Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.In the 1890s, the Canadian government devised a solution for what was chillingly termed “the Indian problem”. Children from indigenous communities were removed from their families and sent to church-run boarding schools, where they were made to learn English and practise Catholicism. Abuse — physical, psychological and sexual — was rife at these sites, at which some 3,000 children are known to have died in the century up to the last school closure in 1997. The discovery of almost 1000 unmarked graves on the grounds of former schools in British Columbia and Saskatchewan in 2021 suggests the real death toll is likely much higher. Sugarcane, a new National Geographic documentary, follows an indigenous community in Williams Lake, BC, where an investigation into the atrocities allegedly perpetrated at the nearby St Joseph’s Mission school is ongoing. Directed by Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat — whose father was born at St Joseph’s — the film is an outstandingly accomplished feature-length debut and a feat of docu-journalism. Uncompromising as an interrogation of systemic colonialist abuse and intensely intimate as a portrait of some of those who survived, it makes for challenging viewing. But this is not just a narrative of brutality and suffering. There is resilience and intergenerational unity alongside collective trauma and national shame. “You’re bearing witness to a time in history when our people are going to stand up,” Charlene Belleau, a former First Nation chief, residential school survivors’ advocate and researcher in the St Joseph’s investigation, stirringly tells NoiseCat.The film focuses as much on the sharing of long repressed memories as on the official investigation into the schools. We hear testimonies of inhuman cruelty and crimes, as well as the shadows cast by these horrific experiences. Some of the interviewees discuss struggles with alcoholism and feelings of internalised guilt which stopped them from seeking help (though often those who did speak out were ignored). In one wrenching scene, NoiseCat’s father Ed Archie — the survivor of an attempted infanticide — discusses the impact his unprocessed anguish has had on his relationship with his son.As filmmakers, Kassie and NoiseCat marry rigour with compassion, giving the survivors the platform to talk while understanding that some things are too hard to put into words. Much of the documentary’s power, then, comes from revealing, unarticulated details — the pauses, quiet tears and trembles that punctuate conversation — and evocative, elegiac imagery, such as the lingering shot of snowy fields near St Joseph’s, suggestive of things silently covered. Of course it is not only incumbent on survivors to confront the past. Here we see Pope Francis and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau acknowledge failings and offer condolences to indigenous groups. But for those who have carried the trauma for decades — or for the many who have died by suicide — such public apologies are too late. For the living, they are insufficient.What, then, does justice and accountability look like when most of the perpetrators are dead? What does closure mean to those whose lives have already been irrevocably affected? Sugarcane doesn’t necessarily find the answers, but it does recognise the importance of asking the difficult questions.★★★★★On Disney+ from December 10
