Title: Oscar Docs: Sugarcane.

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Every year in Oscar season, as some of you know, as most of the media focus on the competition for Best Picture and Best Actors, not that there's anything wrong with that, we invite the makers of the five nominees for Best Feature Length Documentary to come and talk about their films here today. The film is Sugarcane, about the history of the long-running abuse and even infanticide at a particular Indian residential school, as it's called, in British Columbia. It manages to make the story deeply personal while connecting it to the broader history of colonialism and cultural erasure.

We're joined by Sugarcane's directors, both of whom have been on the show before, Julian Brave NoiseCat, who's been here in connection with his political activism, now he's turning full-time to writing and filmmaking, and Emily Kassie, a Canadian filmmaker and investigative journalist. Julian and Emily, welcome back to WNYC. Thank you so much for joining us and congratulations on your Oscar nomination.

Julian Brave NoiseCat: Thank you so much. So good to be back.

Emily Kassie: Thanks, Brian. Good to be here.

Brian Lehrer: Emily, could you give our listeners who are probably completely unfamiliar unless they've lived in these very particular circumstances or have seen your film, a little background on the history of these boarding schools for Indian children, as they're called? These are not children from India. They were government-funded, but run mostly by religious institutions with the goal of cultural assimilation and religious conversion.

Emily Kassie: That's right, Brian. For over 150 years in both the United States and Canada, the governments ran a system of forced assimilation by taking Indigenous children away from their families and placing them at boarding schools where they were not allowed to speak their language or practice their culture and where the goals were to, in the words of one of its architects, kill the Indian, save the man, or in Canada, get rid of the Indian problem.

These kids faced unimaginable abuse at the hands of the people who ran the school, which were often the clergy. In Canada, in particular, most of the schools were run by the Catholic Church. At St. Joseph's Mission, we uncover a pattern of infanticide at one of these schools. Children who are born at the school, some of those to priests, who were either forcibly adopted out into white families, forcibly aborted, or in some cases, placed in the school's incinerator to be burned with the trash. The last school closed in 1997, if you can believe that. There were 139 of these schools in Canada and 417 in the United States.

Brian Lehrer: There were similar schools doing similar things in the United States, Emily?

Emily Kassie: That's exactly right, Brian. The system was three times as big here. It took hundreds of thousands of children to these schools. For the first time, former Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous cabinet secretary, led an inquiry into these schools here in the United States and uncovered that there were at least 417. I think we now know that there were at least over 3,000 deaths of children at these schools in the United States.

Brian Lehrer: Just before we bring Julian in to stay with you for one more question, the difference between the United States and Canada in this respect, or a difference, is that this became a big scandal in Canada, and a Truth and Reconciliation Committee was formed. For you, as the Canadian in the room, when did you decide you wanted to make a film about this? What was the Canada context of this?

Emily Kassie: Well, both Julian and I are Canadian.

Brian Lehrer: Oh.

Emily Kassie: Julian holds both American and Canadian citizenship. I actually haven't lived in Canada since-- In high school, I spent a career looking at human rights abuses and geopolitical conflict all over the world. I was working for the New York Times, Frontline (PBS), et cetera, but I'd never thought to look at my own country and the horrors that it perpetrated. When news broke of potential unmarked graves, as you might remember, in 2021, on the grounds of one of these schools, I felt gut-pulled to the story.

The other thing I felt compelled to do was reach out to my friend, Julian. We had worked our first reporting jobs here in New York as cub reporters. In the years since, he had gone on to become one of the great writers and thinkers and journalists on Indigenous life. What I didn't know is that I would end up selecting the very school to follow an investigation that Julian's family attended and where his father's life began without even knowing that that's what I had done.

Brian Lehrer: Julian, sorry, I didn't know that you were also from the 51st state. Tell us more about how you became part of the film.

Julian Brave NoiseCat: Well, start to see the film then, Brian. How else did I come to work on this documentary?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and the personal connection that Emily was just referring to that you have to it.

Julian Brave NoiseCat: My family was sent to St. Joseph's Mission, which was an Indian residential school near Williams Lake, British Columbia. It was something that was very traumatic and not something that they talked about at all. I spent summers when I was in college. Actually, I went to school here in the city, so I should give it a shout-out since we're on WNYC.

