‘Sugarcane’ director Emily Kassie on ‘horrors’ of forced assimilation, child abuse, and murder taking place at Indian boarding school

For their National Geographic documentary “Sugarcane,” co-directors Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat investigated abuse and missing children at an Indian residential school, sparking a reckoning on the nearby Sugarcane Reserve in Canada. The directors met roughly 10 years ago while working as reporters, and became fast friends when they were sat at desks next to each other.

After their careers took them on different paths, Kassie and NoiseCat continued to look for a project that would allow them to work together. “In May of 2021, I got the New York Times notification that there had been potential unmarked graves on the sites of these Indian residential schools in Canada,” Kassie says. “I grew up in Canada. Despite having covered all of these conflicts, I had never turned my lens on my own country and the horrors it perpetrated against its first peoples. The first thing I did was text Julian and asked him if he wanted to work on something together.” Watch the video interview above.

While Kassie waited to hear back from NoiseCat, she discovered a search about to take place at the Williams Lake First Nation. “That’s when Julian called me back,” she reveals. After telling NoiseCat the location of her documentary, Kassie says her co-director “went silent.” He finally stated, “That’s crazy. That’s the school my family attended and where my father was born. That’s all I’ve ever known.” Out of 139 schools in Canada, Kassie happened to choose the one NoiseCat’s father’s life began.

In that moment the documentary became personal, with Ed Archie NoiseCat becoming a prominent subject. They discovered he was the only infant to survive an incinerator, where he was placed in an ice cream box to be burned alive. He also reconciles his relationship with his son in the film. “We never planned for Julian to be in this story,” Kassie reveals. “I was looking to him to be a creative partner with his deep knowledge of this world. Even though he had this tremendous connection to this school, I was very weary of the idea of him being a participant. I knew how hard that would be to take that on. He was also terrified of what it could do to his family, of the implications it could have on his life. We forged ahead for a year not touching his story.” Eventually, NoiseCat’s story mattered too much to leave out.

Kassie explains the story further, noting, “For over 150 years, in both the United States and Canada, Indigenous children were removed from their homes in a program of forced assimilation. They were brought to these boarding schools, there were 417 federally funded schools in the United States and 139 in Canada. The idea was to ‘kill the Indian, save the man.'” In Canada they said the system was to “get rid of the Indian problem.”

“They would take kids from their homes and bring them to these schools,” she continued. “They’d cut off their hair, they wouldn’t be allowed to speak their language. They’d force on them not only a program of Christian values and learnings, particularly the Catholic church ran the majority of the schools in Canada, but also systematically abuse them, force them into labor, and sexually abuse them. As our film breaks news for the first time, there was a system at this particular school of babies who were born at the school being put into the school’s incinerator.”

Kassie is an Emmy and Peabody-nominated investigative journalist and filmmaker. Her work for The New York Times, PBS, and Netflix ranges from America’s immigrant detention system to the Taliban’s crackdown on women.