We speak with Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, the co-directors of the Oscar-nominated documentary Sugarcane, which examines the legacy of Indian residential schools in Canada. For over 150 years, these government-funded and church-run boarding schools forcibly separated First Nations, Métis and Inuit children from their families in an effort to destroy Indigenous languages, cultures and communities. The schools were rife with physical, psychological and sexual abuse, and many children did not survive. In 2021, a First Nation in British Columbia found evidence of 215 child-sized graves on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, setting off a nationwide search for more possible gravesites. Kassie and Brave NoiseCat would document the painful search for answers at Saint Joseph’s Mission, the residential school where Brave NoiseCat’s own relatives had been sent and near where his father was born and abandoned in a dumpster. The film explores “the colonial silence that exists in our broader society about this history” and how it has “seeped into the lives of the people who had survived it,” says Brave NoiseCat.
Full article on the Democracy Now website at — http://www.democracynow.org/2025/3/4/sugarcane
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