I went to Columbia up in the Upper West Side, and I would get little grants to go work on the rez in the summer. I did economic development one summer, and another summer I just did a language project, but what I was really doing up there was I would spend the evenings in my Kyeh!-eh's kitchen, Kyeh!-eh means grandmother in our language, learning my language, Secwepemctsín, which was very nearly annihilated by the Indian residential schools.

If you're learning a language that was almost killed by those schools from a woman who attended them, you're naturally going to ask her about what it was like to go to the schools. She basically said nothing about it other than a couple stories. One was about how she was hidden by her parents in a trapper's cabin in the woods to try to prevent her from being taken, but that she was taken anyways on a cattle truck to the school. That she also, when she was there, the other little Secwépemc girls, the other Shuswap girls, would describe the nuns and priests as the Kenkeknem, the black bear, which was to say that the people who were supposed to be teaching them and caring for them were predators.

It was really not something that we talked about. I'd also heard the story that my father was born in Williams Lake and left in a dumpster, but it was a very fuzzy story. I also heard this rumor that there were babies born at the mission that were put in the incinerator. In fact, I thought that those were just ghost stories or rez legends. I didn't believe them. In the making of this film, we actually learned that not only are those stories true, but they were actually part of my own family history.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. I want to play a clip of a wrenching scene in the film in a barn that was part of the school with Charlene Belleau, a survivor of the school who's been working to bring the story out of the shadows.

Charlene Belleau: Our elders are now looking to you to listen to our stories. You're bearing witness to a time in history where our people are going to stand up, and you're going to make sure that people are held accountable for everything that they've done to us.

Brian Lehrer: Julian, do you want to tell us more about Charlene and her work?

Julian Brave NoiseCat: Yes. Charlene Belleau is my aunt, not in the literal genealogical sense. We're related through the very sprawling Archie family tree. She's not like my dad's sister, technically, but we in our culture describe lots of elder women who are related to, or sometimes not related to, as our auntie. She's my auntie by blood. For over 30 years, she has been an investigator and an activist who's been leading searches and leading investigations and an effort to hold the people who committed immense wrongs against our children and our families accountable at St. Joseph's Mission. She has believed and prayed for many years that the powerful stories of what happened would be known to the world.

In many ways, our film is an extension of her legacy and of that activism, which is now reaching people around the world who are finally seeing for the first time, in many instances, the truth of a cultural genocide that was perpetrated against 6 generations, 150 years of native children. The way that that fundamentally shaped the history of this continent, not just for Indigenous peoples, but for all peoples. Also, more importantly, the way that Indigenous peoples have survived against that history of genocide, the way that our cultures and our ceremonies are bringing us back, and that we could maintain a very beautiful way of life, despite the mission of the schools, which was to destroy that way.

Brian Lehrer: Emily, this collision between the Catholic Church's practice of transferring abusive priests from one place to another and the idea that what Native communities needed was to assimilate into the dominant culture makes for all kinds of cultural, religious, and political harm, obviously. The film captures a lot of that. We see Chief Rick Gilbert, a devout Catholic, go as part of a delegation to Rome where the Pope apologizes. It sounds sincere, but as he tells a bishop in a one-on-one meeting, "That's just step one." Here's a clip.

Pope: It can't be justified, but it's a sickness that grew into the church, and your forgiveness of us someday is what we need to be healed. It's a mutual search for--

Chief Rick Gilbert: One of the parts of the Bible states that being sorry for something is just the first step you have to-

Pope: Work it out.

Chief Rick Gilbert: -take action. We've heard apologies, but still nothing has happened, really.

Brian Lehrer: Emily, what does the community want from the church at this point?

Emily Kassie: Well, the church and the Canadian government and the US Government have failed and refused to open their records to Indigenous communities so that they can at least know the truth of what happened at these schools and what happened to their kids. The church, of course, has also not paid its part in not only compensating survivors for what they went through but restoring what they took from them, language and culture, and breaking down of their familial connections.

