.” 

Part of Sugarcane’s addition to the record was of chronicling a breakthrough in the investigation which found substantial evidence of infanticide, with parish workers using the incinerator to dispose of bodies. Incredibly enough, the only known survivor of St. Joseph’s incinerator is Ed Archie NoiseCat, who was found by passers-by and then adopted by Julian’s grandmother.

“That was part of my own story, part of my own lineage,” Julian adds. “I think that just goes to show you the extent to which the suppression of this history was not just something that colonial society was doing but it was also something that you know we as Indigenous people, as a colonised people, also participated in.” 

A “post-apocalyptic” people worthy of “epic storytelling”

Williams Lake is described as “a two mill town,” one whose primary industry is logging and forestry. In the midst of this extractive presence are also breathtaking scenes of nature, rushing rivers and swooping hills. You’re dunked headlong into a complex blend of Wild West stereotypes and reality, where at Williams Lake’s famous Stampede, “you have cowboys and Indians, and also Indian cowboys” bucking on horses and roping bulls. 

This complicated legacy of memory, myth, and trauma, as well as a post-genocide life for Indigenous people is what the co-directors wanted to portray in their collage-like approach to filmmaking, spanning the breadth of the community in Williams Lake. 

In the “interstitial moments,” when the story and emotion are allowed to breathe, Sugarcane reminds us of the ways in which the past and the present “rub up against each other in an interesting way.” The power of cinema to create that atmosphere of conflict and ambiguity permits a kind of emotional truth to prevail, going beyond the work of any official investigation. 

“I often see the camera and myself as like a portal for audiences to connect with other worlds and people,” Emily adds, “and we all felt this was a story worthy of epic storytelling, and a people worthy of epic storytelling.”

Yet, with this process of storytelling is a huge emotional leap, one that Emily and director of photography Christopher LaMarca found ways to collaborate with the subjects on, maintaining their agency and supporting their reclamation of a narrative long denied to them. 

“We needed to build trust and intimacy, and one of the ways we chose to do that was by shooting on prime lenses, meaning that in order to be close to someone we had to be physically close, so that had to be earned over time,” Emily explains. “Part of it is also creating the emotional space for people to feel like they have agency, that this is a place where they are empowered to live as they would and make very courageous choices.” 

This kind of community closeness, facilitated by Julian’s own relationship with the Williams Lake First Nation, is what allows the film into spaces, homes, personal confessions, confrontations, even bottoms of graves, that would have never otherwise seen the silver screen. 

In a key scene, while the late Chief Rick Gilbert visits the Vatican in a momentous trip that culminates in an apology from the Pope to residential school survivors, he privately seeks his own apology from the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the order that ran St. Joseph’s Mission. There, thousands of miles away from home, he talked about the abuse twining throughout his own history, from his own conception as a result of rape to his own experiences of sex abuse at the hands of St. Joseph’s priests. The apology that Chief Gilbert receives, while sincere, doesn’t feel nearly enough for the emotional and psychological toll that he continues to live with. The damage still needs to be repaired — where does he, and by extension his community, go from here? 

“Something Jules would say was: this is a post-apocalyptic world for Indigenous peoples – the apocalypse being colonisation, so how do you create what feels like a post-apocalyptic world through visual language?” Emily says. “It’s through the burn of the trees, of the forest fires that pillage and move their way to the edge of the community. IIt means that Julian attended 10 funerals during the making of our film, and I attended several myself because the death toll of St Joseph’s mission continues to climb.” 

“It’s descending to the bottom of the grave that Chief Willie Sellers was digging for his friend and community member Dan Whitecod and getting the sound of the shovel, the closeness of the edge of that shovel against the dirt, and the sound of that the way his body moves, to bury his friend and to hold the community while all of this is happening.”

“It felt like there was something very much alive in that space.”

The vistas of British Columbia, the roaring rivers where Chief Sellers fishes for salmon and the explosive rodeos with bucking cows and rearing horses are all evocative – but the place that feels unsettlingly vivid, even through the metaphorical celluloid, are the grounds and buildings of St. Joseph’s mission itself. 

“This is a place that has kind of been reclaimed by the creatures, the bugs and the birds,” Emily says. Yet, there was still a weight of human history that remained, a “kind of place where the ghosts are alive.”

The nexus between this history and the people of Sugarcane, of the skeletal past lingering in the present, is the old barn on the grounds. Sunlight filtering through the wooden beams and the gaping front windows illuminates dozens upon dozens of names and writings from Indigenous children at St. Joseph’s over the decades. 

“These were children who marked their names, marked the days until they could go home, all the way back for a hundred years,” Emily explains. “The earliest one we found there was 1917, and it felt like there was something very much alive in that space, something that hadn’t left.”

In the barn, Emily tells me, when “Charlene [called] on Julian to help tell this story and [pointed] out to him the names on the walls, and it felt at that moment like the world had broken open in a way. It was a very transformative experience.”

It was powerful and immensely moving to witness on film, the mark that these children had made on a structure and system that made a mark on them, to resist the huge forces at play that preferred to keep their names, their histories, and their futures in oblivion. That now, a hundred years later, their descendants could return to uncover the scars of the past, to try and break this cycle of abuse, and remind us that their First Nations community is still surviving, and joyously alive. 

​​“It’s a community that struggles but it’s also a community that stays together,” Julian explains. “Ultimately, it’s that piece of it that we wanted to portray as enduring, because it is what is gonna help people come back from this history.”

“The truth needs to have its day, too.” 

Since the horrific discoveries of 2021 and the general political will turning towards making amends for this ugly period of Canadian history, truth and reconciliation has been the name of the game. 

A practice championed in post-conflict societies where trauma has been felt on the granular, neighbour-to-neighbour level, truth and reconciliation aims to achieve sustainable peace by having perpetrators admit wrongs and seek forgiveness from victims, who in return receive recognition and closure for their losses and suffering. It’s a difficult experience, and one that requires the community to grieve as a whole. In 2021, the 30th of September was officially recognized as Truth and Reconciliation Day, and as a national holiday remembering the long legacy of residential schools and their atrocities. 

Yet, as Julian reminds us, “Charlene has been leading the efforts to tell the truth and then hold the perpetrators of these atrocities accountable for something like 30 years now, which long predates any talk of truth and reconciliation in Canada.” 

“While our film is obviously specific to St. Joseph’s mission, based upon conversations with other people investigating this history and people involved with the process of truth and reconciliation in Canada, this is likely not an isolated story. So, I think the point here is that there’s still a lot that we don’t know about this history, about these schools, and before we can even get to the part of reconciliation, the truth needs to have its day, too.” 

Cinema can be one of the most powerful forms of truth and reconciliation for a community in the aftermath of conflict, loss, and trauma. In its role as a documentarian and witness, the camera can fill in the gaps of a violently erased history, repossess a story for the community, and lift up the voices of the marginalised. It can commit overlooked truths to posterity, open up new avenues of questioning and self-scrutiny, and move people to act. And watching a film is, in most cases, a community experience that can span generations. 

“We’re able to find community and empowerment through the knowing of the truth and the speaking of the truth,” Emily says. “We are also doing a rez tour, where we’re bringing the film to Indigenous communities across North America, which has been the real highlight of this film for us, and I think we’ve just been blown away by the response.”

“Ultimately the truth of this history is that it was a collectively and communally held experience,” Julian says. “This is not something that happened to a bunch of individuals; it’s what happened to a whole people.”