Sugarcane: “I could feel the presence of that devastating and violent history — a history that is largely invisibilized in Alaska.”

A new film highlights the traumas inflicted on Indigenous children by residential schools

Alaskans say that history needs more attention. “Sugarcane” is set in British Columbia. But after recent screenings in Sitka and Anchorage, advocates say the documentary’s themes are as relevant and urgent just across the Canadian border in Alaska.

By: Nathaniel Herz, Northern Journal - September 25, 2024 5:00 am

St. Joseph’s Mission Indian Residential School, a site featured in a scene from the new documentary Sugarcane. (Sugarcane Film LLC)

This story contains difficult subject matter relating to Canada’s and America’s history of operating residential schools for Indigenous people. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition has gathered resources for self-care at this site.

A new documentary, “Sugarcane,” recounts the searing, traumatic history of colonization and forced assimilation of British Columbia’s Indigenous people through a network of what are known as Indian residential schools. 

The film features former students and their descendants seeking truth, reconciliation and healing from the nation’s legacy of those schools — institutions that the Canadian federal government now says carried out a “cultural genocide” through physical and sexual abuse.

After recent screenings in Sitka and Anchorage — and with the approach of the annual Sept. 30 commemoration for survivors — advocates say the film’s themes are as relevant and urgent just across the Canadian border in Alaska. 

Churches and the federal government once operated a similar network of roughly two dozen such schools in Alaska starting in the 1870s, according to federal records.

Those institutions, advocates say, inflicted their own traumas that still cast a shadow over Alaskan survivors and their relatives — many of whom have not had the same chance to process the painful history in the way that’s shown onscreen in the new film.

“I could feel the tension in my body. I was shaking all night; I still feel it now, two days later,” Ayyu Qassataq, a 44-year-old Yup’ik and Iñupiaq advocate, said after watching Sugarcane at its packed screening last month at the Anchorage Museum. “I could feel the presence of that devastating and violent history — a history that is largely invisibilized in Alaska.”

The Canadian federal government established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2008 in response to class action lawsuits filed by survivors of the country’s residential schools. 

The commission ultimately concluded that the Canadian schools were a “systematic, government-sponsored attempt to destroy Aboriginal cultures and languages and to assimilate Aboriginal peoples so that they no longer existed as distinct peoples.”

Sugarcane’s two directors, who spoke onstage with Qassataq immediately after the Anchorage screening, said they want the movie to lead to deeper understanding among both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people of the systems that operated on both sides of the border. 

That’s especially the case in the U.S., they said, where the federal government hasn’t as thoroughly accounted for the schools’ history as in Canada. 

In that country, the government has provided some $7.5 billion in restitution for Indigenous people, according to the New York Times. 

The Canadian federal government also is currently spending more than $150 million to support tribes as they document, locate and commemorate missing children and unmarked burial sites at former residential schools. In 2008, the prime minister formally apologized for the school system.

Julian Brave NoiseCat, co-director of Sugarcane, speaks after a screening in August at the Anchorage Museum. Co-director Emily Kassie is at left, and Ayyu Qassataq, a Yup’ik and Iñupiaq advocate, is at right. (Photo by Nathaniel Herz/Northern Journal)

“There is not a parallel process of truth and reconciliation happening in this country in as robust a way as there is in Canada,” co-director Julian Brave NoiseCat, who explores his family’s own traumatic history in Sugarcane, said in an interview just before the screening. He added: “It takes a lot of courage to have the conversation. And our hope is that this film inspires people across the country who are living in the legacy of this genocide to have those conversations.”

Sugarcane, described by the New York Times as “stunning” and a “must-see” film, tells the story of a single Canadian First Nation in British Columbia, and its efforts to excavate and account for the deep harms inflicted by a Catholic-run boarding school. 

NoiseCat’s grandmother was a student at the school, where she gave birth to NoiseCat’s father. Harrowing scenes feature survivors and former workers recounting how unwanted babies born to Indigenous students at the school were sometimes thrown into an incinerator.

KEEP READING:  https://alaskabeacon.com/2024/09/25/a-new-film-highlights-the-traumas-inflicted-on-indigenous-children-by-residential-schools/