Earlier this year, a Canadian documentary, Sugarcane, became a smash hit at film festivals, winning prizes at Sundance, Golden Gate, and Full Frame. The movie purports to reveal a history of abuse and misconduct in the Indian Residential School system. It castigates the Roman Catholic Church and depicts a community still recovering from intergenerational trauma.
In the following article, Nina Green reveals the manifold lies that Sugarcane promulgated and corrects the record, leaving the film’s myths of abuse in tatters.
The pseudo-documentary Sugarcane is clearly designed to prop up the preposterous claims Chief Willie Sellars of the Williams Lake (Sugarcane) Band made at a widely publicized media event in Williams Lake, British Columbia, on 25 January 2022. Sellars was the first to grab the mic during interviews after Sugarcane won a directing award at the Sundance Film Festival, and promotional shots for the film show Sellars digging a grave for Williams Lake Band member Stan Wycotte, who committed suicide on 30 September 2021.
At first glance, 2021 seems an early date for a film released in 2024 until one realizes that Sugarcane has been three years in the making. Filming began right after the Kamloops Band’s false claim on 27 May 2021 that it had discovered ‘the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School’, a claim the Kamloops Band has now downgraded to 215 anomalies.
Sugarcane is thus not an independent film by directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie. It is a film made by the Williams Lake Band in the hope that it will lend credibility to Chief Willie Sellars’ claims in 2022 of the dark horrors he had unearthed about the former St Joseph’s Indian Residential School a few miles from Williams Lake.
But does Sugarcane validate the horrific claims made by Sellars about St Joseph’s two years ago?
Absolutely not!
Sugarcane does nothing to validate any of Sellars’ earlier claims, and in fact Sugarcane undercuts Sellars’ credibility even further by going off on a tangent trying to ‘solve’ a non-existent mystery about whether director Julian Brave NoiseCat’s grandfather was a Catholic priest at St Joseph’s.
Sugarcane’s quixotic quest to solve a non-existent mystery
The absurdity of this quixotic quest is revealed in a 2013 article about Julian Brave NoiseCat which identified his paternal grandparents as Antoinette Archie and Ray Peters:
‘Julian Brave NoiseCat, son of’ Ed Archie NoiseCat and Alexandra Roddy, is a member of the Canim Lake Band and a descendant of the Lil’Wat Nation of Mt. Currie. His paternal grandparents are Antoinette Archie and the late Ray Peters, and his maternal grandparents are Suzanne Roddy and the late Joe Roddy. He is in his third year at Columbia University where he studies history. This summer he continued learning Secwepemctsín with his kye7e (grandmother), while conducting and writing a research paper on current and historical words for the white man in Secwepemculecw. He loves his family.
There is no mystery whatever about the birth of director Julian Brave NoiseCat’s father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, because the facts were revealed at the time in contemporary news stories in the Williams Lake Tribune on 26 August 1959 and in the Cariboo Observer on 3 September 1959 (copies attached). In Sugarcane, the Williams Lake Tribune article appears briefly on screen, but not long enough for the audience to read it and learn the true story.
Instead, in Sugarcane the audience is erroneously led to believe that an unnamed priest fathered a child on a female Indian student at St Joseph’s residential school, and when the baby was born on 16 August 1959, the priest attempted to murder the infant by dumping it in the school’s incinerator. However the 1959 news stories indicate that St Joseph’s did not have an incinerator, but merely an outdoor garbage burner behind the school building, likely an open burn barrel of the type common in British Columbia at the time.
Further, the 1959 news articles explain that the 20-year-old unmarried Indian woman (Antoinette Archie) was no longer a student at St Joseph’s, and had even left the Cariboo area for a time to take a practical nursing course at the Vancouver Vocational Institute. When her baby was due, instead of going to the hospital in Williams Lake, Antoinette Archie travelled from Williams Lake to St Joseph’s, delivered the baby herself, and placed it in the school’s outdoor garbage burner. Fortunately, Antonious Stoop, the school’s dairyman, came home from a meeting in Williams Lake about 11:30 p.m., heard the baby cry as he parked his car behind the school, searched in the dark with his flashlight, found the infant in the garbage burner, and saved its life by rushing it to the Williams Lake Hospital. The RCMP investigated, and the mother (Antoinette Archie) was charged, and sentenced to a year in prison for abandoning her child.
After this disastrous start to their relationship, Antoinette Archie and the baby’s father, Ray Peters (1928-2005), a member of the Lil’wat First Nation, married, lived on the Canim Lake reserve, and had seven more children together. Their eldest child, the abandoned infant, grew up on the reserve and became the artist Ed Archie NoiseCat, the father of Sugarcane director Julian Brave NoiseCat. Antoinette Archie and Ray Peters’ eight children, beginning with Ed, are named in Ray Peters’ 2005 obituary.
As many previous interviews given by Ed Archie NoiseCat and his son, Julian Brave NoiseCat, establish, the family has always known who Ed Archie NoiseCat’s father really was, and have used Ray Peters’ Indigenous background to promote Ed Archie NoiseCat’s art, as evidenced by this article by Julian Brave NoiseCat entitled ‘Fatherland’:
My dad’s late father, Ray Peters, is Lil’wat. Our ancestor, N’kasusa7, is a noted Lil’wat chief, whose English name was Harry Peters. Our great aunt, my grandfather’s sister Martina Pierre, composed the Women’s Warrior Song that is performed at protests and celebrations across North America. (I’m told Redmond is our third cousin, or something like that — we’re still trying to figure it out.) But my father grew up with his mother’s people, the Tsq’escenemc te Secwepemc, on a small reserve up north called Canim Lake, where the Catholic Church reigned supreme.
My grandfather, or pé7e (pronounced “pa-ah”) as I knew him, didn’t do much parenting.
