Sugarcane, a beautifully-shot, Canadian-made film, is up for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar at next month’s Academy Awards. It has already won numerous other prizes, including two 2024 Critics Choice awards and a Sundance Film Festival Best Documentary Director award. It has also earned rave reviews from international publications including the New York Times, Variety, The Guardian and the Christian Science Monitor. On the Rotten Tomatoes website, it holds a perfect 100 percent “Fresh” Tomatometer rating from certified critics and a stellar 82 percent rating from viewers. At a private screening at the White House in December, former U.S. President Joe Biden offered his own effusive praise.
Despite the global acclaim, few Canadians have actually seen the film to date. After its domestic debut in August at the Toronto International Film Festival, Sugarcane skipped across the country with very few showings at film festivals and in limited theatrical release. Prior to its Oscar nomination, it had received only a modest amount of Canadian press, most notably from the Globe and Mail and CBC. Now, however, with some critics calling it a front-runner to win an Oscar, Sugarcane may be in line for much greater attention at home. National Geographic has picked up the film for distribution and it is now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu.
Thumbs up, around the world: The 2024 Canadian-made documentary film Sugarcane has earned high praise from movie critics and numerous awards at international film festivals. It was nominated for a 2025 Academy Award as Best Documentary Feature.Here’s what you need to know before watching it.
For anyone curious about the title, it refers to the tiny Sugarcane Indian Reserve near Williams Lake, British Columbia, home to the Williams Lake First Nation and Cariboo Indian Residential School, commonly known as St. Joseph’s Mission. The film is yet another attempt at making Canadians feel abject shame and guilt about the treatment of Indigenous students at residential schools. The Globe and Mail’s review, for example, is headlined “Delicately infuriating documentary Sugarcane digs deep into pain of Canada’s residential school system.”
The film is infuriating – but not in the way the newspaper meant. Despite its status as an Oscar-nominated documentary backed by the imprimatur of National Geographic, the entire movie should be considered an artfully-arranged assemblage of misdirection and manipulation, with a pile of key facts lying discarded off-screen. Viewers should trust very little of what they think they are seeing.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the movie’s closing moments when an onscreen script declares: “The ongoing investigation at St. Joseph’s Mission has uncovered a pattern of infanticide” and that a central character in the film “is the only known survivor of the school’s incinerator.” Both statements seem horrifying. The first is false. The second means something entirely different from what it appears.
Sugarcane may be beautiful to look at, but it doesn’t belong in the Best Documentary category. It can instead be regarded as a blood libel on Canadian history, modern Canada and – the easiest target of all – the Roman Catholic Church.
The Origins of Sugarcane
In 1867 the Roman Catholic Oblates of Mary Immaculate established St. Joseph’s Mission at Sugarcane Reserve, and in 1891 built a residential school on the site to serve Indigenous children from small, far-flung communities in the Williams Lake area. Given the distances involved, most students lived on-site, going home for holidays. The reserve itself is named for the tall, reedy grass that grows in local wetlands and reminded early settlers of sugarcane.
The creative team: Environmental activist Julian Brave NoiseCat (left) and investigative photojournalist Emily Kassie (right) teamed up in 2021 to begin the work on Sugarcane. Shown, the pair at The National Board of Review Awards Gala in January 2025. (Source of photo: Kristin Callahan/Everett Collection)
The producer/director of Sugarcane is Emily Kassie, an award-winning Canadian-born investigative journalist. In promotional interviews last year, Kassie explained that she was “gut-pulled” by the announcement of May 27, 2021 by the Kamloops First Nation that it had found “confirmation of the remains of 215 children” on the grounds of the former Kamloops Residential School. Having done earlier investigative photojournalism on the genocide in Rwanda (which took the lives of an estimated 800,000 Rwandans), Kassie said she was shocked to learn a similar thing had happened in her own backyard.
One of Sugarcane’s three plot lines involves an investigation by an Indigenous activist into terrifying tales alleged to have occurred at St. Joseph’s, including that Oblate priests impregnated Indigenous students and then cast the unwanted babies into the school’s incinerator.
