Interview: ‘Sugarcane’ Directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie Discuss their Historic Oscar Contender

In 2021, a stunning discovery rocked Canada and the world at large, when unmarked graves were uncovered at a residential school run by the Catholic Church, where indigenous children were sent to assimilate into Canadian society. The investigation revealed a larger trend of cruelty perpetuated by the residentical school system, and caught the attention of journalist-filmmakers Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, who decided to document this ongoing story on film. The resulting documentary Sugarcane is historic not just for its harrowing subject matter, but for Julian Brave NoiseCat’s ground-breaking achievement as the first ever indigenous North American filmmaker to be nominated for an Oscar. Awards Radar was therefore honored to discuss this tremendous filmmaking feat, which included deeply personal conversations and sneaking into the Vatican.

Shane Slater: This is such a sensitive topic. How did you decide to embark on this filmmaking journey?

Emily Kassie: I’m an investigative journalist and documentary filmmaker, and I’ve spent the last decade telling stories about humanitarian conflicts, and people caught in the cross fires all around the world, from Afghanistan to Niger. But I had never turned my lens on my own country. I’m born and raised in Canada, and yet I knew nothing about the residential school system or the horrors that were perpetrated against the First Peoples of my own country. And so, when news broke about potential unmarked graves on the grounds of one of those schools in Canada, I, like so many, was horrified, and I just felt drawn and compelled towards it.

The other thing that I felt compelled to do, was to reach out to Julian, and that’s because Julian and I worked our first reporting jobs together 10 years ago. We were randomly seated at desks next to each other and became friends. And in the years since, Julian had gone on to become one of the foremost writers and journalists and thinkers on indigenous life in North America. So he seemed like a wonderful collaborator to embark on a project like this with.

Julian needed some time to think about that, and in the meantime, I went looking for a First Nation that was going to lead a search, because it seemed like the natural narrative arc, to follow an investigation from its onset. And I found this article in The Williams Lake Tribune about Chief Willie Sellars and the Williams Lake First Nation. And I reached out to Chief Sellars. I sent him a cold email, and he called me back that same afternoon, and he said “The Creator has always had great timing. Just yesterday, our council said we need someone to document this search.” So I got my gear together and I was ready to go to Williams Lake, and that’s when I heard back from Julian.

Julian Brave NoiseCat: When I called Emily back and told her I’d be open to collaborating with her on the documentary, that’s when she told me that she’d identified this First Nation that was beginning its own search, and that search was happening at Saint Joseph’s Mission near Williams Lake, British Columbia. And when she said that, as you might imagine, I was just completely floored, because that’s the school that my family was taken to, where my father was born. So out of 139 Indian residential schools across Canada, Emily happened to choose to focus our documentary on the one school that my family was sent to and where my father’s life began, without even realizing that that’s what she had done.

SS: Your film touches similar issues as another Oscar-nominated film Nickel Boys. That film used a unique first-person perspective. Was there a specific approach that guided how you told this story?

EK: Well, I think for Julian and I, we really created a shared vision together, and it was very important to us that we give the emotional truth its day, as well as the kind of journalistic truth. And so to tell that kind of story, you need to live alongside people as they experience things as they happen. It needed to be a story about the present, told through the perspectives of those who survived it and are still living it. And so, we very much want to be in the POV of each of our main characters, including eventually, Julian, who became part of the story about a year into it.

So the way that we shot it was incredibly intimate. You know, it’s not quite to the level of Nickel Boys being over the shoulder or or seeing the full frame of their back. But, you know, the films have an incredible overlap. They both tell stories of reformatory schools, essentially that were designed to subjugate and dole out unfathomable abuse to kids. Kids whose skin color was not acceptable to the rest of society, and in the case of Nickel Boys, that was a story that both Julian and I were familiar with.

SS: This film is just as much the generational trauma and healing, as it is about the investigation. Could you speak more on how that intergenerational dialogue was included in the film?

JBN: The way that we set out from the very beginning to tell the story, was by following an investigation and to tell a story about something that happened in the past but that still has consequences in the present. That is, in certain senses, very much not past. You know, the Indian residential schools. People are still dying from what happened at these schools and the cycles of poverty, of addiction, of self harm, of violence that they instigated in our families.

And the way that we set out to do that was as a verité film. You know, we didn’t do a sit down, archival talking head style documentary, we documented the consequence of these schools in the present by following an investigation as well as the reckoning that it instigated in the lives of our participants. You know, as that happened. So we spent 460 shoot days, most of them in Williams Lake, and really lived in the life of the Sugarcane community and the surrounding Indian reserves. And for me, that meant being super present in my community and my family and going on a journey, including a road trip with my own dad to find answers and to address some of the ghosts in our closet and to heal.

