Rick McGinnis:
Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements
First Nations issues are evergreen in Canadian politics, rising to prominence regularly, like during the battle over the Meech Lake Accord in the late ‘80s, when Manitoba MLA Elijah Harper and his eagle feather helped scuttle any attempted constitutional amendment (and got Harper elected as an MP shortly after).
It was a major factor again in 2021 when Justin Trudeau’s Liberal party campaigned on the wave of outrage after over 200 unmarked graves that were supposed to have been discovered at a First Nations cemetery in Kamloops, BC. The story made headlines all over the world and started a wave of church burnings across the country.
This plays out in the background of Sugarcane, a documentary by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie that made a triumphant sweep through film festivals before getting nominated for best documentary at this year’s Oscars and a 100 per cent critics’ score at Rotten Tomatoes. (It can currently be seen on the National Geographic channel on Disney+.)
The film has three plotlines. The first follows NoiseCat and his father, artist Ed Archie NoiseCat, on a healing journey from Ed’s home in Washington state to his birthplace at the now-abandoned St. Joseph Mission next to the Sugarcane reservation, northwest of Kamloops. The two have been estranged, it seems, and this is an attempt to confront the trauma in their lives going all the way back to when Ed was found as a newborn in the incinerator at the Mission.
The second is the story of Rick Gilbert, a onetime student at St. Joseph and former chief of the Williams Lake band of the Secwepemc, who has discovered from a DNA test that he’s half Irish and Scottish. He doesn’t know his father’s identity, but common ancestors with the name McGrath point the finger at a Fr. McGrath, who was at St. Joseph. Rick has been invited to Rome to attend an official apology by Pope Francis on the involvement of the Catholic Church with abuses at residential schools.
Between the two is Charlene Belleau, Julian Brave NoiseCat’s aunt and an investigator who has devoted her life to uncovering residential school abuse, with the help of Whitney Spearing, an archaeologist employed by the Williams Lake band. Together they make the connections between the Mission’s students, the nuns and priests who worked there, and the unmarked graves that are supposed to be in the ground by St. Joseph’s, laid out at the end on a big “evidence wall” with photos and names and pieces of string connecting them.
The film is beautifully shot and deliberately paced as it circles back and forth to the empty Mission buildings and the nearby cemetery. The horrible details of Ed Archie NoiseCat’s birth are revealed – left by his mother in an ice cream carton in the school incinerator to be discovered by a dairyman. Rick Gilbert goes to Rome and meets with the current head of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, who ran St. Joseph’s Mission. Justin Trudeau visits Williams Lake to make an apologetic statement for the press. And Charlene Belleau presents her crime wall, a web of births and deaths illustrated with pictures of mostly long-dead priests.
The big problem is that there isn’t much evidence as much as inference and speculation, and there are lots of key omissions along the way. Michelle Stirling, a journalist, compiled a list of Sugarcane’s deliberate obfuscations on her Substack, The Bitter Roots of Sugarcane. Most notably is the fact that neither Ed Archie NoiseCat’s mother nor Rick Gilbert’s mother was a student at St. Joseph at the time of their birth, as students were obliged to leave at 16. Ed’s mother was nearly 20, and his father, an indigenous man with whom she would have eight children, was known to him. Though Rick tells the head of the Oblates that his father was a priest, no evidence is provided except for a surname common in the area.
The film ends with the ground at St. Joseph undisturbed, and no note is made of bodies found there. Despite the four-year-old news stories claiming that bodies were found at Kamloops, no excavation took place there either, and, despite immense sums spent on consultants and studies, they remain “soil anomalies,” though the former school has been declared a national historic site. Skeptics about the mass grave story are called “denialists” and legislation has been proposed to make voicing doubt about the story a crime.
What no one seems to admit is that it’s possible to find the most lurid aspects of the residential school narrative – lecherous priests consigning the bodies of bastard children to incinerators, burying victims of abuse in huge, unmarked graves – worth serious scrutiny while acknowledging that the story of First Nations people in Canada during and after the Indian Act is a terrible one, worth lamenting.
