Has Sugarcane proved Chief Willie Sellars wrong?
Absolutely.
At a highly-publicized presentation on 25 January 2022, Chief Willie Sellars proclaimed that ’93 is our number’ and went on to describe horrific atrocities at the former St Joseph’s Indian Residential School in Williams Lake:
“This journey has led our investigation team into the darkest recesses of human behaviour. Our team has recorded not only stories involving the murder and disappearance of children and infants, they have listened to countless stories of systematic torture, starvation, rape and sexual assault of children at St. Joseph’s Mission.”
Sellars said survivors have recounted memories of an instructor being hired at the school to be a disciplinarian, with children being beaten until they lost consciousness, forcibly confined to the outer wall of the barn, intentional starvation and exposure. . . .
“In survivor accounts that are disturbing beyond words, we have heard detailed descriptions of the unwanted babies of certain priests at St. Joseph’s burned in the incinerator.”
Sellars also alleged a massive destruction of records and cover-up on the part of the federal government, the Catholic Church, and the RCMP:
Sellars said the real story of what occurred at the St. Joseph’s Mission has been intentionally obscured for generations, noting the recent investigation, which included interviews with survivors as well as poring over historical documents, has revealed “clear evidence that religious entities, the federal government and the RCMP have knowingly participated in the destruction of records, and the cover-up of criminal allegations.”
Fortunately, Sugarcane has disproved all of Sellars’ allegations. There is not a scintilla of verifiable evidence offered in Sugarcane for any of them.
How did it come about that the so-called Williams Lake ‘investigation’ was filmed and documented in Sugarcane?
According to Canadian filmmaker Emily Kassie, on hearing the false claim by the Kamloops Band on 27 May 2021 that it had discovered ‘the remains of 215 children’ (since admitted by the Band to be nothing more than ‘215 anomalies’), she was ‘gut-pulled’ to the Kamloops story. However if Kassie contacted the Kamloops Band about filming at Kamloops, the Kamloops Band summarily turned her down.
Kassie then cast about for another former Indian residential school that was doing an investigation, and Chief Willie Sellars quickly confirmed to her that he wanted someone to document the Williams Lake Band’s search at the former St Joseph’s Indian Residential School.
As Kassie explained in an interview on 13 August 2024:
‘I went and looked for a Nation that said they were going to do a search, and I found an article in the Williams Lake Tribune about Chief Willie Sellers in the Williams Lake First Nation, and I wrote him a cold email, and he called me back that day, and he said, ‘The Creators always had great timing. Just yesterday, our council said we need someone to document this search’.
Kassie quickly agreed, and she and her co-director, Julian Brave NoiseCat, filmed the investigation at St Joseph’s for three years, and as the finished product – the film Sugarcane – reveals, the investigation found no verifiable evidence whatever to support Chief Willie Sellars’ claims at his 25 January 2022 presentation.
Sugarcane is replete with factual errors, as revealed in an extensive fact check document here, but that does not take away from the essential fact that Sugarcane was unable to film any verifiable evidence which could support Chief Willie Sellars’ claims of atrocities, torture, murder, clandestine burials, and a massive destruction of records and cover-up on the part of the federal government, the Catholic Church, and the RCMP.
That result was hardly unexpected considering that Willie Sellars’ own grandmother, Martha Sellars, worked at the school, as Sellars himself acknowledges in Sugarcane. Did Willie Sellars really think his own grandmother would stand idly by and continue to show up for work at the school every day when children were being tortured, starved, tied to posts and lashed until they passed out, murdered and clandestinely buried, and newborn infants were being tossed into the school’s incinerator?
Of course Martha Sellars and the countless other members of the Williams Lake, Alkali Lake and Canim Lake Indian Bands who worked at the school over the years would not have shown up for work and turned a blind eye to those atrocities. The very idea is an absurdity.
So it is not at all unexpected that this three-year investigation came up completely empty, as documented in Sugarcane.
But that gives rise to another question. Since there was clearly nothing to investigate at the former St Joseph’s that had not already been known for years in publicly available sources, what happened to the almost $8 million taxpayer dollars the Williams Lake Band received from the Residential Schools Community Support Fund to carry out this fruitless investigation?
Canadian taxpayers deserve an answer to that question.
Nina Green is an independent researcher who lives in British Columbia.
Related Items:
Read: “Sugarcane” Documentary – Possible Oscar Nominee – is Fake News – by Michelle Stirling – posted January 12, 2025.
