With ‘Sugarcane,’ Lily Gladstone Wants to Force North Americans to Face “an Act of Collective Genocide”

Lily Gladstone remembers where she was when she first heard that over 200 unmarked graves had possibly been found at Kamloops Indian Residential School—a segregated boarding school for First Nations youth run by the Catholic Church in Canada. At the time, Gladstone was in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, in the midst of filming Killers of the Flower Moon—Martin Scorsese’s staggering film about unrelenting atrocities committed against a different Indigenous community, the Osage Nation, in the 1920s.

“I remember Leo [DiCaprio] texting that to me, asking in all caps and exclamations and question marks, ‘What the hell is this?’” Gladstone exclusively tells VF over Zoom. She remembers how she responded to her bewildered costar: “It really is nothing new to us.”

Just as the Osage were being targeted by a murderous conspiracy bent on taking their oil-rich land, First Nations children in Canada were being separated from their families and sent to boarding schools like Kamloops Indian Residential School, which opened in 1890 and operated until 1978. There, they experienced forced assimilation, abuse, and often worse.

Chief Willie Sellars digs a grave for communty member Stan Wycotte who took his life on the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada. (Credit: Emily Kassie/Sugarcane Film LLC)Emily Kassie

Sugarcane, the documentary from filmmakers Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, dives headfirst into the aftermath of the discovery of these unmarked graves, finding and following First Nation survivors of Canada’s boarding schools and reckoning with the dark legacy of these institutions. Their documentary premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury award for directing. Since then, Sugarcane has been acquired by National Geographic and has played at film festivals across the country—racking up awards, and most recently leading the Critics Choice Documentary Awards with eight nominations. Now Gladstone has boarded Sugarcane as an executive producer.

“You’re not going to find any Indigenous person in North America, Canada, the US, elsewhere, or really Indigenous people worldwide that didn’t go through some kind of program like this,” Gladstone says. “It’s the second wave of colonization.”

The film is deeply personal for Gladstone, as both a member of the Blackfeet tribe and an artist. Before she became the first Native American actress to win a Golden Globe and be nominated for a best-actress Academy Award for Killers of the Flower Moon, Gladstone was a theater artist and activist. “I spent a good part of my 20s doing theater work for social change and social justice,” she says. Part of that involved starring in a one-woman educational show about the Indigenous boarding school experience.

“There was a scene that talked about how the graveyard was full of unmarked graves. And just the resistance I would get—not from kids, but from moms, educators, from teachers questioning if that was real, if that actually happened,” Gladstone says. She remembers trying to explain the reality of the conditions at those early Indigenous boarding schools. They were “not concentration camps in the sense that you’re used to learning about them, but it was an act of collective genocide and extreme neglect, extreme abuse.”

Gladstone knows this lack of knowledge about Indigenous history is baked into the American education system. “Most Americans’ understanding of American Indian history seems to stop with the Battle of Little Bighorn, the Indian Wars,” she says. “How do we get to where we’re at now, and this huge chapter of the assimilation era—this assimilation period across North America?”

Rick Gilbert, former Chief of the Williams Lake First Nation, in the church on the Sugarcane Indian Reserve. (Credit: Christopher LaMarca/Sugarcane Film LLC)Christopher LaMarca

Her ties to Sugarcane, however, run deeper than just her passion for activism. “My grandmother, who I lived with from age 11 until she passed away two summers ago—she’s a boarding school survivor,” Gladstone says.

Gladstone’s grandmother, also named Lily, attended Chemawa Indian School near Salem, Oregon, the oldest continually operating Native American off-reservation boarding school still open in the US. “She was born and raised in Lapwai, Idaho on the Nez Perce Reservation,” the actor says. “She and her siblings were sent to Chemawa, to South Portland and Oregon. Her younger sister asked to come home and refused to go back.”

Her grandmother, Gladstone says, was a typist who had children very early and spent her career working in public transit for the metro-bus system in Seattle. The actor describes her namesake as sharp and talented—perhaps more talented than the world would allow a woman, let alone an Indigenous woman, to be in the mid-20th century. “One of the things I loved about her: She typed 140 words per minute on a typewriter. She just flew at it,” Gladstone says. “She could pick up anything…She would collect, what are they, Rubik’s cubes? And just read the instructions, and she would just sit down and crack Rubik’s cubes from having read the instructions.”

Gladstone adds, “She was very much a strict rule follower and a very smart woman. I think she followed rules and fell in line and stayed sweet and kept her head down.”

This tendency may have been a double-edged sword. “My grandma didn’t talk much about her experience” at Chemawa, Gladstone says. “When I’d asked her when I was younger, I definitely got the edit of ‘Oh, my friends were great. It’s when I became a Catholic, because my friends went to the Catholic service instead of the Presbyterian one, and I wanted to sit with them.’ That’s about all she would say.” But in the last years of her life, when her grandmother was suffering from dementia, “some pretty disturbing memories came out,” Gladstone says.

In 2016, unmarked graves were also found on the grounds of Chemawa Indian School, just as they’d be found at Kamloops five years later. “I don’t know if my grandmother ever allowed for that space to open up enough for her to heal from it,” Gladstone says. “I think she was surviving from whatever it was she witnessed… It’s knowing that she knew kids who had lost their lives there, or whatever she talked about as being rough there. It’s like, What did she experience, and what did she survive?”

Courtesy of National Geographic.

Sugarcane asks these questions directly of survivors, with deeply emotional results. “There’s no mincing words. There’s nothing edited out,” says Gladstone. “You’re talking to survivors and you’re confronting that grief and you’re confronting that reality in a way that needs to be done because it’s a hard thing for people to palate.”

Gladstone is well aware that we’re entering a political period in which some people are actively trying to erase history. “There’s basically a light ban of Killers of the Flower Moon or any book about the Tulsa race massacres,” she says. “We’re coming into a time where we are once again fighting tooth and nail in a lot of places in this country to not have the truth of our history as a Nation in the States and in Canada erased. In Canada, there’s a huge pushback of residential school deniers, the same way that you have Holocaust deniers—and they’ve been getting a lot more vocal since Kamloops.”

She boarded Sugarcane to combat this movement, combining her artistry and activism to make sure these stories are not lost—no matter how difficult they are to hear. “It’s when we stop telling our stories, when we start maybe performing things that are not true, that’s a part of colonization,” Gladstone says. And while her grandmother wasn’t able to see Sugarcane, Gladstone did feel some catharsis sharing the experience with other Indigenous elders in her community.

“My grandma was the love of my life,” she says. “It was so moving in this documentary, watching elders share that with each other, demand some kind of acknowledgment of it, some kind of repercussions.” She can’t help but get choked up. “There’s just something so raw and undoing when you see an elder cry,” Gladstone says. “It feels like the world is upside down.”

Courtesy of National Geographic.

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