Canadian Medical Association Apologizes for Harming First Nations People | HEALING STONE at Seneca

By Native News Online Staff |  September 20, 2024

The Canadian Medical Association (CMA) apologized for its role and the role of the medical profession in past and ongoing harms to First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples in the health system.

In presenting the apology at a ceremony held on Wednesday, Sept. 18, in Victoria on the ancestral lands of the lək̓ʷəŋiʔnəŋ-speaking people of Songhees and Xwsepsum Nations., CMA President Dr. Joss Reimer spoke of the organization's commitment to being accountable and working together with Indigenous Peoples to do better in the spirit of humility and reciprocity.

“We have not lived up to the ethical standards the medical profession is expected to uphold to ensure the highest standard of care is provided to patients and trust is fostered in physicians, residents and medical students,” she said. “We realize we have left Indigenous Peoples out of that high standard of care.”

The ceremony also included singers, drummers, dancers, musicians and storytellers.

Approximately 225 guests, including local and national Indigenous leaders, members of the CMA Indigenous Guiding Circle and Indigenous Survivors listened as CMA leadership outlined the organization’s path to an apology.

“Today, we turn the first page of a new chapter in the CMA’s history,” said Dr. Alika Lafontaine, CMA president (2022–23). “It's a chapter that we hope First Nations, Inuit and Métis Peoples can write with us together, as we work toward a health system that provides Indigenous Peoples with the right care, at the right time, in the right place, in a good way.”

That path included an in-depth review of more than 150 years of archives, which revealed the role the CMA, and the medical profession, have played in the mistreatment of Indigenous Peoples, whether through action or inaction.  These harms include the devastating impacts of Indian hospitals, forced medical experimentation, forced sterilization, child apprehensions, systemic racism, neglect and abuse within the health care system.

The CMA’s first Indigenous president, Dr. Lafontaine announced the association’s commitment to an apology in June 2023, as an important part of the CMA’s response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action.  With the goal of creating meaningful change in health care and in the relationship between physicians and Indigenous Peoples, the CMA is hoping the apology inspires members of the profession and medical organizations to begin their own reconciliation journeys.

Building on past reconciliation work, the CMA’s ReconciliACTION Plan outlines how it will advance health and well-being for Indigenous Peoples, support the medical profession’s journey toward truth and reconciliation, and promote internal reconciliation as an organization.

SOURCE: https://nativenewsonline.net/health/canadian-medical-association-apologizes-for-harming-first-nations-people 

 

Seneca Iroquois (Alleghany) Museum: https://www.senecamuseum.org/

The Healing Stone will remain at the cultural center for two years before returning to New Zealand for the next World Indigenous Suicide Prevention Conference. Alongside the stone, the Seneca Nation received other gifts from previous conference hosts, which will also be displayed at the cultural center.

The Onöhsagwë:de’ Cultural Center is open six days a week and offers exhibits, collections, and educational programs. To learn more visit their website.

LOCATION: Salamanca, New York 

ALSO READ: Healing Stone from World Indigenous Suicide Prevention Conference on Display at Seneca Museum

Remains belonging to dozens of Native ancestors set to return to tribal nations in four states

Students gather around the eternal flame on UND’s campus. Eric Hylden/Grand Forks Herald

By Joshua Irvine | September 22, 2024

  

GRAND FORKS, North Dakota — A little over two years after UND officials announced they’d identified the remains of dozens of Native Americans in the university’s possession, the return of the deceased to their descendants can begin.

The first of the human remains identified in the university’s archives became available for repatriation to Native American tribal nations on Thursday.

Now, the remains of dozens of Native ancestors, along with more than 1,000 funerary objects and other artifacts, can be returned to tribal nations across the region.

“It’s finally done,” said Keith Malaterre, director of the Indigenous Student Center and a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. “They finally get to go home.”

All told, the remains of some 57 ancestors and associated funerary objects are now available for repatriation, according to the two Federal Register notices published in August.  Tribes have been able to submit written claims for ancestral remains since the notices went out.

Per the Federal Register notices, the remains have a “reasonable connection” to nearly two dozen Native tribes, including all five tribes in North Dakota as well as tribes in South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wyoming.

Many of the remains in question came from excavations of burial mounds across North Dakota.  Ancestral remains were received by the university as early as 1907 and as late as 1982, according to the notices.