Coincidentally, Kassie once shared a desk at the Huffington Post, a left-wing U.S. online media outlet, with Julian Brave NoiseCat, an Oxford and Columbia-educated Indigenous climate activist. Kassie asked NoiseCat for his help in making a film about the graves. Seeing a news story that the Williams Lake First Nation was about to launch a similar ground-penetrating radar search for unmarked graves, Kassie emailed Williams Lake Chief Willie Sellars. Serendipitously, Sellars responded that the band council had just been discussing the need to document the issue. Later that same year, the filmmakers arrived in Williams Lake.
A Beautiful Deception
There are three main plot lines to Sugarcane. One is a journey, with an Indigenous father and his estranged adult son going on a road trip to come to terms with the father’s abandonment of his son, as well as the father’s earlier abandonment by his own parents. Another involves an investigation by an Indigenous activist into terrifying tales alleged to have occurred at St. Joseph’s, including that Oblate priests impregnated Indigenous students and then cast the unwanted babies into the school’s incinerator. Finally, there is a story of confession and apology in which the former chief of the Williams Lake First Nation travels to the Vatican to confront the Oblate’s Superior-General with news that he is the son of a native woman abused and impregnated by a residential school priest.
What is the Sugarcane documentary film about?
Sugarcane is a Canadian-made documentary film by co-directors Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat focused on the Sugarcane Indian Reserve at Williams Lake, B.C. It combines NoiseCat’s reconciliation with his father and an investigation into allegations of infanticide at a nearby residential school. It was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Documentary category for the Academy Awards on March 2, 2025.
The father-and-son of the first plot line comprise co-director Julian Brave NoiseCat and his father Ed Archie NoiseCat, who was born at St. Joseph’s under mysterious circumstances which will be explored in the film. Today, Ed is a respected Indigenous artist and jeweller. Julian’s mother, unseen on screen, is Alexandra Roddy, a Jewish-Irish marketing executive currently working as vice president of Ecosystem and Alliances with IBM Cloud in Oakland, California, where she raised Julian. Julian serves as Sugarcane’s central figure, lightly tying the plot lines together.
Julian claims he was initially reluctant to take an active on-camera role, as the film’s themes hit too close to home. He was apparently convinced by his aunt, Charlene Belleau, during a smudging ceremony in an old barn at St. Joseph’s, as is depicted in the film. A pivotal, emotional scene near the beginning of his journey features Julian badgering a reluctant Ed to tell him about the circumstances of his birth. Ed demurs, replying, “It just keeps on damaging.” This may be Sugarcane’s most truthful statement.
Deceptively gorgeous: Despite its lurid accusations, Sugarcane is filled with many beautiful and well-crafted visuals of northern B.C. (Source of screenshot: Sugarcane Official Trailer, retrieved from National Geographic/YouTube)Filmed on location in northern B.C. over a period of three years, the film is often breathtakingly gorgeous. The place-setting scenes of mountain landscapes, fast-flowing rivers and other natural and man-made locations have a transcendent, dream-like quality reminiscent of the movies of acclaimed director Terrence Mallick. Known for visually-stunning movies such as Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line and The New World, Mallick often presents nature as an active and enchanting character in his stories. As does Sugarcane.
Another similarity with Mallick’s oeuvre is the manner in which the story is told – obliquely and without any clear narrative or guidance for the viewer. Lacking a narrator or other story-telling device, Sugarcane leaves it to viewers to decide what it is they’re seeing and what conclusions they should draw. Within this framework, the movie-makers often withhold important facts or present evidence in ways that lead viewers to make incorrect assumptions about the story they’re being told.
What shocking claims does the film Sugarcane make?
The documentary states that the filmmakers “uncovered a pattern of infanticide” at St. Joseph’s Mission (aka, Cariboo Indian Residential School) near Williams Lake, B.C., and that co-director Julian Brave NoiseCat’s father is “the only known survivor of the school’s incinerator.” Such allegations are based on innuendo and a deceptive manipulation of the facts. No conclusive evidence for either claim is ever presented to viewers.
