A new film highlights the traumas inflicted on Indigenous children by residential schools
Alaskans
say that history needs more attention. “Sugarcane” is set in British
Columbia. But after recent screenings in Sitka and Anchorage, advocates
say the documentary’s themes are as relevant and urgent just across the
Canadian border in Alaska.
St. Joseph’s Mission Indian Residential School, a site featured in a
scene from the new documentary Sugarcane. (Sugarcane Film LLC)
This
story contains difficult subject matter relating to Canada’s and
America’s history of operating residential schools for Indigenous
people. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition
has gathered resources for self-care at this site.
A new documentary, “Sugarcane,”
recounts the searing, traumatic history of colonization and forced
assimilation of British Columbia’s Indigenous people through a network
of what are known as Indian residential schools.
The film features former students and
their descendants seeking truth, reconciliation and healing from the
nation’s legacy of those schools — institutions that the Canadian
federal government now says carried out a “cultural genocide” through physical and sexual abuse.
After recent screenings in Sitka and Anchorage — and with the approach of the annual Sept. 30 commemoration for survivors — advocates say the film’s themes are as relevant and urgent just across the Canadian border in Alaska.
Churches and the federal government
once operated a similar network of roughly two dozen such schools in
Alaska starting in the 1870s, according to federal records.
Those institutions, advocates say,
inflicted their own traumas that still cast a shadow over Alaskan
survivors and their relatives — many of whom have not had the same
chance to process the painful history in the way that’s shown onscreen
in the new film.
“I could feel the tension in my body.
I was shaking all night; I still feel it now, two days later,” Ayyu
Qassataq, a 44-year-old Yup’ik and Iñupiaq advocate, said after watching
Sugarcane at its packed screening last month at the Anchorage Museum.
“I could feel the presence of that devastating and violent history — a
history that is largely invisibilized in Alaska.”
The Canadian federal government established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2008 in response to class action lawsuits filed by survivors of the country’s residential schools.
The commission ultimately concluded
that the Canadian schools were a “systematic, government-sponsored
attempt to destroy Aboriginal cultures and languages and to assimilate
Aboriginal peoples so that they no longer existed as distinct peoples.”
Sugarcane’s two directors, who spoke
onstage with Qassataq immediately after the Anchorage screening, said
they want the movie to lead to deeper understanding among both
Indigenous and non-Indigenous people of the systems that operated on
both sides of the border.
That’s especially the case in the U.S., they said, where the federal government hasn’t as thoroughlyaccounted for the schools’ history as in Canada.
In that country, the government has provided some $7.5 billion in restitution for Indigenous people, according to the New York Times.
The Canadian federal government also is currently spending more than $150 million
to support tribes as they document, locate and commemorate missing
children and unmarked burial sites at former residential schools. In
2008, the prime minister formally apologized for the school system.
Julian Brave NoiseCat, co-director of Sugarcane, speaks after a
screening in August at the Anchorage Museum. Co-director Emily Kassie is
at left, and Ayyu Qassataq, a Yup’ik and Iñupiaq advocate, is at right.
(Photo by Nathaniel Herz/Northern Journal)
“There is not a parallel process of truth and reconciliation happening
in this country in as robust a way as there is in Canada,” co-director
Julian Brave NoiseCat, who explores his family’s own traumatic history
in Sugarcane, said in an interview just before the screening. He added:
“It takes a lot of courage to have the conversation. And our hope is
that this film inspires people across the country who are living in the
legacy of this genocide to have those conversations.”
Sugarcane, described by the New York Times as “stunning” and a “must-see” film, tells the story of a single Canadian First Nation in British Columbia, and its efforts to excavate and account for the deep harms inflicted by a Catholic-run boarding school.
NoiseCat’s grandmother was a student
at the school, where she gave birth to NoiseCat’s father. Harrowing
scenes feature survivors and former workers recounting how unwanted
babies born to Indigenous students at the school were sometimes thrown
into an incinerator.
Ahead of its release, we sat down with Fancy Dance
director Erica Tremblay to talk about her narrative debut with Lily
Gladstone.
Fancy Dance will mean different things to different people. For a start, no one seems able to describe what genre of film it is. Since its Sundance debut last year, it’s been described as a road trip
movie, a coming-of-age story and a crime drama. More than those, though,
it feels like a window into life on a modern-day Seneca-Cayuga Nation
reservation; a snapshot still rarely put on the big screen, let alone
one given a profile like Apple have given this one.
Starring Lily Gladstone as tough-as-nails grifter, Jax, and Isabel
Deroy-Olson as her niece, Roki, the film starts days after the
disappearance of Jax’s sister (and Roki’s mother), Tawi. Together, they
fight child services and Roki’s white grandparents to track Tawi down –
and prepare for a dance at the upcoming powwow while they’re at it.
With a profile boosted by Gladstone’s Killers Of The Flower MoonOscar
nomination, the film arrives on Apple TV+ on Friday. We sat down with its
director, Erica Tremblay, to talk Gladstone, building believable
characters and making the jump from documentary filmmaking.
Why don’t we begin with how Fancy Dance got started?
Well, Lily Gladstone and I had done a short called Little Chief
together that had premiered at Sundance in 2020. And people were really
drawn to that film and kept asking me if I was going to do something
bigger with that story. I called [Lily] up and said: “If I create a
story in the same world with a similar kind of character, would you be
interested?” And she said she would.
And, you know, we started developing the project, she read all the
versions of the script, and she really helped inform her character along
the way. I was doing a three-year language immersion programme in my
ancestral language, Cayuga, at the time, and I was learning family
words. I learned that the word for mother is knó:ha, and the word for auntie is knohá:’ah,
which means little mother. And that just excited me to tell a story
about an aunty and a niece as a kind of mother-daughter story.