The university has also issued notices of intent to repatriate several sacred objects to area tribes, including the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians and the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate of the Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota.

An unspecified amount of ancestral remains or related objects possessed by UND was also transferred under the legal authority of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in August, in order to comply with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.

The return of ancestral remains comes just over two years after UND first announced it had located what it estimated at the time as around 250 boxes of sacred objects and the remains of what was initially estimated to be 70 Native American ancestors.

Faculty had first identified ancestral remains in the university’s possession in March 2022, beginning months of discussions with area tribal nations.

President Andy Armacost issued an apology to tribal nations across the country and pledged to return the remains and any sacred objects in the university’s possession to their respective tribes.

Since 2022, the university has worked since then with the affected tribes as well as multiple state and federal agencies to inventory the ancestral remains and identify their rightful recipients while remaining in compliance with NAGPRA.

Crystal Alberts, co-chair of UND’s NAGPRA compliance committee, says staff has searched “building to building, floor to floor, door to door” to identify any ancestral remains in the university’s possession.

Even so, she did not rule out the possibility of more ancestral remains being found in the future.

“I can’t definitively say no one else will be found and there is no one else,” Alberts said. “That would be an irresponsible statement.”

Dianne Desrosiers, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe, credited UND for its handling of the reparation process.

“I have to commend UND,” Desrosiers said. “They worked with the tribes and did everything they could within their power to make this process easy and smooth for tribes.”

As opposed to its very public early stages, administrators have elected to avoid publicizing this latest step in the repatriation process.

An email went out to members of the university’s Indigenous community in July informing them of the forthcoming Federal Register notices.

“This is a very private and sacred time for our tribal nations and we want to respect that,” Armacost told the Herald earlier this month, adding the affected tribes had been “very patient” over the two years working with the university.

Keali’i Baker, a third-year law student who is president of the Native American Law Students Association, says he believes the end of the repatriation process will mean relief for Native students and the opportunity to heal.

“I think students will just be happy it's over,” said Baker, a member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation. “We’ll always be sad it happened in the first place and it wasn’t taken care of sooner.”

Still, he noted, he felt the university, and Armacost in particular, had handled the task of repatriation as best they could.

The process of repatriating sacred objects and other objects of cultural patrimony will likely take longer than the return of ancestral remains.

According to a summary submitted by UND to the National Park Service under NAGPRA, UND has sent summaries of the sacred objects in its possession to 49 tribes that may have a claim to those items.

Two tribes and one lineal descendant have reached out to claim sacred objects so far. The Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe is claiming a pipe that belonged to a series of tribal chiefs named Standing Buffalo, per Desrosiers.

She said the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe seeks to display the pipe alongside other sacred objects, with the goal of establishing a museum documenting the tribe’s history.

“We want to be able to educate people about us, about who we are, what our history here has been and how long it has been, because we have been here for thousands of years,” she said.

She declined to share specific details on how the tribe will address the return of ancestral remains.

“It is a very private thing,” she said. “We are repatriating human remains. It would be akin to going to retrieve your ancestors out of a museum or research facility.”

Malaterre, who also served on the repatriation committee, said he anticipated his tribe would hold a traditional burial for the ancestral remains the tribe receives from UND.

He said the tribe had responded similarly to the repatriation of the remains of ancestors who died at federally-run boarding schools.

A proper burial in the Ojibwe tradition is important, Malaterre said, because it helps to shepherd the spirit into the afterlife.

“I’m just happy they’re in the right place and at peace,” he said. “That they’re not in a state of unrest, that their spirit has moved on.”

US navy apologizes for razing of Native Alaska communities in late 1800s

USS Saginaw, probably at Mare Island Navy Yard in 1862.

In ceremony in Kake, military acknowledges bombardment of village that destroyed it and led to many deaths

Cecilia Nowell

Sat 21 Sep 202

In a ceremony Saturday afternoon, the US navy apologized for firing upon and torching the Alaska Native village of Kake in 1869.

Surrounded by tribal Chilkat weavings, historic photographs and other Lingít artwork in the Kake elementary and high school gymnasium, R Adm Mark B Sucato expressed the military’s regret, in the first of two apologies planned by the military for bombardments of Alaska Native communities in the late 1800s.

“This has been 155 years in the making,” said Joel Jackson, the president of the Organized Village of Kake, of the apology to the Lingít (often known as the Tlingit) people. “It’s becoming real because we never talked about it and now we are.”

