Mother Church is quite unfamous among a certain section of people on this planet. And frequently when historians recount events, there is a focus on the white perspective, making it easy to marginalize people of color. Many people outside the First Nations community remain ignorant of the fact that tens of thousands of Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families and placed in church-run boarding schools. Sugarcane erases self-imposed data limitations. The so-called Indian problem was a segregation tactic that sought to erase native culture, but it can never be efficiently implemented, and as a result, domestic violence without a sense of guilt or accountability ensured that these schools became institutes of evil that watered evil’s roots.
To put things in perspective, let’s take a look at St Joseph’s Mission, located in Williams Lake in British Columbia (which was closed down in the year 1981). The documentary collaborates with former pupils and anthropologists to reveal every wrongdoing detail that was committed against generations of people from a specific community through systematic and extreme violence. This is a perspective shattering moment that leaves any rational sense of recognition of scope utterly bewildered.
The two directors, Kassie and Noisecat (the latter, with his father Ed and grandmother, are characters in this documentary), worked on bringing these people’s stories to the forefront of history, which alongside the media coverage of abuses and utter disrespect of Native American ethnicity is not only complimentary but also essential to understand the context of oppression of these people.
The unmarked graves of some children rekindled the investigation of the school and “Sugarcane” brings the matter closer to home.
The tremendous care and in-depth detailing that Kassie and Noisecat exhibit while framing and recounting the events surrounding St. Joseph’s Mission and its reverberations takes the film to a different level. Instead of working as a file, it rather plays the role of treating a case of transgenerational pain. From a litany of onsite deaths and unmarked burials to monotonous oppression, to children mothered and brutally disowned by the workers, and other evils, such systems seem to harbor vile crimes without end. Yet these listed crimes only cover the period when students were attending the school. The lasting effects of these traumas very much have present-day consequences such as post-traumatic stress disorder, addiction, suicide among the so-called alumni and their communities. As the film puts forth it, “Indigenous peoples are still dying from residential schools. And still living, despite them.”
Through a triangulated set of angles to which the influence slant, Noisecat’s troubled relationship with his father and father figure’s grief of loss including of his wife and somehow Noisecat’s grief, the impact of his family blood in a paradigm of shapes and finally interwined all by the Canadian law enforcement’s case studies done by Whitney Spearing and Charlene Belleau, “Sugarcane” is very authentic and poses the real people and families behind a history which once accepted is too often treated in the abstract and femoral.
It prevails the initiation of seeking responsibility. This action, however, is often more declarative than restorative as is the case with the meager sentiments offered by Trudeau, and the empty gesture of compassion shown by Pope Francis which comes altogether without an apology, restitution, or the return of relics.
“Sugarcane” is an emotional bomb. It is excruciatingly powerful as it features spoken words of memories and instances of not being able to speak out that resonate equally. With the scope of the communities’ culture providing the context, vast landscapes and a rich audio tapestry of cultural background, the sadness of the tragedies is alleviated by the appreciation of a beautiful culture that survives.
Owing to its focus on repressive history, the film is also unencumbered by a central idea of how social institutions operate. Irony amplifies itself as, just when “I love you” graduates into a folk tune, “Sugarcane” declares how their priorities are more emotional: how to save and heal what is left of their unbroken communities.
To Watch More Movies Like Sugarcane (2024) Visit Soap2day.
