Sugarcane review – trauma and truth unearthed in Indigenous children’s schools scandal

This deeply disquieting and indeed enraging documentary is about the hundreds of residential “Indian schools” for Indigenous children in Canada, largely administered by the Catholic church from the 1930s until the 1990s. It highlights the grotesque scandal of one in particular: the St Joseph’s Mission school in British Columbia (long since closed) where Indigenous children were routinely subject to physical and sexual abuse, with girls impregnated by their rapist-abusers. Some prosecutions of individual priests were brought. Reports were made. But very clearly, this hardly scratches the surface.

The film-makers speak to community members in the Sugarcane Reserve in British Columbia near the hated school and we get some sense of the pain and inherited trauma. But more than that: new radar technology is now revealing babies’ graves around the school’s property and the film recounts the case in 1959 of a newborn baby apparently abandoned by an Indigenous mother and fortuitously rescued from a garbage incinerator by a dairyman who happened to hear crying. We hear a trial report: the mother was sentenced to a year in jail with the judge sternly noting that had the baby not been found in time, this would have been a murder charge. But on that subject … if the school were simply quietly allowing these rape victims’ babies to die and get buried or disposed of, then wouldn’t that also be homicide?

Perhaps the most curious moment in this whole film is the frankly less than impressive speech made by the pope, who in 2022 invited Canadian Indigenous people to the Vatican and read aloud a written apology about “shame and sorrow” – a statement in Italian, not the pope’s native tongue nor that of his listeners. He then concluded in English with a bright and smiley farewell (“Bye, bye!”) as if they were a party of schoolchildren. Could it be time for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to reopen this sickening cold case? Elaborate, florid papal apologies aren’t going to cut it.

• Sugarcane is in UK cinemas from 20 September.