We were able to bring this film all the way to the White House and to Canadian Parliament, but we still have not heard from the church. Though there are many in the community who still practice the Catholic faith and an acknowledgement and apology means something thing to some people, it's just not nearly enough. We've not gotten a response yet from the Catholic Church on this film. This isn't the work of just individuals, which the Pope apologized for. There was a real emptiness when he said that. He said, "We apologize for the individuals who harmed you." This was an institution that was knowingly moving around priests that were abusing hundreds of kids and committing horrendous other crimes that we uncover in the film and covering them up. They need to answer for that.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you're just joining us, we have a few more minutes with Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat, who have made the Oscar-nominated documentary called Sugarcane about the history of long-running abuse and even including infanticide at a particular Indian residential school in British Columbia. Julian, considering your personal connection to these events, and you told us a little bit before about the dark side of things that happened in your own family, there's more in the film, I know. Was this filmmaking process a healing experience for some of them and for you?

Julian Brave NoiseCat: Absolutely. I think that the point of telling a story like this is not just to excavate painful truths, but also to tell a story that is about the love and the culture and the families that have endured despite the efforts to tear us apart and to tear us down. I moved in with my dad for two years while we made this film, a man who I have a very complicated backstory and relationship to. I, among other things, lent him money so that he'd come to my own high school graduation. I bailed him out when I was a student at Columbia University, actually one summer.

We've had a real run, me and him, and we still have a lot of love. In the film, you see us go on a road trip back to the rez and the mission to look for answers. He's also become just an incredible fan and supporter of the film. He comes on the road with us to promote it and he's really proud. He always says this of Em and I and the art that we made because, of cCourse, he's an artist, too.

Brian Lehrer: Emily, you have family connections to the Holocaust, and your work has often centered on genocide and human rights abuses of various kinds. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada called this "cultural genocide." Do you see common threads between this and other stories that you've covered?

Emily Kassie: Absolutely. I think my work as a filmmaker and journalist is trying to understand why we exact violence on one another and how we survive and what we make of that in the aftermath. These were kids who were taken to eliminate who they were. They had numbers. They were assigned numbers at these schools. There are, obviously, echoes of the incinerators with the gas chambers in concentration camps. This story deserves its day.

There's also, much like the Holocaust, a strong denialist movement that's coming for this story. What's so historic about it is that not only are we breaking ground and telling this untold story of the origin of North America and how the land was taken, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention that Julian is the first Indigenous North American filmmaker to ever be nominated for an Academy award in its 97-year history.

Brian Lehrer: Wow.

Emily Kassie: When Hollywood was telling stories of cowboys and Indians and how Indians were at the end of a barrel of a gun and people who were dying, the schools were also trying to accomplish that actual mission and what they were doing in the same moment. This film is a reputation of that and so is Julian's historic nomination. I'm just so proud to be able to tell this story with him.

Brian Lehrer: Julian, we see the damage, but we also see that the culture was not destroyed. For one thing, the film shows you winning a traditional dancing contest. Is there, a happy ending would probably be too strong, but a story of resilience in here at least?

Julian Brave NoiseCat: Yes, I think it's a story about a people who ultimately survived and are taking back what was taken. I think Em and I got to live inside of a very beautiful community and to tell it the story from the inside to the world. I think that our collaboration is something that we're incredibly proud of. Not only is this the first film nominated, directed by an Indigenous North American, but it's also the first film nominated, directed by an Indigenous North American and a Jewish Canadian. I think our people actually share a lot in common. We love wittiness and a good story. We definitely have a love of smoked salmon on both sides of this relationship.

Emily Kassie: That's right.

Julian Brave NoiseCat: There's also a shared history of familial pain and genocide in our roots. I think that that brought us together and helped us tell the story in a really authentic way that could also have some universality.

Brian Lehrer: That's where we leave it. Sugarcane, directed by my guests Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat, is one of the five films nominated for a Best Feature Length Documentary Oscar, as we are doing our series again this year, inviting the makers of all five nominated feature documentaries, we'll have another one on Monday. Julian and Emily, as I say to all the filmmakers, good luck at the Oscars, and thank you so much for sharing your story with us.

Emily Kassie: Thanks, Brian.

Julian Brave NoiseCat: Kukstsémc, Brian. Love being on your show.

Brian Lehrer: Sugarcane, folks, is available for streaming on Hulu and Disney Plus. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. More in a minute.

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