Leaping to Conclusions
When I saw Sugarcane for the first time last summer, my attention was immediately grabbed by the brief image of an archival news article from the Williams Lake Tribune that explained the details of Ed’s mysterious birth. In 1959, a dairyman at St. Joseph’s was returning home late one night when he heard odd sounds coming from a large outdoor garbage burner with a heavy, closed lid. He assumed there was a cat trapped inside; he found instead a newborn baby in an ice cream carton.
The newspaper story, dated August 26, 1959, recounted the trial of a 20-year-old unwed mother charged with abandoning that same baby. She would eventually serve a year in jail for her crime. Her name is Antoinette Archie and today she is a respected elder of the nearby Canim Lake Reserve. Her baby would be named Ed Archie NoiseCat, meaning Antoinette Archie is also Julian NoiseCat’s grandmother.
Antoinette Archie does not appear to have been a full participant in Sugarcane. According to Documentary, the International Documentary Association’s magazine, Kassie was “unable to get answers from NoiseCat’s kyé7e (grandmother), who finds the events of her son’s conception and birth too painful to revisit.” The final cathartic meeting between Ed, Julian and Antoinette actually takes place off-camera, with viewers only able to hear their painful, emotional interaction.
There’s no mystery: This 1959 article from the Williams Lake Tribune clearly explains the details of Ed Archie NoiseCat’s birth, although Sugarcane would have the viewer believe it resulted from sexual abuse by a Catholic priest.
Despite this, Antoinette can be seen several times throughout the movie, often interacting with Julian. Oddly enough, the filmmakers never explicitly identify her by name despite the fact other characters are given explanatory subtitles. Rather, she is described, as the article above indicates, as “kyé7e”, the Shuswap/Secwepemcstin word for grandmother. It strains credulity to think this lack of clarity was a mere oversight, and it seems a material omission for a documentary claiming to delve deep into the facts.
Omissions of this sort lead viewers who are not well-schooled in the real facts to come to incorrect conclusions in the other plot line as well, particularly with regards to claims of Roman Catholic priests systematically impregnating Indigenous female students and then incinerating the unwanted babies in the school’s garbage burner. Evidence from those glowing movie reviews clearly suggests this is exactly what is happening. Already trained to expect the worst of Canada’s relations with Indigenous people from gruesome (but false) “mass graves” headlines about Kamloops, the international movie press leapt to a series of incorrect assumptions about what they thought the movie was revealing.
Unknown to viewers of Sugarcane, Ed’s father’s name is Ray Peters and he was a rodeo rider, owner-operator of a backhoe business and member of the Lil’wat Nation.
The Christian Science Monitor’s review of Sugarcane, for example, states, “The documentary’s furious emotional center is the disclosure of Ed’s secretive birth at the St. Joseph’s Mission residential school, where he was subsequently abused, to a mother who was raped by a priest. Only the chance discovery of the newborn by a milkman saved him from the infanticide that befell other such unwanted babies.” Virtually everything in these two sentences is wrong.
Fact-checking a Documentary
As the Williams Lake Tribune clipping attests, Antoinette Archie was 20 when she gave birth. Twenty-year olds could not attend residential school; students had to leave at age 16. She therefore could not have been impregnated by an abusive priest as a student. It would have been theoretically possible for her to have an ongoing affair afterwards with a priest from the school. Yet Julian reports that his grandmother attended high school at Kamloops Residential School; if she ever became intimate with a priest, it was probably not at St. Joseph’s. Further, the news clipping explains that prior to the time of the birth, she had been studying practical nursing in Vancouver.
In fact, there is no mystery about the identity of Ed’s father. None whatsoever. And no priests were involved.
Unknown to viewers of Sugarcane, Ed father’s name is Ray Peters and he was a rodeo rider, owner-operator of a backhoe business and member of the Lil’wat Nation. Peters lived on the Canim Lake Reserve and subsequently married Antoinette; the couple had seven more children together and remained married until Peter’s death in 2005, as his obituary explains. Ed, however, grew up with his alcoholic grandparents, from whom he adopted the last name “NoiseCat”. Intriguingly, Peters also fathered nine other children with four other women, as Julian recounted in a 2020 story about his dad. None of these facts appear in Sugarcane. While a passing reference is made by Ed about his real father in the film, the scene is so murky that a viewer not well-versed in the NoiseCat family tree will almost certainly miss it.
