The discovery of hundreds of unmarked graves at an Indian residential school in Canada in 2021 was just the catalyst for “Sugarcane.”
Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, the filmmakers behind the Oscar-nominated documentary, spent years investigating the truth behind just one of the institutions. “Sugarcane,” now streaming on Hulu, paints a horrifying picture of the systemic abuses inflicted by the state-funded school and exposes for the first time a pattern of infanticide and babies born to Indigenous girls and fathered by priests.
In the year since it debuted at the Sundance Film Festival, “Sugarcane” has screened at the White House, for Canadian Parliament and for over a dozen indigenous communities in North America, sparking a grassroots movement and reckoning to find the truth about the other schools. It also marks the first time that an Indigenous North American filmmaker has received an Oscar nomination.
From the 19th century until the 1970s, more than 150,000 First Nations …