'Sugarcane' set out to tell a story about Indigenous boarding schools. The documentary uncovered 'something much darker had happened.'

When documentary filmmaker Emily Kassie asked her colleague and friend Julian Brave NoiseCat to co-direct a film about the abuses surrounding Indigenous boarding schools in Canada, neither one realized that NoiseCat would become a crucial part of the story.

After news broke in May 2021 that 215 unmarked graves had been discovered at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia — a discovery that shed a brighter light on the abuses exacted on Indigenous boarding school attendees across Canada and in the U.S. over decades — Kassie felt compelled to dig deeper.

The Canadian filmmaker wanted to find another boarding school that was holding its own search for unmarked graves, and she felt that NoiseCat, who is an Indigenous journalist, could help her explore the subject too.

Following a string of improbable coincidences and an unexpected connection to NoiseCat’s family, the pair’s project became Sugarcane, which hit theaters this month to critical acclaim and will stream on Hulu and Disney+ later this year.

‘Did you know that’s the school that my family was taken away to?’

Before the project got its start, Kassie was doing preliminary research on which boarding school to feature. She had found an article about the Williams Lake First Nation, based on the Sugarcane Reserve, and its leader, Chief Willie Sellers.

“I sent [Sellers] a cold email,” Kassie explained, “and he called me back ... and he said, ‘The creator’s always had great timing. Just yesterday, our council said we need someone to document this search.”

When Kassie told NoiseCat that she had secured access to follow the search at St. Joseph’s Mission, near the Sugarcane Reserve, where 93 unmarked graves had been discovered, there was a long pause on his end of the line.

“Wow, that’s really crazy,” NoiseCat, who is a member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen and a descendant of the Lil’wat Nation of Mount Currie, told Kassie. “Did you know that’s the school that my family was taken away to and where my father was born?”

“So out of 139 Indian residential schools in Canada,” NoiseCat explained to Yahoo Entertainment, “Em happened to choose the one school where my father, where his life began, and where my family was sent. So what are the odds?”

‘Something much darker had happened at these schools’

Sugarcane follows an investigation into the deaths and abuses at St. Joseph’s Mission, a former Catholic-run Indigenous residential school that closed in 1981 near the Sugarcane Reserve in British Columbia.

The film follows several threads, including the stories of former students and the descendants of former students. NoiseCat’s story is one arc.

His grandmother attended St. Joseph’s but had not spoken much about her experience there. She had shared few details about the birth of NoiseCat’s formerly estranged father, artist Ed Archie NoiseCat, who had been born while she was a student at the school. In the documentary, it’s revealed that his father had been saved from the infanticide that took place at St. Joseph’s, which was discovered during the investigation.

Another unexpected thread follows the late former Williams Lake First Nation Chief Rick Gilbert, whose mother was a student at St. Joseph’s and whose father might have been one of the priests at the school. (Gilbert died in 2023, after the documentary had finished filming.)

“What we realized is that the unmarked graves were actually not the story at all,” Kassie said, “but really something much darker had happened at these schools.”

Woven together are the stories of two estranged fathers, one known and one unknown. For NoiseCat, who grew up in the U.S. with his mom and younger sister, the opportunity to film Sugarcane from both sides of the camera was a kind of reckoning but also an opportunity.

“[My dad and I] were roommates for actually the two years [while] making the documentary,” NoiseCat said, “and gave us an opportunity to really spend meaningful time together for the first time since I was a little kid, and to really heal.”

Gilbert’s own healing journey took him, along with a contingent of Indigenous Canadians and the documentary team, to the Vatican. There, the pope offered a formal apology, and the former chief — and devout Catholic himself — spoke to a priest there about his DNA findings and what that meant to him as the son of a boarding school victim.

For NoiseCat, “seeing the bravery of the late Chief Rick Gilbert, who trusted us with the most heavy and personal possible story you can imagine, was one of the most incredible things that I've ever seen any human do in my entire life.”

Gilbert’s Vatican meeting inspired NoiseCat to take his own action to create a vulnerable pathway to healing.

“I just felt, oh my God, if this man is willing to trust us with this story, and I know that my family has its own story, a story that is at the core of the infanticide that happened at St. Joseph’s Mission, and I’m not willing to go there ... then I’m not giving this story everything it deserves,” he explained. “This is the story that deserves my all.”

For both NoiseCat and Kassie, their hope is that other Indigenous boarding school survivors feel called to share their own experiences, if they choose, as many have in the U.S. with Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.

They also hope that the film opens more eyes to the abuses that happened at Indigenous boarding schools in Canada and the U.S.

“This is a foundational story of North America, a conversation that has begun in Canada but has barely just begun in the United States,” Kassie said. “Our hope is that the film is a catalyst for dialogue in the broader world. It’s a history that is everyone’s history who lives in North America, and it’s essential that people know it.”