“They burned everything. All the shelters, all the food caches, the canoes,” Jackson told the Washington Post. Although no one was killed during the winter bombardment, he said the destruction of the community and its supplies and canoes led to many deaths.

READ: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/21/us-navy-to-apologize-for-razing-of-native-alaska-community-in-late-1800s?CMP=share_btn_url

ABOUT SAGINAW: wiki

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Saginaw_(1859)

Peehee Mu’huh (Thacker Pass)

 

Over the past couple years, you’ve heard several times from us about the Indigenous resistance to construction of what’s slated to become the world’s largest lithium mine near Peehee Mu’huh (Thacker Pass), on the ancestral lands of our Paiute and Shoshone relatives in so-called Nevada. We remain ever grateful to Lakota Law supporters like you who have taken action to try to stop the mine and helped us raise funds to help support the legal defense of water and land protectors targeted by law enforcement there.

Those issues aren’t going away.  But today, I want to share with you something I hope will lift your spirits.  Each year, on Sept. 12, the descendants of Ox Sam (according to the lore of the people, one of just three Paiutes who survived the 1885 Mountain Meadow Massacre) host a run to honor his memory — and all who were lost. This year, I traveled out to participate with my daughter, Tokata, and Antoine Running Bear of the Native American Youth Organization (NAYO). 

I invite you to watch our new video, narrated by Tokata, which highlights her participation in the run and offers our appreciation to the grandmothers and all those who organized this important recognition of history and resilience.

Watch: Tokata put in some miles to honor our Paiute relatives and their ancestors!

It should go without saying, but these lands — and many sites contained within them — are sacred.  While we may not, in the end, be able to halt the mine’s construction, I’m grateful that you have helped us make an impact by publicizing its threat to Native homelands, sacred burial grounds, and a delicate ecosystem with several threatened species. Your support has empowered what must be an ongoing conversation about the continued necessity to gain consent from frontline communities as we transition from fossil fuels to “clean” energy like lithium, cobalt, and other critical minerals.

20% of these sought-after commodities lie under land currently controlled by tribal governments. Even more minerals and other resources are contained within land Native nations possess and over which we hold legal claims — titles which have never been extinguished. We have a right to be in our lands and withhold our consent on infrastructure which puts us in the sacrifice zone.

Thank you for helping us make new friends in this struggle. Part of what Lakota Law always aims to accomplish — with a renewed emphasis as we complete our transition to full Indigenous leadership under the Sacred Defense Fund — is the forging of rock-solid relationships and partnerships with our fellow Indigenous People, across Turtle Island and the world. On this trip, we met Ivan Bender, from the Hualapai Tribe in Arizona, whose lands are also currently threatened by an exploratory drilling project for lithium. Mining for lithium, gold, and other resources also remains a major issue closer to home in the Black Hills.

Please stay with us as we move forward.  We’ll have much more to say — and there will be more you can help us do — to protect sacred lands, elevate Indigenous voices, and safeguard the Native communities who seem always to be disproportionately affected by incursions from extractive industries. Your friendship means the world to us.

Wopila tanka — thank you for standing up for the sacred!
Chase Iron Eyes
Director and Lead Counsel
Lakota People’s Law Project
Sacred Defense Fund

 

The last Indian Wars were dirty wars. The new Indian Wars are as well.

Indian Fighting Today: Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher

News | September 19th, 2024

By Winona LaDuke | winona@winonaladuke.com

The business of Indian Hating is a lucrative one. It’s historically been designed to dehumanize Native people so that it’s easier to take their land. ‘Kill the Indian, save the man,” manifest destiny, and “merciless Indian savages” are all phrases which underscore the deep hatred of the American Empire for Indigenous peoples. After all, this is our land, indakiingimin, the very land to which we belong.  And to make America, it’s important to steal it.

That’s pretty much history — a lot of theft: land, cultural items and people. And where possible, the laws themselves. It starts with hating and expands to war. Welcome to the modern Indian Wars. Some of them are in the courtroom.

There’s a long list of law firms who specialize in modern day Indian fighting. It’s usually to do with tribal jurisdiction over water, land, or children, all pretty basic for the survival of a people. Most of those law firms have other clients like real estate or title insurance folks, mining companies, oil companies, county governments and the like who want to have access to more Indian land or people. Those interests need a modern cavalry; that’s some lawyers.

Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher is a big shot law firm for fighting Indians. That’s sort of their practice. These days, they are the attorneys for Energy Transfer in a $300 million case known as a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (or SLAPP suit), intended to stop Greenpeace, the international environmental network, from supporting Indigenous peoples. Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher appear to want to stop Indigenous peoples from protecting their lands. And while they are at it, scare away any allies to protect those lands.

It’s called a SLAPP suit. SLAPP lawsuits are more typically targeted at journalists and human rights defenders. They are meant to shut down anyone who opposes the corporation which sues. Thirty-two states have passed regulations discouraging these lawsuits, not only because they deter basic civil rights, but also because they waste a lot of time in the court. North Dakota is not among those 32 states.

Filed originally in 2019, Energy Transfer (ET) accuses Greenpeace of criminal behavior — trespassing, vandalism, arson, as well as the harassment and assault of construction workers — to stop the Dakota Access pipeline. Energy Transfer basically holds Greenpeace responsible for most of what happened at Standing Rock.

That’s rather surprising, since many of us were there, and frankly had no idea Greenpeace was in the camp. As a matter of fact, ET contends Greenpeace orchestrated a campaign that ultimately convinced the federal government to halt construction of DAPL for roughly five months. A lot of us wrote letters to the federal government and the Army Corps of Engineers and Greenpeace didn’t even give us pencils.

It is likely that Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher isn’t just interested in Greenpeace; they are actually interested in diminishing tribal sovereignty, and tribal rights. Let me explain.

Supreme Court and ICWA

Remember the U.S. Supreme Court case on the Indian Child Welfare Act? The Brackeens, in Haaland v. Brackeen (one of three lawsuits where no Native foster parents wanted to adopt Native children) had Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher represent them for free.  That’s right, pro bono.

The case, if it prevailed, would have gutted the Indian Child Welfare Act. That’s a hard fought for law to protect Native communities.

Mother Jones Magazine explains why pro bono made sense to the firm: “Taking a financial loss litigating a family law case is a small investment toward advancing the interests of the rest of the firm’s clients in diminishing the last, tenuous pockets of tribal sovereignty…. make no mistake that it is a business decision. All the ‘everyone deserves a lawyer’ rhetoric doesn’t play here — the firm is taking on a pro bono case for a family with seemingly no injuries as part of a broad attack on tribal rights.”

“One of the things that tribes need to continue to exist is their children,” says Shannon Smith, executive director of the Indian Child Welfare Act Law Center, which provides legal services for Native families. “Things just don’t exist if you don’t have kids.”

Ultimately, in a narrow margin, the Supreme Court affirmed the Indian Child Welfare Act, and ruled against the Brackeens, dashing Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher’s hopes. They have other battles.

Welcome to the modern-day Indian Wars.

Chevron in Ecuador

The Cofan are a water people who travel and live upon the Aguarico River in what’s called Ecuador. Because of American oil companies, they live in the oil wasteland.

Texaco began operating the Lago Agrio oil fields in the 1960s. By the 1990s, millions of gallons of crude oil had been spilled throughout the region. Toxic waste from drilling and refining was stored in unprotected pits, toxifying the soil and contaminating water supplies.

There were 30,000 plaintiffs in a case against oil producers, mostly Native. The case took almost 18 years to resolve, but in 2011 an Ecuadorian court ruled against Chevron, which now owned Texaco, ordering it to pay $18 billion. While that figure was later reduced to $9.5 billion, it still represented one of the largest judgments ever against an oil company. Rather than pay up, Chevron, the $200 billion company, refused to clean up and instead removed its assets from the country.

Enter Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher.

The attorney for the Ecuadorian Native people was a man named Steven Donziger. None of Donziger’s original 30,000 Ecuadorian clients — suffering and dying from cancers and other diseases that many believe are related to the oil contamination —have received a penny since the original lawsuit was filed in 1993.

The Ecuadorian court awarded $l8 million to the people of the river. Then it was halved. Three years after it all stopped in New York. Here’s what happened: Chevron’s attorneys, Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, argued successfully that Steven Donziger had secured the $9.2 billion judgment by corrupt means. The lawyers argued that Donziger violated U.S. federal laws prohibiting attempted extortion, wire fraud, money laundering, witness tampering, and obstruction of justice, as well as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. That was in 2014. Then the state of New York arrested and disbarred the lawyer, Steven Donziger.