He fathered at least 17 children with five different women at our family’s last count. (I was with my dad when he met two of these siblings for the first time, and we’re almost certain there are more.) What little dad learned about his father’s people came from stories told to pass the time when pé7e, pé7e’s sidekick Harold Frank and my dad would hop in the truck and drive to Indian rodeos throughout the B.C. Interior. A bottle in his hand, pé7e would tell stories about the mountains, like The Place Where Thunderbird Sits and In-SHUCK-Ch, or Gunsight Peak, where our ancestors tied off their canoes during the great ancient flood. But those trips and stories ended when, at 20, my dad flew off a bareback bronc and broke his back.
So knowing full well that the artist Ed Archie NoiseCat’s father was Ray Peters of the Lil’wat First Nation, and that Ed Archie NoiseCat and his son Julian Brave NoiseCat had openly admitted that in many interviews, and had used Ray Peters’ Lil’wat ancestry to promote Ed Archie NoiseCat’s art, why would the directors make the infamous claim in Sugarcane that Ed Archie NoiseCat was fathered by a priest who tried to murder Ed in an incinerator, and that priests fathering infants on female students and murdering them in incinerators was a routine event at St Joseph’s?
There seems to be no answer to that question other than that the directors of Sugarcane have completely lost touch with reality.
More bizarre claims in Sugarcane
Sugarcane also features activist Charlene Belleau, who on 9 March 1993 told a Royal Commission on Indigenous Peoples (RCAP) hearing that her residential school experience at St Joseph’s was a positive one, as was her mother’s (transcript attached).
Having apparently forgotten what she told the RCAP hearing in 1993, Charlene Belleau now claims in Sugarcane that children at St Joseph’s were tied to poles in the school barn and lashed until they passed out. In fact, Belleau began making that outrageous false allegation the moment the BC government appointed her as a First Nations Liaison in July 2021, and has made it repeatedly since then. Belleau has never produced any evidence for this sadistic fantasy because there is none. Ironically, the only recorded lashing was conducted by Indians on a reserve. According to an account in Margaret Whitehead’s The Cariboo Mission (see p. 96), in 1892 the Chief and two members of the Lillooet Indian Band administered 30 lashes on their reserve to a seventeen year old named Lucy as punishment for promiscuity.
Charlene Belleau also claims in Sugarcane that she is related to Augustine Allen, a 13 or 14 year-old-student from the Canim Lake Band who died at the school in 1920 after accidentally eating poison hemlock. Belleau has never produced a shred of evidence that she is related to Augustine Allen, and her claims concerning the degree of their relationship change from interview to interview. She has contradictorily claimed at different times that Augustine Allen was her great-grandfather, her grandfather, her great-uncle and her uncle. Two of these claims are nonsensical, as Augustine Allen died as a young teenager and left no descendants, so he cannot possibly be anyone’s grandfather or great-grandfather. And until Charlene Belleau produces some genealogical evidence, it can confidently be assumed that he was not her great-uncle or uncle either, and that in fact Charlene Belleau is not related to Augustine Allen at all, and is merely claiming him as a relative as an excuse for involving herself in the GPR search for so-called unmarked graves at St Joseph’s.
Yet another easily-refuted claim made in Sugarcane is that the late Rick Gilbert of the Williams Lake (Sugarcane) Band was fathered by a priest while his mother was a student at St Joseph’s, a claim Gilbert actually took to the Vatican in 2022. The only ‘evidence’ for this claim in the film, which clearly amounts to no evidence at all, is that a DNA test revealed that Gilbert was 43% non-Indigenous, which should be no surprise to anyone, considering the enormous number of Indigenous persons in Canada with a non-Indigenous parent or grandparent, including many prominent Indigenous activists. Moreover Rick Gilbert’s mother was 18 at the time of his birth in 1946, and clearly not a student at St Joseph’s since the compulsory discharge age at Indian residential schools was 16.
There seems to be no recognition on the part of the directors of Sugarcane of the harm they are doing by traumatizing Indigenous communities across the country with these dark and sadistic fantasies.
Nor is there any recognition on the part of the federal government or the Catholic Church that they have taken a wrecking ball to both truth and reconciliation with their funding of endless GPR searches, their turning over of private Catholic Church sacramental records for missing children who were never missing in the first place, and their encouragement of a ghoulish obsession with so-called unmarked graves which are merely unmarked because Indian Bands have neglected their cemeteries and forgotten the children they themselves buried there.
One has only to look at the sad and drawn faces of community members at these activist-led media events announcing GPR ‘discoveries’, and hear the community members’ tearful voices, to realize how cruel and destructive it is for the federal government and the Catholic Church to be subjecting Indigenous people across the country to this endless demoralizing search for missing children who aren’t missing.
Will the federal government and the Catholic Church finally speak up, and denounce Sugarcane, or will they let Canada’s reputation, and the reputation of the Catholic Church, slide even deeper into the mud by encouraging the world to believe that Catholic priests fathered children on female students and burned the infants in incinerators at federally-funded Indian residential schools, and that staff at the schools tied children to poles and lashed them into unconsciousness?
Canadians are waiting to see, and hoping for some actual leadership from federal government and Catholic Church leaders.
Nina Green is an independent researcher who lives in British Columbia. She recently sent this opinion piece to Members of the Senate and Members of Parliament, as well as to journalists, Catholic clergy, and the United Nations Special Rapporteur, Francisco Cali Tzay.
Related Items:
Watch Sugarcane documentary filmmakers discuss boarding schools at Sundance Film Festival, (8 minutes), January 29, 2024.
Watch Saddle Lake officials are sharing evidence they say points to a “mass grave” | APTN News, (62 minutes), January 24, 2024.