There is certainly plenty of real evidence of it in Sugarcane, from glimpses of life on the reservation to the harrowing stories told by survivors like Ed, whose infamous start in life as the “Trashcan Baby” led to ferocious bullying, even by his own relatives, like the cousin he and Julian visit during the film. We have known about clerical abuse and the dire circumstances of life for First Nations citizens, on and off the reservation, for decades, and maybe that’s the problem: as spectators we’ve developed trauma fatigue and need to have the horror hyped and stylized to be moved to care again.
Politicians like Justin Trudeau were certainly quick to become part of this process, staging sorrowful mea culpas while stating that anger against the government and the Church were “fully understandable.” It’s an easy ritual to enact, and one that the prime minster took to with an eagerness that was almost unseemly, and of little risk to the government, whose facilities are less easy targets than the many remote churches that burned in the aftermath of Kamloops. (When we meet Rick Gilbert and his wife, they’re returning artifacts and books to their local church after storing them out of fear they’d be lost if the church was attacked.)
Stirling quotes Robert Carney, a historian and professor who wrote extensively about the residential schools. “The phenomenon of Aboriginal residential schooling is too complex and requires considerable nuance, as well as conceptual analysis, for simplistic historical interpretations to be serviceable,” he wrote, underlining the role they played in care and social welfare in marginal communities with scarce official resources, kept out of sight by government policies and agendas.
“The Aboriginal perspective dominates virtually everything that is said,” Carney wrote. “This is not surprising given that the linear perspective has been defined in such a way to exclude it from the analysis. As a result, Aboriginal residential schools are invariably cast in an unfavourable light.” This is a deeply unpopular analysis today – essentially an assault on survivors and their testimonies – so it’s no surprise that it’s never mentioned by his son, current Prime Minister Mark Carney.
After watching Sugarcane I couldn’t help but think about another, nearly unrelated recent news story. Nearly two years ago a CBC documentary exposed the singer Buffy Sainte-Marie for trading on a false identity as a First Nations Canadian for six decades, “revealing” that she was born to Italian and English parents in Massachusetts. Why Sainte-Marie decided to claim Indian heritage isn’t unreasonable – despite their treatment by governments, First Nations people and culture have been celebrated, even fetishized, for over a century, and in the politically righteous atmosphere of the folk boom and the counterculture it was a potent edge in a crowded scene.
Sainte-Marie has had Algonquin, Mi’kmaq, and Cree status attributed to her, and it was with the Cree that she made her strongest allegiance, despite attempts by family members to go on record going back to the ‘60s, blocked by the singer with legal actions. The CBC documentary revived what was already an old story, and one that Sainte-Marie tried to get in front of by claiming that she was a “naturalized” member of the Piapot First Nations in Saskatchewan, who, for their part, have stood by the singer during the controversy.
Sainte-Marie has nonetheless been defenestrated, and awards like her Junos, Polaris Music Prizes, Canadian Music Hall of Fame induction, and her Order of Canada and Golden and Diamond Queen Elizabeth Jubilee medals have been revoked. The curious prestige of First Nations status – conferring a sort of “victim privilege” – has seen a rash of “pretendians” in the arts and public life, and it’s hard not to think of Sainte-Marie and recall Grey Owl, the Englishman born Archibald Stansfeld Belaney who claimed half-Apache status and became a famous spokesman for wildlife and conservation in Canada until his death in 1938.
Belaney was beloved in his lifetime, and as with Sainte-Marie, his activism was in the service of unimpeachable causes – a career of good faith compromised at its root by a bad faith deception. I can’t help but regard Sainte-Marie as a scapegoat, punished not just for making not only her fans but a nation who celebrated her look gullible, but for revealing the theatrical nature of the accepted narrative, and how little we really care about the people who’ve lived with its harsh reality.
It’s unlikely that First Nations issues will play a big part in the election that’s scheduled this year. Even if Mark Carney were suddenly moved to either recall or reject his father’s legacy, this is an election about economics and fighting a trade war with our closest neighbour, where Canadian nationalism is the keynote and not the national shame Carney’s predecessor leaned into back in 2021.
And once again First Nations issues will be filed away behind land acknowledgments, easily solvable problems like clean drinking water on reservations will be kicked further down the road, and a film like Sugarcane – dishonest, to be sure, but nonetheless a plea for help – will help government obscure the meaning and goals of words like truth and reconciliation.