The river, the water, is still full of oil. And the people are sick. But Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher won.

Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher will be at the front lines of the Indian Wars in North Dakota. Looks like they hope to discredit Greenpeace, make them pay $300 million and be sure that no one says a peep about that dirty oil pipeline.

Greenpeace’s attorney Everett Jack told Southwest District Court Judge James Gion that “Greenpeace cannot be responsible for the entire protest without evidence.” Jack said only six people working for Greenpeace ever attended the demonstrations.

Greenpeace is a big fish in the environmental world.

But Lakota lands, waters and jurisdiction are a bigger fish. We will see how the case rolls out in Morton County, but ultimately Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher has proven to have a larger agenda for Indian Country. The last Indian Wars were dirty wars. The new Indian Wars are as well.

Historic Fort Wayne to host Indigenous wild rice camp

 Preserving culture, reconnecting and ricing is a very good thing... TLH

  by Jena Brooker September 19, 2024

Rosebud Bear Schneider and her son, Sonny, use a push pole to harvest rice. Credit: Antonio Cosme

Along the shores of the Detroit River and in almost every Michigan waterway,  manoomin, or wild rice, used to grow abundantly. 

Sacred and central to Great Lakes tribes’ origin stories, manoomin has largely disappeared due to development, pollution and other factors. But Indigenous people remain and they are bringing wild rice traditions back to Detroit. 

On Sunday, Historic Fort Wayne is hosting a rice camp where participants will craft wooden sticks for wild rice harvesting, “dance” on the rice in moccasins to remove the hulls and share a meal, among other activities. 

Rosebud Bear Schneider, a Southwest Detroit native and member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians, has been working for 10 years on cultivating Indigenous food sovereignty in Detroit. In the past, she would cook and serve wild rice at events to reconnect people to their traditional ways. 

“You would see a full room of people light up and get really excited, like, ‘I haven’t eaten that in a long time,’” said Schneider, who is a co-director of education and engagement at local farming nonprofit Keep Growing Detroit.

Teaching people how to process the rice will deepen that connection even further, she said. It’s the first time she can think of that the teaching was offered in Detroit during her lifetime.

“It’s another step to this path that we’re on to connect to this food, connect to our ways, connect to our spirit and connect to the land,” said Schneider, who will process manoomin for the first time this weekend. 

Teachings say Ojibwe people migrating from the East were told to establish where they found food that grew in water. They found wild rice in Lake Superior and made the region home. The rice grew abundantly along the Detroit River and in other parts of the city before 97% of the city’s coastal wetlands were destroyed for development in the late 20th century and 85% of the city’s inland streams were buried. 

The decimation has contributed to a disconnect between local tribes and the sacred grain, according to rice camp organizers.

“Manoomin, the food that grows on the water – it’s the whole reason that we Anishinaabe are even here,” said east side resident Jared Ten Brink, a member of the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi and one of the event’s collaborators. “It’s so important to who we are, but I talked with my own family members, and most of them don’t know anything about it.” 

Manoomin harvest. Credit: Antonio Cosme

The closest place to Detroit where traditional wild rice harvesting occurs is several hours up north, creating a barrier for Detroit Natives to reconnect to their traditions. The wild rice camp hosted by the Detroit Indigenous People’s Alliance, Black to the Land Coalition and the Ecumenical Theological Seminary seeks to close the gap. 

“We want people to be able to experience wild rice here in Detroit,” said Antonio Cosme, co-founder of Black to the Land Coalition, a nonprofit that helps Black and brown people return to the land. Just a few weeks ago Cosme traveled to Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin, to learn traditional manoomin harvest methods. 

Fort Wayne, the induction center for soldiers for every conflict from the Civil War to Vietnam, is the site of Native burial mounds and where members of the Potawatomi tribe once lived. On Sunday, attendees will smell the toasted rice, feel it beneath their feet and see it with their eyes. 

“It’s hard to really understand something if you can’t actually get your hands into it and do it, so this is a great opportunity where we can bring this to people who wouldn’t otherwise necessarily be able to have this experience,” said Ten Brink. 

Regrowing wild rice

At the state level, efforts are being made to regrow wild rice and recognize its importance.

Last year, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed legislation making wild rice the state’s official native grain, the first state to designate a native grain. In November, more than 70 groups from across the state gave input on a draft of the Michigan Tribal-State Manoomin Stewardship Plan, a joint partnership between the Michigan Wild Rice Initiative and U-M Water Center, funded with a $100,000 state grant from 2022.