Not what you might think: Sugarcane leads viewers to make numerous incorrect assumptions about the story they are seeing, including the facts of Ed Archie NoiseCat’s life. He never attended residential school, his father was not a priest and he was born at St. Joseph’s only by happenstance. (Source of photo: The Canadian Press/HO-Sugarcane Film LLC, Emily Kassie)
As for allegations that Ed was abused at St. Joseph’s as a student, this is also impossible: he never went there. Rather, he attended local day and public schools. He was abused at these schools, as he was frequently targeted by other students as the “garbage-can baby” (further suggesting that the origin of his birth was quite well-known) and, as he recounts in the film, was once kicked in the head by his cousin Laird Archie, crushing his cheek bone.
And while Ed was born at St. Joseph’s, this appears to be sheer happenstance. According to the Williams Lake Tribune article, the then-unnamed, unwed mother explained at her trial that she had gone from “Williams late [sic] to the residential school where she delivered the birth of her child at about 11:20 pm.”
What is the real story behind the birth of Julian Brave NoiseCat’s father?
Despite insinuations in Sugarcane that Julian’s father Ed Archie NoiseCat was born to a Catholic priest at St. Joseph’s Mission (aka, Cariboo Indian Residential School) near Williams Lake, B.C., who then placed him in an incinerator to destroy the evidence of his sin, in fact Ed’s father was a local Indigenous businessman and rodeo rider named Ray Peters. After Ed’s birth in 1959, Peters married Ed’s mother Antoinette and they went on to have seven more children together. News coverage from the time reported that Antoinette served a one-year jail sentence for child abandonment. Ed was raised by his alcoholic grandparents, whose family name he adopted: “NoiseCat”.
What was a heavily pregnant Antoinette Archie doing at St. Joseph’s? One possibility is that she was on her way home to Canim Lake Reserve, about an hour-and-a-half’s drive from Williams Lake, and went into labour along the way (St. Joseph’s is about 19 km southeast of Williams Lake). While admittedly speculative, this scenario makes far more sense than the movie’s implied claim that she went there specifically to see the unnamed priest who’d fathered her child, so that he could then incinerate the infant. As recounted in the Williams Lake Tribune, she delivered the baby alone, using the nursing skills she’d learned in Vancouver.
As for Sugarcane’s assertion that Ed was “the only baby known to have survived the incinerator,” this may be technically correct: Ed is likely the only baby who’d ever been placed there. And he was placed there by his own mother.
Misdirection and Distraction
To add credence to their investigative claims regarding priestly misdeeds and midnight incinerations, Kassie and Julian bring a completely different story to bear through innuendo and association. In the mid-1960s Father Hubert O’Connor, an Oblate priest who was the principal at St. Joseph’s, violated his priestly vows by having an affair with Phyllis Bob, a 22-year-old Indigenous woman who worked at the school as a seamstress. Bob became pregnant and the baby was subsequently given up for adoption. Years later Phyllis accused the now-Bishop O’Connor of rape. These charges were eventually dropped and all parties engaged in a healing circle. While this tale does demonstrate that at least one Oblate priest fathered an illegitimate child at St. Joseph’s, it doesn’t prove anything about Ed’s parentage, nor establish a pattern of sexual abuse and infanticide at the school.
The O’Connor tale would be a complete non sequitur if not for the fact that the healing circle was organized by Belleau, former chief of the nearby Alkali Lake Indian Band, aunt to Julian and a more distant relative of Antoinette Archie. Belleau is also a former student of St. Joseph’s. In 1993, Belleau testified before the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples that she’d had a generally good experience as a student at the residential school, as did her mother and grandmother. At that time, Belleau made no allegations of abuse, let alone claims that priests were impregnating adolescent Indigenous girls and cremating the resulting babies.
In Sugarcane, Belleau plays the role of the “investigator” looking into the alleged horrors of St. Joseph’s. Throughout the movie, she is presented as an independent expert without mention of her personal relationships with all the central characters. Further, most of the “facts” Belleau uncovers on-camera concern events and people that key members of the story must already know very well. This includes the tale of the garbage burner baby.
