“Sugarcane,” an award-winning Canadian documentary billed as an investigation into “a pattern of infanticide” in a B.C. residential school, has been short-listed for a 2025 Academy Award. Unfortunately, the film fails to deliver on its premise, revealing no evidence for even a single infanticide at a residential school, let alone a “pattern.”
In media interviews, Sugarcane’s director and producer Emily Kassie recalls being “gut-pulled” to her project by the 2021 “discovery of unmarked graves” at the Kamloops residential school. Having seen a news story about a search for missing children by the Williams Lake First Nation at the nearby St. Joseph’s Mission residential school, which had been established in 1891 by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, Kassie approached them. They were amenable to collaboration.
The film’s title refers to the “Sugar Cane” community near Williams Lake, B.C., home to the Williams Lake First Nation.
Having invited her former journalism colleague, climate activist Julian Brave NoiseCat, to partner in the project, Kassie was surprised to learn that his estranged father, carver and artist Ed Archie NoiseCat, had been born under unusual circumstances at St. Joseph’s. And so Ed’s and Julian’s quest to uncover the alleged mystery of Ed’s paternity and birth, their mutual struggles with father abandonment and their journey toward healing became the emotional anchor of the film.
The particulars of Ed’s 1959 birth were indeed extraordinary. The newborn Ed, tucked into an ice cream container, was discovered by a passing dairyman, alerted by “mewing” sounds coming from inside St. Joseph’s incinerator, which was cold at the time. But Ed’s near-miraculous survival was not, as the film posits, a mystery.
The event was newsworthy and duly written up at the time for the local newspaper that everyone in the tiny community read (misleadingly presented in the film as a freshly discovered clue). It is on this incident alone that the film’s “pattern of infanticide” thesis depends.
In reality, although tales of nameless incinerated babies, supposedly the issue of Indigenous girls raped by priests, are a staple of residential-school horror lore, Ed is Canada’s only documented school incinerator infant. But Ed’s birth has no relationship to a priest or even to St. Joseph’s, apart from the fact that his mother, Antoinette Archie, delivered him there.
Antoinette was then 20, so not a student (school tenure ended at 16). Possibly Antoinette gave birth at St. Joseph’s because she went into labour while passing the school on her long way home from Williams Lake to Canim Lake Reserve. It was summer. There was nobody around. Antoinette claimed she thought the baby was dead when she put it in the school’s incinerator, but she ended up spending a year in jail for “abandonment.” Today she is a respected elder in her community.
It was never a secret that Ed’s father was an Indigenous man called Ray Peters, with whom Antoinette had seven other children. Julian knew this, and so did Ed. Their “journey” to find the truth is an aesthetic construct. Kassie has admitted that she was unable to get Antoinette to talk about her son’s conception and birth because it was “too painful to revisit.”
Most reviews of the film are fulsomely laudatory, vanishingly few critical. One critical reviewer, Michelle Stirling, a writer, researcher and veteran documentarian, says the film “(weaves) a fiction out of what should have been fact,” with the producers “ultimately cashing in on a tragic tale of Antoinette Archie’s impulsive and criminal actions back in 1959.” Stirling also made a rebuttal documentary titled “The Bitter Roots of ‘Sugarcane.’” Watch the latter, and you — like me — may end up skeptical of Sugarcane’s award-worthiness.
If there is an over-arching villain in this story, Stirling feels, it is alcohol, which Stirling told me was rampant in Ed’s family’s community. It is therefore unfair, Stirling thinks, to blame all Indigenous woes on residential schools (Ed attended a day school). Raised by his alcoholic grandparents, from whom he adopted the name NoiseCat, Ed lost them to the scourge when he was only a boy. Ed himself left Julian and Julian’s (Irish-Jewish) mother, Alexandra Roddy, as he had been abandoned.
Stirling’s documentary convinced me that Sugarcane does not meet the essential criterion of a documentary: to tell a story that provides reliable evidence for a thesis. Stirling calls Sugarcane a “blood libel” of the Roman Catholic Church. She has in mind the 112 mostly Catholic churches that have been vandalized or burned through allegedly “understandable” anger ginned up by the anti-Churchism pervading Sugarcane’s claims.
For an even more in-depth unpacking of Sugarcane’s departure from the truth, documentary buffs will find a plethora of corrections and disproofs in a 17,000-word, minute-by-minute fact-check of the film compiled by residential-school researcher Nina Green. It is an astonishing piece of investigative journalism.
“A pattern of infanticide?” No. Green writes, “Sugarcane thus ends with a false and horrific claim that viewers are told is true, but for which the film itself provided no verifiable evidence whatsoever.” I reached out to Kassie for comment on both Green’s fact-check and Stirling’s documentary, but received no response.
Following Sugarcane’s Sundance Film Festival win, National Geographic picked Sugarcane up for distribution. On the magazine’s website, a promotional blurb for Sugarcane states, “In 2021, evidence of unmarked graves was discovered on the grounds of an Indian residential school run by the Catholic Church in Canada.” (Et tu, venerable National Geographic?) Fact-check: Evidence was found for “soil anomalies,” not graves. No clandestine Indigenous child burials have been found in Canada.
National Geographic plans to distribute Sugarcane as an educational vehicle to schools across Canada. Unless our goal is to ensure that reconciliation remains impossible for yet another generation of Canadians, this should not be permitted.
National Post
X: @BarbaraRKay