"Genocide" is a word that needs to be deployed carefully so as not to denature its power.
It's not a charge to be levied casually, or used as a political tool, as an all-purpose obliterator. Not every atrocity is equivalent to the Holocaust.
Warm, elliptic and sad, Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat's 2023 documentary "Sugarcane" is an artful film made in the shadow of genocide. It is a nonfiction film made with remarkable empathy and restraint, a sober but humane interrogation of the recurrent damage done by arrogantly applied benign intentions.
It has long been taken for fact that when, during the Indian Wars of the Great Plains, Comanche Chief Tosahwi surrendered to General Philip Sheridan at Fort Cobb in January 1869, telling the general he was "a good Indian."
Sheridan responded by saying the "only good Indians I ever saw were dead," which was rephrased as the adage "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." While Sheridan denied making any such statement, the sentiment was affixed to his reputation by the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and the quotation used as a chapter heading in Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee."
In 1892, another former Union Army officer, Richard H. Pratt, alluded to the already established cliché in 1892, saying "[a] great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one ... In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man."
Pratt is a complex figure, the well-intentioned Good Father who, while never mentioned in "Sugarcane," was the inadvertent destroyer of generations of Native North Americans. He was the man who envisioned the mission school -- essentially boarding schools where young Indians would undergo "compulsory immersion education."
They would cut their hair and renounce their "blanket ways," including tribal names. They would forsake their native languages and learn English. They would become Christian. They would assimilate.
In 1879, Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School at Carlisle, Pa., the first of what would be hundreds of off-reservation boarding schools for Native Americans throughout the United States and Canada. That was where Jim Thorpe played football after running away from the Sac and Fox Indian Agency school in Stroud, Okla.
Pratt's ideas took root in Canada; the government adopted the residential industrial school system of the United States, and in a partnership with the Catholic Church and various church organizations, established a system of what grew to be 80 residential schools around the provinces. In 1894, school attendance -- whether at day schools, industrial schools, or residential schools -- was made compulsory for Indian children. Because of the remoteness and small size of many Indian communities, residential schools were the way many families could comply with the law.
Under Indian Commissioner Hayter Reed, residential schools were intentionally located at substantial distances from Indigenous communities, in part to minimize family visits, isolating children from their parents. Parental visits were further restricted by a system that required Indians to obtain a pass to leave their reserve (the Canadian term for "reservation").
There was no ambiguity in the purpose of these schools. In 1920, Duncan Campbell Scott, the deputy superintendent of Indian affairs, gave a speech in which he said: "I want to get rid of the Indian problem ... Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department."
The last government-funded residential school, Kivalliq Hall in Rankin Inlet, closed in 1997. More than 150,000 children attended these schools. Some statistics suggest there are thousands who did not survive.
Artist Ed Archie NoiseCat and his son, co-director Julian NoiseCat in "Sugarcane"
Y'all Gonna Be a Canadian
This is all prologue.
"Sugarcane" is not a lecture. It is painterly and well-tempered, given to ruminative shots and rural landscapes and twilit bodies of water. It is voices and faces, heartbreaking images such as three elderly drunks at a bus stop, jovial, stunted and lost, or an earnest Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer allowing that while giving access to records violates procedure, "if not now, when?" It is a brief for human kindness that suggests remembrance is the only avenue to forgiveness.
In Canada there are people willing to argue sematics. It wasn't "mass graves" that were found on the grounds of some of these schools, but "unmarked" graves in cemeteries. It's not 4,167 dead kids -- it might not even be 3,000. There are those willing to haggle over the figures.
"Sugarcane" does not go much into that, though it does have a scene where Willie Sellars, the chief of Williams Lake First Nation in British Columbia, politely answers a vitriol-filled email he received from someone who believes the Indians brought their troubles on themselves.
Sellars is working in the shadow of atrocity, leading an investigation spurred by the 2021 discovery of more than 200 potential unmarked graves of Indian children at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, once the largest residential school in Canada, with its enrollment peaking at 500 in the 1950s.
It had been acknowledged that 51 children died at the school -- but the investigation suggests there were many other undocumented deaths.