The misdirection favoured by Sugarcane’s creators is further revealed in the treatment of Rick Gilbert, former chief of the Williams Lake First Nation. In the movie, Gilbert travels to the Vatican as part of a large Indigenous delegation invited to hear an apology from Pope Francis. Gilbert and his chatty wife Anna are among the most appealing characters in Sugarcane. They are also devout Catholics. When we first meet them, they are packing up various artifacts for return to their church; they took these items home for safekeeping during the wave of arson attacks on Canadian churches following the Kamloops “mass graves” report. Since 2021, 112 churches across Canada have been vandalized or burnt to the ground.
To this day, the Williams Lake region boasts plenty of other McGraths, both white and Indigenous. None of them appear in Sugarcane. Nonetheless, the documentary-makers want us to believe Gilbert was fathered by this one particular McGrath who just happened to be a priest.
Director Kassie moved in with the Gilberts for several weeks while making the film, inserting herself directly into the lives of her characters. In one key scene, Rick and Anna review results of a DNA test on their laptop that shows his ethnic heritage to be 50 percent Irish, 45 percent Indigenous and 5 percent Scottish. As is common with such ancestry sites, up pops an image of a potential “cousin”, a fellow named Brian McGrath. Rapid editing then takes us to a photo of a former Oblate priest standing with a group of boys at St. Joseph’s. His name? Father James Michael McGrath. “See!” cries Anna.
No convincing evidence is presented that links James McGrath to Brian McGrath, or that Rick Gilbert is related to either of them. The connection is entirely speculative based on the results of Gilbert’s mail-order DNA sample. To this day, the Williams Lake region boasts plenty of other McGraths, both white and Indigenous. None of them appear in Sugarcane. Nonetheless, the documentary-makers want us to believe Gilbert was fathered by this one particular McGrath who just happened to be a priest. Gilbert passed away in September 2023.
What hard evidence is available suggests Father McGrath is unlikely to have been Gilbert’s biological father. Rick’s mother, Agatha Gilbert, was 18 and not a student at St. Joseph’s when she became pregnant. According to the Find a Grave website, Rick’s father was actually Edward George Gilbert, a Second World War veteran who married Agatha in 1946, the year of Rick’s birth. Agatha later had eight more children with several different men while still legally married to Edward. Tragically, Agatha was stabbed to death at age 37 in a drunken brawl with a 19-year-old relative at the home of current Williams Lake chief Sellars’ grandmother. The attacker was charged with murder but later acquitted.
Connecting Unrelated Dots
Distorted personal stories and random coincidences dressed up to appear as proof return as a theme of the investigation plot line that features Belleau and Whitney Spearing, an employee of the Williams Lake First Nation’s archeology firm, Sugar Cane Archeology. Aside from collecting archival documents and screening microfiche files, Belleau and Spearing are shown gaining access to certain RCMP files. This despite an RCMP officer saying on-camera that the force never allows the public access to such files. Belleau is married to an RCMP officer (who also attended St. Joseph’s) and, at the time, she held an Indigenous relations post with the B.C. government.
However they got access to the files, the duo’s investigation leads them to a packet of information titled “O’Connor adoptions”. The viewer might then assume they’ve unearthed evidence of yet more awful, unprosecuted crimes regarding a veritable horde of children secretly fathered by O’Connor and his Oblate colleagues. In fact, the file reveals that the school actually took good care of any female students who found themselves pregnant by boyfriends, local men, passing rodeo riders, etc. The church would arrange for the girls to spend their pregnancy in Vancouver at a Catholic charity where the babies were later given up for adoption, as was the custom of the day. This is presented as yet another cruelty, although the film neglects to explain that in the 1950s and 1960s a teenaged mother of any race had no access to government-funded social supports. It certainly undercuts any theory of the mass incineration of unwanted babies.
How has the international media misinterpreted Sugarcane?
Reviews from major outlets, including The Christian Science Monitor, incorrectly claim the film exposes systematic abuse and murder of Indigenous babies by Catholic priests at Canadian residential schools. No solid evidence for any of this is presented in the film.
