'Sugarcane': a song to the resistance of a people

"There are so many things I shouldn't have kept to myself!" says a grandmother. "What things?" asks her grandson. And she remains silent, her gaze fixed on the horizon. She has her hands clasped on her belly and rotates her thumbs around each other. She says nothing. It is one of the conversations in the film. Sugarcane, another of the candidates for the Oscar for best documentary. Produced by National Geographic, you will find it on Disney+. It denounces the abuses of the Catholic Church in boarding schools and the missions that were established in Canada to convert indigenous people. It focuses on the Saint Joseph Mission, on the Sugarcane Indian reservation, in British Columbia. But it is only one case that reveals the patterns of infanticides that occurred in the hundreds of boarding schools that the governments of Canada and the United States promoted to solve what they called "the indigenous problem." The documentary is directed by Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat, son of one of the survivors of Saint Joseph. The discovery of dozens of children's graves near this mission will cause a national scandal that will revive interest in the past: "The ghosts of children have awakened these days," say the media. Murders, abuses, torture, disappearances and rapes committed by priests and nuns come to light. The after-effects of these atrocities continue to this day, with an indigenous community suffering from serious alcohol problems and a high suicide rate. Sugarcane The investigation continues. Beyond the scene where the ground is being studied to discover the secretly buried bodies, there is a striking image. In a barn they find the inscriptions that the children left engraved on the wood of the wall: their names, their laments, their despair. The hypocrisy of the institutions is also revealed: the Canadian government, the police and the Church. Now they are trying to repair, with more appearance than will, all that they have ignored and despised for decades.

The documentary is in no hurry to tell the story and never places the survivors in front of the camera. A certain intimacy is preserved through more familiar conversations. And often it is the silences that express the suffering and the abuse. Few can verbalize what they suffered. The whole story breathes a tense calm, the somewhat disturbing tranquility of the Wild West. Amidst the harshness of the story, the need to show the culture that was attempted to be annihilated emerges: the rituals, the customs and the indigenous language, which few still remember and which is on the verge of disappearing. It is a way of telling us that, despite the genocide, they have survived and will try to perpetuate their traditions.

Sugarcane This is a documentary that seeks to restore the dignity of the stigmatized and mistreated indigenous community. It is a cry for support. It shows the difficulty of wiping out an entire people, but also how the pain inflicted is transmitted over many generations.