Emily Kassie on Her Film ‘Sugarcane’

Your Fellows project is the film Sugarcane, which tells the story of an investigation into abuse and missing children at an Indian residential school. How did you come to make this film?

In Spring of 2021, when news broke about a discovery of unmarked graves at a former Indian Residential School, I had this gut-feeling. I reached out to my old colleague Julian Brave NoiseCat (Fellows Class of 2022) right away. Julian is a tremendous writer, historian and storyteller. We worked our first reporting jobs together and had been trying to find a project to collaborate on ever since. Then, I went looking for a First Nation that had announced they were beginning their own search and found an article in the Williams Lake Tribune about Chief Willie Sellars. I reached out. He called me back that day. “The Creator has always had good timing for me,” he said. “Just yesterday our Council said we need someone to document our search.” Two weeks later Julian called again. I told him I was planning on following the search at St. Joseph’s Mission near Williams Lake. He paused. “That’s the school where my family was sent and where my father was born…” Out of 139 schools, I chose the one school where Julian’s origin story began.

While you have covered stories across the globe, this project brings you back to your home country of Canada. How was your experience as a journalist and filmmaker different in a more familiar place?

Sugarcane marks the first time I’ve turned my lens on my own country, its original sin and the horrors it perpetrated against its First Peoples. I felt a more direct responsibility to help uncover the truth and make sure that Canadians understood this foundational atrocity on which the country was built. The last residential school closed my first year of kindergarten and yet I didn’t know these schools existed until I became a journalist. We were brought up with a national identity as peacekeepers. Canada was supposed to be a gentler, kinder version of our southern neighbors. That illusion was shattered for me. In another sense, I grew up in Toronto and had never been to British Columbia, let alone the rugged Cariboo region in its interior, which is culturally quite different. Williams Lake is a cowtown, a milieu fit for a western, so there was a lot of learning.

As someone who is not Indigenous or part of the First Nations, how did you build trust with your subjects? What considerations did you make as an outsider telling a story that is central to Secwépemc history and identity?

As a baseline, I operate from a place of empathy, and see my role as someone who can listen and create space for people to be heard. It was of course important to recognize the power dynamics, the history of extraction by government, society and media and make sure that participation was an empowering choice made by participants and the community. Trust was built mostly by the way we decided to document the story—living alongside the community and shooting vérité. We were embedded in our participants’ lives, caring for them, spending time outside of filming, attending community events, living on the reserve for part of production and participating in ceremonies guided by elders. One of our participants, Charlene Belleau, who has been doing this work for decades, was central to approaching each part of the process in a culturally centered way. This story also needed a strong Indigenous voice and perspective at the helm and Julian was central to that. He speaks the Secwépemc language, can engage with Indigenous narrative traditions and put the film in conversation with Indigenous art in a way I couldn’t. I had the incredible opportunity to learn from him and the community.

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