St. Joseph’s Mission Indian Residential School, a site featured in a scene from the new documentary Sugarcane. (Sugarcane Film LLC)
This story contains difficult subject matter relating to Canada’s and America’s history of operating residential schools for Indigenous people. The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition has gathered resources for self-care at this site .
A new documentary, “Sugarcane,” recounts the searing, traumatic history of colonization and forced assimilation of British Columbia’s Indigenous people through a network of what are known as Indian residential schools.
The film features former students and their descendants seeking truth, reconciliation and healing from the nation’s legacy of those schools — institutions that the Canadian federal government now says carried out a “cultural genocide” through physical and sexual abuse.
After recent screenings in Sitka and Anchorage — and with the approach of the annual Sept. 30 commemoration for survivors — advocates say the film’s themes are as relevant and urgent just across the Canadian border in Alaska.