Did learning Cayuga at the same time inform what you were writing?
I think the language was one of the things that inspired me to do
this film, because currently there aren’t young people that speak the
language fluently, or there aren’t very many. And so it was
aspirational, in a sense, to see young people speaking the language.
I was studying eight hours a day and then writing at night. So it was
certainly an influence, and all the folks – the other seven in my
cohort – we’d be driving around at lunch, and I’d be pitching ideas and
we’d be talking about it. So it was a very formative time to be
creating, yeah.
Isabel Deroy-Olson stars as Jax’s niece, Roki (Credit: Apple TV+)
I’d like to talk about Frank, Jax’s father in the film. He’s a
much less black and white, Hollywood-style villain than he first
appears.
Yeah, you know… That relationship isn’t exactly my relationship with
my white dad, but it’s definitely a place in my own personal life that I
was able to draw from. I think when you have one side of your family
that’s native and the other side that’s not, there are going to be these
areas of cultural divide, and there are gonna be these things that just
aren’t understood on either side.
Michiana, my co-writer and I, when we were writing Frank
specifically, we didn’t want him to just be a trope: he’s the
antagonist, and he’s gonna be a bad guy. We wanted there to be grey
areas, and we wanted the audience to sometimes wonder, “Where should
Roki be?” Frank very much loves his children in the best way that he
knows how. And sometimes that’s very heartbreaking to a child, when
their parent loves them like that.
One line that particularly stood out to me was from Frank’s
wife, Nancy. I’m paraphrasing, but it was something like: “We know how
important it is for you to stay connected to your culture.” It’s meant
in a really lovely way, but it almost assumes that Roki’s native culture
is something she’s going to lose by default, that she’ll have to make
an effort to stay connected to these traditions.
Nancy really stood in for a lot of relationships that Michiana and I
have with non-native folks. I think Nancy is fine that her adopted
grandchild is native, but she kind of only wants Roki to be native in a
way that’s comfortable for her. So, when she says, “We want you to
remain connected”, she wants her to remain connected so she can talk
about this with her friends at the Rotary Club. But not if it starts to
push up against things that she holds valuable.
And Nancy provides that feeling of: “I’m certainly not a bad person.
And I’m certainly not a racist. And I’m certainly not all these things.
But this is really scary, and I’m only going to engage with this in a
way that’s safe for me.” And that safe space ends up being oppressive.
“I learned that the word for mother is knó:ha, and the word for auntie is knohá:’ah, which means little mother…”
The film’s been described as so many things, from a road trip
to a coming-of-age movie… You said you started with the idea of that
aunty-niece relationship, when did the missing person element come in?
Yeah, the idea of an aunty-niece story, that kind of came first. But
women and relatives going missing in our communities, and being murdered
in our communities is something that’s very prevalent, and it’s
something that all native communities handle. This seemed to be a way we
could talk about that, but through a central relationship between two
people left behind.
Then them being wanted by the authorities gives us an instant
antagonistic force, one that’s making the characters move and make
choices. And then we’re dealing with the Indian Child Welfare Act, with
the forced removal of native children, as well. So there’s all these
things that you think existed in the past, but are actually still really
actively existing in communities today.
The crime element does provide this really interesting
flashpoint, it puts the characters in such a heightened state. How much
do you think about what these characters are like in any other week,
before Jax’s sister went missing? Because that could almost completely
change their personality, how they react to things.
Yeah, I think my muse for a lot of my characters – and for both of
the characters that I’ve written for Lily – it’s been my mom. And my mom
is an incredibly talented, kind, strong native woman. And the thing is,
is that when you’re traversing a world where you’re constantly having
to play defence and offence at the same time, you have these walls built
up around you. Because the moment that you allow yourself to laugh or
the moment that you allow yourself to be goofy, or the moment that you
allow yourself to fall in love, or, you know, put in anything that makes
you vulnerable in a way that you know, is perhaps different for native
folks than some others.
Jax is very loving, and she’s very giving, and she’s extremely
passionate about the things that she cares about. But she can seem
gruff, and she can seem distant, and she can seem like she’s not
connected, because she has to operate in that way to protect herself. And I think what’s great about a character like that is that despite her
stoic, exterior, we really get to see her go on a journey. When you
write a character, you want to know, well, what was her relationship
with this person last week? Where’s it gonna go in two weeks, and you
really want to be able to live in that world.
So you come from a documentary background, and Fancy Dance is your first narrative feature. Were there any habits you had to stop during filming?
What’s funny is that I kind of only ever made documentary films
because they were cheaper and you could do it when you had a camera on
your arm. And while I was making documentaries, I started to question my
ethics as a documentary filmmaker because as I would make docs all I
wanted to do was make it up, like, “This isn’t as entertaining as it
could be. If they would have said this or done this, it would have been
way better story.”
So I think a couple of things that I’ve brought with me are, number
one, probably don’t hire me as a documentary filmmaker. But two, I
really do love people’s real lived experiences, but I have to say, I’m
better suited making up what happens in the world, rather than
documenting what’s happened.
BAD RIVER is a full length documentary that takes us into the heart of an epic battle the Bad River Ojibwe are waging to save Lake Superior. Acclaimed New Yorker writer, Bill McKibben calls the film "a powerful chronicle… and a hopeful picture of the emerging possibilities for power” Narrated by Quannah ChasingHorse and Academy-Award nominee, Edward Norton.
Opening in select @amctheatres across the US MARCH 15.