The plan is still being finalized, said Ten Brink, who worked on it as a PhD student at U-U-M. Reseeding Detroit and Michigan with manoomin is complicated for a number of reasons, he said. 

“You can’t just harvest manoomin seeds from some place and go out and start tossing them,” he said. 

Jared Ten Brink harvesting rice at Tawas Lake in Michigan. Credit: Nigora Erkeava

Specific varieties need to be used for different locations. Reseeding can be made challenging by water current speeds and temperature, pollution, and species like phragmites, which take over an ecosystem and make it hard for native species like wild rice to thrive. It’s even harder in an urban setting like Detroit, where many waterways have been buried, said Ten Brink, including Bloody Run on the city’s east side near where he lives.

“It’s enclosed in a storm drain, it doesn’t exist as a river,” he said.  “Those are places where river rice would have been growing, but we don’t even have the rivers to restore it.” 

Another challenge is figuring out how to work together on the plan, he said.

“Wild rice restoration – a lot of the knowledge is held within the tribes, but a lot of the resources are with the cities, counties, states and the federal government.” 

And, climate change is an increasing threat. In Lac du Flambeau, the rice was struggling, Cosme added.

“You go to a rice bed and you’ll see that it’s a lot of water, there’s not much seed to harvest,” he said. “You start knocking the rice, and it’s not much coming into your boat.” 

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources confirmed in September that the wild rice production this year was significantly lower than average due to a warmer winter and heavy June storms. Factors that are made more likely due to climate change, which Ten Brink hopes to educate people about at Sunday’s rice camp. 

“In Southeast Michigan, we will see more and more severe weather as a result of warmer temperatures and that severe weather has a couple of big impacts for wild rice,” he said, primarily increased water levels and water temperatures. 

For non-Natives interested in the camp and the topic, Schneider wants them to know that Indigenous people still exist in Detroit and need support. 

Since 2018, when the city of Detroit had its first Indigenous Peoples’ Day, on what is alternatively considered Columbus Day, Schneider said the relationship between Indigenous people and the city has been growing, like District 6 representatives supporting the traditional maple sugarbush in Rouge Park. 

“We are still very much a thriving community and we still very much need that solidarity and support when it comes to these huge issues like feeding ourselves, having our neighbors recognize that we are still here and that Indigenous People’s Day is an actual and important day,” she said. 

The Sunday camp runs from 1-6 p.m. Registration is required and urban Natives will be prioritized.

SOURCE: https://www.bridgedetroit.com/historic-fort-wayne-to-host-indigenous-wild-rice-camp/

Sugarcane | A Deeply Personal Investigation Into Canada’s Residential Schools

During the 19th and 20th centuries, government programs in both the United States and Canada forcibly separated Indigenous children from their families, relocating them to residential boarding schools to “civilize” them. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has acknowledged this as a form of cultural genocide. In 2021, this awful history got a fresh round of public discourse when surveying work on the grounds of the Kamloops residential school in British Columbia identified around 200 unmarked graves. (Officially, 51 children are currently recognized as having died at the school.) 

These events spurred Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie to collaborate on Sugarcane (2024), a documentary about Canada’s residential school system. It’s told from the perspective of now-elderly survivors of St. Joseph’s Mission, another such school in British Columbia, including Julian’s father, Ed. (The documentary gets its name from the nearby Williams Lake Indian Reserve, which is often called “Sugarcane.”) The film’s investigation into the circumstances of Ed’s birth at the school leads to disquieting evidence of infanticide. 

We sat down with NoiseCat and Kassie over Zoom to discuss the delicate process of having NoiseCat participate as both co-director and subject, as well as how they got the residents of Williams Lake to trust them. This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

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Julian Brave NoiseCat (photo by and courtesy Emily Kassie)

Hyperallergic: How did you come together to work on this film, and what caused Julian to expand his role from co-director to on-camera participant?

Julian Brave NoiseCat: Em approached me to collaborate with her on a documentary about Indian residential schools on the day of the discovery of 215 potential unmarked graves at the Kamloops school. I hesitated; I took about two weeks to think about it. I had just signed a book contract, and I had never written a book before and I’d never made a film before. Doing both at the same time seemed a little bit crazy. But I knew my family had a very painful connection to the residential schools. I didn’t know the specifics because we never talked about it. To work on that subject in a new medium felt risky, and I wasn’t sure if I was ready.

