This New Film Confronts A Haunting History That We Rarely Talk About

Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie probe Canada’s quest to “solve the Indian problem” by separating generations of children from their families.

Scenes of revelation and reckoning weave together in “Sugarcane,” a documentary that probes Canada’s shameful history of separating Indigenous children from their families to live in residential boarding schools.

The film, which premiered in January at Sundance Film Festival and is now streaming on Hulu, Disney+ and National Geographic, delves into the stories of survivors of widespread abuse at the Catholic-run schools, where children were subject to rape and physical abuse. Some students disappeared — and some were even killed.

The film is anchored by the discovery of unmarked graves at the Catholic-run St. Joseph’s Mission school on Sugarcane Reserve near Williams Lake, British Columbia, in 2021.

In “Sugarcane,” audiences watch as the filmmakers grapple with generations of trauma and cultural degradation wrought by Canada’s over 100 federally funded residential schools. The nation believed it had a duty to “solve the Indian problem,” a phrase coined by a Canadian official who once ran the residential schools and that would be repeated by others in the government.

Children were separated from their families and stripped of their native languages and cultures in an attempt to “civilize” younger generations and assimilate them into the world of white Canadian settlers. The system was in place from 1848 until Canada’s last remaining residential school closed in 1996.