SS: I remember this scene in the film where comments are read, which blame the indigenous people for what happened.What was it like having to navigate all the misinformation and propaganda?

EK: The investigation itself that was being led by the Williams Lake First Nation. And in particular, Charlene Belleau and Whitney Spearing, who you see in the film, operated outside of the police and outside of the government, who sort of forfeited their right to help find out the truth of what happened at these places, because they were complicit in what happened, right?

So, the very difficult thing about the investigation was, all of the records were either incredibly hard to find or we just weren’t able to access them, because the church has not released them. So out of the documents that we were able to find in various archives, as well as local people turning in old photographs and letters, we were able to find little bits of information and piece together the story of what happened that said, this is a town where there’s still a very strong sentiment from a particular part of the population, that thought St Joseph’s Mission was a really nice place. And a really great opportunity for Indigenous children to go to school. And really struggled to accept or face that some really awful things could have happened there.

I think that that sentiment is reflected across Canada in particular, and also the US, where there is a right wing kind of strong, extreme denialist movement of these places. But you know, anytime truth telling is being done about the horrors perpetrated against a minority, there’s usually some sort of denial and some sort of resistance to that. And so, I think we always knew it was there. It has only grown stronger. But the film is a refutation of that. It is a correction of the record and of history and demands that people start grappling with the truth of what was done to six generations of Indigenous children, and as a result, what happened to their descendants. Why indigenous communities face the highest rates of suicide and addiction and cycles of violence as a direct result of this program of forced assimilation and abuse.

SS: What was it like to go to the Vatican and try to get the Catholic Church to own up to its wrongdoings?

JBN: It was incredibly difficult to get that to even happen. They made it difficult every step of the way, including getting our participant included. They were resistant to the late chief Rick Gilbert coming in representation of the Williams Lake First Nation. And, you know, they even wouldn’t let independent media other than the Vatican media into that apology. So we had to work our asses off, especially Emily, to make sure that we were able to document this historic moment, and to tell it from the POV of one of our characters, someone who has a deep connection in many senses, some beautiful, some horrific, to the Catholic Church. And you know, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Catholic Church wanted to control every part of that narrative.

EK: It required sneaking into the Vatican. [Laughs]. So that’s how we got that scene. And you know, the Catholic Church, the Pope apologized for the crimes of individuals, individuals who may have harmed you. Not the institution itself. That said, the apology meant something to some people, and at the same time, it’s not enough. The Catholic Church, as mentioned, has not opened their records to indigenous communities so that survivors can at least know the truth, and they’ve not really paid their part in any sort of reparations or restoring what they tried to obliterate, which is the language and the culture and the fabric of community life and familial connection.

I don’t know if we’ll ever see that sort of accountability. And so sometimes it feels like the truth might be the only thing that we have for a while. And even that is at risk and under attack.

SS: This film is largely about advocating and raising awareness. How has the film been recieved and do you think the advocacy has been successful?

JBN: We were incredibly lucky that this film reached the highest levels of decision making and policy making in both Canada and the United States. It was screened in parliament for members of the Prime Minister’s cabinet, as well as in the White House, where the first ever Native American Cabinet, Secretary, former Secretary the Interior, Deb Haaland was present. Emily and I also attended multiple apologies during the making this film. There are two that you see in the film, the apology of Trudeau before the papal apology that Emily snuck in to record. And we were also present for President Biden’s apology to Native American boarding school survivors in Arizona back in October. So we have been incredibly fortunate.

I think all documentarians obviously hope their films have impact. And some kind of claim that they do, without them really having any real proof that they did. But I think that we are incredibly fortunate that ours actually did reach decision makers, and we’re part of a real reckoning, a real movement for truth telling and a small measure of accountability for what happened at these schools. And in addition to reaching those highest levels, we also had a res tour that brought the film to over a dozen indigenous communities in Canada and the United States, where elderly survivors of these schools came to watch the film with their kids and their grandkids in some instances, and began community conversations about the history of what happened to them.

It was a very moving thing for this film to travel all over North America, from Sitka, Alaska and Anchorage Alaska, to Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, to Standing Rock in the Dakotas, to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and many places in between. And to be part of this grassroots, bottom up movement that was also reaching the highest levels of power and making sure that people actually know about what happened. About this foundational story for all of North America. Genocide that happened right here on this land.

EK: I want to mention, about the impact of the film. Another thing that is having tremendous impact is that Julian is the first indigenous North American filmmaker to ever be nominated for an Oscar in any category in its 90 plus year history. So I think what we say to that is, “It’s about damn time, and we hope that he is not the only one for long.”

Sugarcane is now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.