But I did agree, and when I called Em to say so, that’s when she told me she’d identified a First Nation that was leading a search [for more unmarked graves]. It was the Williams Lake First Nation, and they were investigating St. Joseph’s Mission. That was the school my family was sent to and where my father was born. And as the investigation and the documentary unfolded, I was increasingly pulled into the story by members of my own family, by our participants, by the events themselves. It took about a year from when we started before I became a participant myself. 

It took a long time to get comfortable with incorporating my family’s story, which is quite traumatic and which was largely unknown to me at the time — particularly the story of my father’s birth, which even he did not know before. But ultimately it felt like if there was any story that deserved our all, this would be it. I needed to go there with my own family trauma, particularly since other participants, like the late Chief Rick Gilbert, trusted us with so much of their own most painful truths when they had no authorship of the work.

Julian Brave NoiseCat visits family on the Mount Currie Indian reserve during a road trip with his father, Ed Archie NoiseCat. (photo courtesy Emily Kassie/Sugarcane Film LLC)

Emily Kassie: I’m an investigative journalist and have made short films and multimedia stories in the context of newsrooms, and I’ve been making docs since I was 14. But despite having covered human rights abuses and genocide around the world, I’d never turned my lens on my own country. I felt gut-pulled to tell the story, and I knew immediately that the person to do this with was Julian. We worked our first reporting jobs together almost a decade ago; we randomly sat next to each other and developed a fast friendship. 

I didn’t come in hoping that he would be in the film, because I thought that would be very difficult. I knew that if he was going to do that, he’d have to really want to, because it would take so much of himself. And eventually he came to that point, and when he did, it was extraordinary. By then we had built such an incredible collaboration and so much trust that I could be there for him as he transitioned between directing and being a participant.

Directors Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat after filming at the Williams Lake Stampede. (photo courtesy Sugarcane Film LLC)

H: How did you share responsibilities as co-directors? Did each of you have the lead on specific elements of the production, or was everything a balancing act?

EK: Because we were making a vérité film, we weren’t doing sit-down interviews, we were following things as they happened. I was shooting, and Christopher LaMarca, our director of photography, was often shooting with me, and Jules would be present as well. At the end of each day, we’d all get together. We were living together, so we would go to our communal space and sit on the couch and eat a lot of snacks and talk about what we had seen and the themes and ideas and perspectives we wanted to incorporate. There wasn’t a formal setup where we were putting up lights together and sitting down and asking questions. We were just following the story and creating a shared vision for how to interweave it and our themes. There are these tensions between faith and the spirit world and this idea of “cowboys and Indians,” because we were in this Western town. What would bring that to life?

JBNC: It was a constant dialogue, from the moment we were in the field together to the nights afterward to the edit. We were watching, working through our ideas, thinking through what stories to follow and how. It became a shared vision for what the project would be and could be. That was crucial in the edit, when we had thousands of hours of footage to put together. It was our North Star that helped us always get back to the film we wanted to make.

Julian Brave NoiseCat and his father Ed Archie NoiseCat look down at the Williams Lake Stampede from the top of “Indian Hill” on their road trip back to St. Joseph’s Mission, where Ed was born. (courtesy Emily Kassie/Sugarcane Film LLC)

H: And you both spent a lot of time living with Ed [Julian’s father].

JBNC: I lived with my dad the entire time. I moved in with him for the film, the book, for life in general. I had been on the East Coast for a decade, working in politics and journalism before turning full-time to writing and film. I moved back west to work on those projects. This film is so much about my relationship with my dad, and so is my book. We spent all this time together, and it was the first time I’d lived with him since I was a small child. That was core to the documentary and our camaraderie, to our ability to have some of the difficult conversations we had on camera.It also brought me closer to my family on the rez, which is within driving distance of where I live now. We spent a ton of time together, both when making the film and just in life. Bringing me closer to my people and my home was essential not just to the film, but also my life beyond that.

H: Is that kind of physical proximity the key to getting the participants to be vulnerable with you?