Throughout the film, Belleau and Spearing construct a “crime wall”, complete with de rigueur red strings linking various priests to “Baby X” and “Baby Y” and so on. They also interview a number of people in a large “witnessing” circle, some of whom make grisly accusations regarding babies tossed in furnaces and piles of ash filled with bones. While personal testimony of this sort can be compelling on screen, statements related to childhood memories or distant traumas are notoriously unreliable and require corroborating evidence. No matter. The purpose of these scenes is to leave viewers with the impression that they’re watching a criminal investigation. As if to prove that point, one of those 2024 Critics Choice Awards given to Sugarcane was for “Best True Crime Documentary”.
Connect the dots: One of the most compelling visuals in Sugarcane is an iconic “crime wall” constructed by Belleau, complete with red string linking alleged victims with rogue priests. Shown, Williams Lake First Nation chief Willie Sellars examining the “evidence”. (Source of photo: © National Geographic Documentary Films/Courtesy Everett Collection)
Recall, however, that Sugarcane’s genesis began in 2021 with claims of genocide regarding unmarked graves and missing children in Kamloops and Williams Lake. At a follow-up January 2022 press conference, Williams Lake chief Sellars could not name a single dead or missing child. Rather, as is now common practice, he announced that “93 is our number” of missing children, based on ground-penetrating radar results that can only identify soil anomalies that might be caused by any number of things. Ground-penetrating radar cannot identify human remains. Since the original Kamloops announcement, no physical evidence of graves or missing bodies has been uncovered outside of known cemeteries at any residential school in Canada.
This absence of proof for the many horrific claims about crimes committed at residential schools may explain the centrality of incinerated babies to Sugarcane’s narrative. The exhaustive Truth and Reconciliation Report of 2015, for example, placed the total number of student deaths at all residential schools over the course of more than 100 years at 423 on-site deaths and 3,201 in related locations like TB sanatoriums or hospitals – these largely from disease, malnutrition and accident. With the post-Kamloops era notable for claiming that the residential school death toll must have been far, far higher, this troubling lack of proof creates a credibility barrier with the public. Such a conundrum was obliquely acknowledged by Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat in a 2024 press interview, when they complained that “discourse about Indian residential schools has waned over the past three years.”
Other than Ed Archie NoiseCat’s brief time spent in a garbage burner – due to an individual act of desperation unrelated to the school or any Catholic priests – there’s no proof of any other similar events ever occurring.
Allegations that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Indigenous children were born of renegade priests, killed and then turned to ash offer a new and wholly unprovable narrative to replace that of those undiscovered “mass graves”. In fact, this is precisely the approach taken by Chief Terry Teegee, elected Regional Chief of the British Columbia Assembly of First Nations. In a May 2024 interview with CityNews, Teegee said, “Some of these residential schools or institutions had incinerators so there could be potential [for] not finding any remains.” In other words, no proof need ever be provided for the most shocking of accusations.
Unbefitting a “documentary”: Sugarcane abets unproven allegations of horrific crimes at St. Joseph’s Mission through omission, innuendo and coincidence. Shown, the cemetery and barn at St. Joseph’s as they currently stand. (Source of photo: The Canadian Press/Darryl Dyck)Sugarcane eagerly abets baseless allegations by repeatedly claiming Belleau has discovered a systematic process of baby incineration where none exists. Other than Ed Archie NoiseCat’s brief time spent in a garbage burner – due to an individual act of desperation unrelated to the school or Catholic priests – there’s no proof of any other similar events ever occurring. Yet the final image left to viewers is that there was “a pattern of infanticide” at St. Joseph’s and that Ed “is the only known survivor of the school’s incinerator.”
Far from Oscar material, Sugarcane casts a further stain on Canada’s international reputation regarding residential schools thanks to its vague and confusing story that misleads viewers through omission, innuendo and coincidence. The conclusions drawn in this way are entirely wrong, and represent a blood libel against both the Roman Catholic Church and Canada. Sugarcane cannot properly be called a documentary; in a documentary, facts are supposed to matter.
Michelle Stirling is an author on Kindle, contributor to the Western Standard and producer/writer of the recent counter-documentary The Bitter Roots of Sugarcane. She blogs at www.michellestirling.com.
Based on research by Nina Green.
Source of main image: © National Geographic Documentary Films/Courtesy Everett Collection.
