The new documentary Sugarcane uses extensive footage from the CBC documentary, The Eyes of Children, filmed in late 1962 at the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
The CBC film crew had access to the entire school and grounds for an extensive period of time, filming girls flocking to walk with the principal, Father Dunlop, senior and junior classes in session, playground activities, bedtime routines, religious services, Christmas preparations, children staying behind at the school during the holiday season because they had no home to go to, and much more.
All these activities at the school are featured in shots and video clips in the new documentary Sugarcane, including a clip of Indigenous teacher Mabel Caron teaching a senior class about telephone manners. In fact there were three Indigenous teachers at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in late 1962 – Mabel Caron, Benjamin Paul, and Joe Stanley Michel, the first graduate of the Kamloops Indian Residential School who returned there to teach and lived with his wife, Anna Soule, another graduate of the school, and their children in a teacherage on the school grounds.
The reason for using extensive footage from The Eyes of Children is not explained in Sugarcane, and is obviously confusing to viewers as Sugarcane is ostensibly about events which occurred at St Joseph’s Indian Residential School in Williams Lake. Why a film about a residential school in Williams Lake includes extensive footage from a decades-old CBC documentary about the Kamloops Indian Residential School is a mystery.
But leaving that mystery aside for explanation by the people who made Sugarcane, the inclusion of extensive footage from the CBC’s 1962 documentary The Eyes of Children establishes that the CBC has proved that nothing nefarious was happening at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in the early 1960s at a time when Canadians are now led to believe 215 children were being murdered and clandestinely buried by fellow students in the apple orchard.
In fact what was happening at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in the early 1960s, in addition to the regular school activities filmed by the CBC, was integration. A residence had been built for senior students, and they were being bussed into downtown Kamloops to attend St Ann’s Academy.
Obviously, the CBC knew all this in 1962 and knows it now.
Is the CBC implying by its silence that three Indigenous teachers and their families at the Kamloops Indian Residential School covered up the murder and clandestine burial in the apple orchard of 215 children? Did the CBC itself cover up these murders and secret burials in 1962?
Or did the CBC know in 1962 and now that nothing of the kind ever happened?
Nina Green is an independent researcher who lives in British Columbia.