JBNC: Yeah. Obviously, being from that community is incredibly helpful. Still, from the moment Em showed up, she signaled to people that she was all in on this, that she was going to do it with a very loving, open presence in their lives. On the very first night, Chief Willie Sellars and Francis Johnson, Jr., a chief from a neighboring community called Esket, took Em down to the Fraser River. You could die going down this trail, and Em had her camera. They were holding onto her backpack to prevent her from sliding into the rapids. She was there until 4 am filming them dip-netting for sockeye [salmon]. From that, to descending to the bottom of a grave as it was being dug by Chief Willie Sellars, to living with the late Chief Rick Gilbert for a couple of weeks before he went to the Vatican, Em showed up – sometimes for things we weren’t even filming. That was the kind of relationship we built, and that made the trust you feel in the film possible.

EK: Wielded the right way, a camera can give people agency and tell them they matter. If you create the right space for people to be heard, it can be a profound tool that allows people to open up and to move through things. We approached people with respect and integrity and the belief that they were each worthy of epic storytelling. I think they could feel that from us.

Director Emily Kassie films investigators Charlene Belleau and Whitney Spearing searching for evidence of abuse at St.Joseph’s Mission. (photo courtesy Julian Brave NoiseCat/Sugarcane Film LLC)

H: Was it difficult to gain the level of trust and access to them that you achieved? You watch them go through some searing emotional moments. Julian, you share one yourself with your father.

JBNC: It was essential from the outset that we had affirmative consent. Part of the origin of the documentary is that the Williams Lake First Nation wanted this story to be told. The day before we approached them, their council had a conversation about this investigation and how they wanted it to be documented. They understood what we were doing. With all our participants — Rick Gilbert and my own family especially — we only would go there when it was the right time, when we had built up trust and people felt like they were ready.

In the early going, we asked Rick some hard questions about his experience at the school and his parentage. At the time, he appeared ready to talk about it, but then he felt a lot of shame and regret for sharing what he had, so we had a very explicit conversation with him over lunch a few weeks later where we told him, “Hey, we don’t need to use any of this. We don’t need you to participate at all. We just want to buy you lunch and get to know you and spend time with you. And if you ever feel open to going back there again, we are here and ready.” It took a number of months, but we ended up following Rick to Rome, where he confronted the Catholic order that abused him with his deepest, darkest secret: his parentage, which was from a rape at the mission. To get there with him, we had to learn a little bit, but more importantly, we had to build deep trusting relationships and be patient with people. We are not the agents of this story; they are.

Julian Brave NoiseCat and his father Ed Archie NoiseCat read an article detailing the circumstances of Ed’s birth at St. Joseph’s Mission. (photo courtesy Emily Kassie/Sugarcane Film LLC)

EK: One early conversation I had with Chris was that we’d exclusively use prime lenses, which can’t zoom. That means you have to move your body to get close to things. The film is quite close to its subjects. We felt that intimacy had to be earned, that my body would have to be close to them. That took time and trust. 

As Julian pointed out, Rick went from not trusting that we were the people to tell the story to allowing me to film him as he revealed to a priest the most difficult moment of his life. Being able to watch his face transform and for him to have the strength to do that was such a big journey, two years from where we started with him. 

With Julian and his father, I think I became part of the fabric of their lives. I was just around for so long. We became so close that by the time they were ready to have that conversation, we could film it. And I could feel Julian not just as a participant, but as my friend and co-director. Our connection — and Ed’s trust in us — allowed that scene to unfold.

Messages, some dating back a century, written by children on the walls of a barn on the site of the former St. Joseph’s Mission Indian residential school. (photo courtesy Christopher LaMarca/Sugarcane Film LLC)

H: One element of these events that hasn’t been reported on before your film is what looks to be a pattern of infanticide at this residential schools. Do you know of any further reporting being done on these crimes?

EK: This is a story that’s told in many communities about many schools. For the first time, this film presents testimony and evidence that it actually happened. We hope this film is a catalyst for this reporting to continue, both in Canada and the United States. We don’t think that this was particular to one school, and we hope the people covering the film will highlight that. This is new information, and the Catholic Church and the Canadian government have not yet been held accountable.

JBNC: It’s so fucking crazy that, as one of the directors of this documentary and a participant in it, I happen to be the son of the only known survivor of the incinerator at St. Joseph’s Mission. What are the fucking odds?

Rick Gilbert, a survivor of St. Joseph’s Mission, tends to the Catholic cemetery on the grounds of the school. (photo Christopher LaMarca/Sugarcane Film LLC)

Sugarcane (2024), directed by Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, continues at Film Forum, New York, and on screens at select theaters across the United States and Canada. 

 

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