Barack Obama recently tweeted his movie picks and they include the Canadian documentary “Sugarcane,” now streaming on Hulu. The documentary is an Oscar nominee finalist, and the film was picked up for distribution by National Geographic. What a prestigious trifecta!
“Sugarcane” also won two Critics Choice Awards! One for Best Political Documentary, the other for Best True Crime Documentary. The film has “100% Fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
And to top it all off, “Sugarcane” had a private screening at the White House on Dec. 17, 2024, receiving a glowing letter of praise from Catholic President Joe Biden.
But the “Sugarcane” story is false! The true crime is the blood libel that “Sugarcane” smears on Roman Catholics and Canadian history.
Let’s look at the facts.
“Sugarcane” is the name of the local Indian reservation, near St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School near Williams Lake, BC.
“Sugarcane’s” premise is that priests at St. Joseph’s impregnated students and threw unwanted babies in the incinerator. The “proof” of the story is that of the main character, Ed Archie NoiseCat, who, as a baby, was found in the school’s garbage burner. The dairyman heard noises and thought a cat was trapped inside. He looked and there was a newborn baby, crying. He saved his life. The mother spent a year in jail for abandoning her baby. This was headline news in Williams Lake in 1959. Everyone knew the story.
So, was Ed fathered by a priest?
No. The father of baby Ed was Ray Peters. He had seven more children with her and fathered 17 children in total with five different women. Ray was eleven years older than Ed’s mother. She was 20 at the time she gave birth to Ed.
Crucial fact. Indigenous students were mandated to leave residential school at age 16.
The film’s lead investigator Charlene Belleau is related to Julian’s grandmother. She would have known all these facts. But she and colleague Whitney Spearing create a ‘crime board’ tracking phantom crimes.
National Geographic reportedly picked up the film for a distribution deal in the ‘low seven figures.’ Thus, co-director of “Sugarcane,” Julian Brave NoiseCat, Ed’s son, just cashed in on his own father’s and grandmother’s tragic past.
Another true story at St. Joseph’s. A priest named Father O’Connor broke his vows. He had an affair with a 22-year-old Indigenous woman who worked there as a seamstress. Their baby was put up for adoption.
“Sugarcane” filmmakers Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat weave together these two true stories to come up with one big lie – the lie that hundreds of film critics have repeated for the past six months. With few exceptions, film critics claim that priests raped Indigenous female students at St. Joseph’s and burned the unwanted babies in the school’s incinerator; that this was systemic and that these crimes have gone unpunished. The film ends with a black and white title claiming that Ed Archie NoiseCat is the only baby known to have survived the incinerator.
Ed is the only one known to have been put there. By his own mother.
Producer Emily Kassie claims to be an investigative reporter. She’ll win Oscar for fake news! The information in this article was found in a few hours of Internet search. It’s all laid out for you in my mini-doc rebuttal, “The Bitter Roots of Sugarcane.”
Michelle Stirling is the producer/writer of “The Bitter Roots of Sugarcane,” an author on Kindle, contributor to Western Standard and blogger at www.michellestirling.com.