Sugarcane
Sugarcane
Almost everybody in the Western Hemisphere is aware of the crimes of the Roman Catholic Church as it keenly accepts blame for its wrongdoings. Paralleling though most of the historical narratives that exist today, whiteness is also more often the great eraser of facts, and when it comes to crimes against victims of color, they are treated as an endnote. Indigenous children are also white children Vis or colonizers in other words. This is addressed in “Sugarcane.” Instead, wittingly isolating these residential schools whose core purpose was to assimilate “the Indian” towards the colonial state, have always been breeding grounds for disgusting abuse of power by one generation after the other who have been let off the hook for committing murder over several centuries.
Researching the history of St Joseph’s Mission, Williams Lake, British Columbia, Canada (closed 1981), this documentary collects personal narratives from the students and anthropologists revealing the painful history of state violence leading up the deaths of and trauma within their people, spanning over many generations. It turns out to be quite explosive as well.
Co-directors Emily Kassie and Julian Brave Noisecat (the latter being his father Ed and grandmother) along with the mass media traumatic accounts of the historical abuses entered into these intimate tales which are important in understanding these tragedies and also the history of the American Indians’ oppression. The research of the very institution equipped itself with thorough background concerning the very opening of undisclosed burial locations, just like ‘Sugarcane’ seemed to complete the puzzle.
It is this softness and care exercised by Kassie and Noisecat in expressing what transpired at St Joseph’s Mission and its present influence that makes this film stand out from others. Rather than functioning solely as an archival clutterbox, it performs as a revisiting of intergenerational trauma. Be it a reef of concrete tombstones with an endless list of onsite fatalities or having abuse at all levels that allowed staff pregnancies to be followed up with staff quits: the evils that stem from these types of institutions appears to be insatiable. These kinds of accusations are limited to only looking at those workings that occurred within an enrolled period alone; nevertheless, there remains a residue concerning these traumas on the extent of time as today in the case of PTSD, substance abuse and even suicide in former students. In the words of the film, “The residential schools are still killing Indigenous peoples. And Indigenous peoples continue to gendera-lineagedkill children, still kids, and secondary children, kids.”
The crushing authoritarianism in their Sacramento home and the domestic turmoil unraveled to Noisecat’s father made lifelong acceptance of one’s own past- in both kinds seem impossible; and that emotional estrangement from one’s child –ordains Noisecat’s. Those consequences of the tragedies prompted Chief Rick Gilbert’s conversion and embracing ancestral roots; Whitney Spearing and Charlene Belleau however focused on rather those emplotted crimes.
The implications of this sentiment are that history is too embedded and warm at its roots; since it shows through families and faces that become history even if these in the best scenario have been only one and have been devoid of warmth. There exists the weight of an obligation whose type is usually symbolic rather than reparative found in Trudeau’s mumbled guilt and trite apologies from Pope Francis (nothing more than hollow words: without apology, without restorative compensation, without return of plundered items).
It has been said before, in more poignant ways, that “sugarcane” is deep. It is emotionally both recall events and the moments where there are no words to express the emotions. What is missing then is poverty amongst the hearts of many who lie in bioenergy; there are beautiful forests, mountains and plains and many kinds of folk music within the story, although there are sad events in history still dealing with the happy vibrant tradition which never died.
This has not been the connecting theme here of the films on the repressive regimes though there have been lectures on the internal violence of a nation over the ages. Rather, as “I love you” metamorphoses into a folk song, “sugarcane” demonstrates that these women are more concerned with the psychological and the personal; hanging on and trying to restore their societies in oe society, no way or how.
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- Genre: Documentary
- Country: united states
- Director: Emily Kassie, Julian Brave NoiseCat
- Cast: Julian Brave NoiseCat, Ed Archie Noisecat, Charlene Belleau