In the aftermath of the discovery, some churches were set afire.
The award-winning documentary "Sugarcane" investigates the systematic abuse of children at a residential school in Canada.
Old Man Look at My Life
Emily Kassie is an American journalist who has made films for The New York Times and PBS Frontline. When she decided she wanted to make a film about the investigation into the unmarked graves and possible undocumented deaths she brought Julian Brave NoiseCat into the production.
NoiseCat was raised in Oakland, Calif., by a single mother. His semi-estranged father and grandmother were both survivors of St. Joseph's Mission residential school near Sugarcane.
In addition to his journalism, NoiseCat is an experienced political strategist, policy analyst and cultural organizer. He is, according to his online biography, a "champion traditional dancer" whose "powwow prize winnings include a horse."
In the residential schools, the children were not allowed to dance traditional dances. In the 1940s, at Kamloops, Sister Mary Leonita taught Irish dancing.
Julian is a character in the film; we see him winning a traditional dance contest (and seemingly being surprised that he has won), and reconnecting with his father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, now a notable artist based in the Pacific Northwest, working in glass and metal, silver and stone.
As investigators Charlene Belleau and Whitney Spearing do the drudge work to try to piece together evidence of decades-old crimes at the school (it doesn't provide any solace that most of the suspected perpetrators are long dead and the one they manage to get on the phone is a doddering old fool who can't -- won't -- help them), Julian and his father slowly unwind their history, bonding through native music and Neil Young.
Meanwhile, Rick Gilbert, a former chief of Williams Lake First Nation and devout Catholic, and his wife Anna take it upon themselves to protect various religious items in their home. Rick is a product of the school, and while he was there he was sexually abused by a priest. His mother was a student at the school who was raped by a priest or a brother there. While he is reluctant to believe it, a DNA test confirms his Irish heritage; he even has a match for a second or third cousin, a McGrath, the same surname as one of the brothers at the school with his mother.
Rick is invited to the Vatican to a meeting between Pope Francis and the Canadian Indians whose families suffered under the clergy running the residential schools. On the bus to the Vatican, he chats with a young woman whose mother was also abused in the school. The name "McGrath" surfaces again.
Pope Francis seems genuinely sorry for the damage inflicted by the Church.
One of the film's strengths is that it offers no direct narration; it just puts us there as witnesses to the scene. We are free to draw our own conclusions.
This approach, while powerful, also leads to some confusion; I wasn't always sure when the principals were talking about Kamloops and when they were talking about St. Joseph's. For a while I assumed it was the same school, but in researching this piece I learned they weren't.
American audiences might lose context if they are not familiar with Canada's National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, aka Orange Shirt Day. But in the end it doesn't really matter if you grasp all the details. You get the picture of a system that shielded abuse while pursuing an arrogant and crude program of forced assimilation.
Maybe you think genocide is too strong a word for mere criminality. But consider what was done to the Indigenous people who inhabited North America before the arrival of the first Europeans. Consider the wars of conquest, the broken treaties, the Trail of Tears. Consider an infant, a child of rape, deposited in a garbage incinerator at an Indian residential school.
On the morning of Aug. 16, 1959, a milkman hears a cry coming from the incinerator. He finds the child, stuffed in an ice cream box used as a trash container. The baby is saved. The young native mother is sent away; she serves a year in jail for abandoning the child. The father, presumably a Catholic priest or monk, is sent away to reflect on his sin, to confess, to resolve to sin no more, and then re-assigned to some other residential school.
That baby survived. Thousands didn't.
This was the attempted murder of a culture.
Email: pmartin@adgnewsroom.com
The Arkansas Cinema Society , Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival and the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts are screening "Sugarcane" on Wednesday in the Performing Arts Theater at AMFA. Doors open at 6 p.m.; the show starts at 6:30. Admission is $15 for adults and $10 for children/senior citizens. More information can be found at events.arkmfa.org/event/movies-at-the-museum-sugarcane.
The screening corresponds with the AMFA's current exhibition, "Action Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art, 1940s to 1970s," which is on view at AMFA through May 26.