Victim and victimization

Sugarcane
National Geographic, 2024

Racing to keep our language alive: H̓ágṃ́ṇtxv Qṇtxv Tx̌ (We’re all we got)
The Guardian, 2025

Films reviewed by Richard Butler

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In his final book, The Power of Story, the late Harold Johnson describes what he refers to as a “victim story:”

… victim is different from victimized. If you tell yourself a victim story, your life story is defined by that status: you are a victim. In a victimized story, something was done to you. It happened to you, but it is not who you are. You are still in charge of that. You can tell your own story.[i]

[i] The Power of Story: on Truth, the Trickster and New Fictions for a New Era Biblioasis, 2022.

Victim stories make headlines, sell newspapers, and otherwise lead to wider media distribution.

The most notorious example of a victim story is the initial coverage of “mass graves” supposedly discovered in 2021 at the residential school in Tk’emlups te Secwepemc through the use of ground-penetrating radar.¹ Mass graves became unmarked graves of 215 children. The innuendo was that the graves were unmarked to cover up something sinister about the children’s deaths. Ultimately, public statements on the matter resolved into a sacred covenant and underground anomalies which could potentially be unmarked graves.

More recently, there has been media coverage of the release of a report on new archival research into the number of unexplained deaths at the residential school at Penelakut Island.

That research seeks greater clarity on an aspect of historical victimization of Indigenous children, families, and culture through Canada’s residential school system.

However, the Penelakut story was juiced up by headlines and reportage about disposing of bodies of murdered babies by secret burial, by throwing them into the sea, or by burning them in one of the school’s two incinerators.

Terry Glavin patiently explains that the disposal stories came third-hand from another fellow “who’s been trying to drink himself to death owing to his own painful memories.”²

It was a classic example of passing on a victim story with little or no connection to the research findings or the media reporting about them.

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Each of the films reviewed here considers aspects of victimization.

Each also makes its contribution to the ongoing conversation around Indigenous truth and reconciliation in modern-day British Columbia.

Sugarcane is the better known of the two films. It has received rave reviews and was nominated for an Academy Award. However, some have questioned its lack of evidence and sought to debunk its key allegations. So further, more nuanced consideration, seems warranted. In particular, the film seems in many respects to fall within what Harold Johnson describes as a “victim story.” That will be the theme of the first part of this review.

Racing to keep our language alive is a wonderful, positive, forward-looking film which deserves more attention than it has so far received. It is full of light and hope and epitomizes knowledge seeking and knowledge preservation—specifically with respect to the loss and recovery of the Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) language. The second part of this review will show the approach taken by the Haíɫzaqv film in response to victimization—an approach markedly different from taken that in Sugarcane. 

Sugarcane

Sugarcane shows how easy it is to slide from seeking the particulars of victimization into the making of a victim story.

At the heart of the Sugarcane film is the story of Julian Brave NoiseCat, who was evidently prompted by the Tk’emlups announcement and uncertainties about his own family past to do some digging of his own.

He calls his father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, on Ed’s birthday—significant because of the reported circumstances surrounding Ed’s birth. “Looking at the place you were born,” Julian tells him.

As we come to learn, Ed’s mother, Antoinette, had left her infant child in a shoebox in the incinerator of the St. Joseph’s mission residential school near Williams Lake. He was found and placed for adoption with a non-Indigenous family. Ed’s mother was convicted of abandonment.

But Ed doesn’t want to know—initially,  at least.

Julian eventually persuades Ed to come with him to Williams Lake. On the way, in an extremely poignant moment in their shared motel room, we come to the crux of the matter: intergenerational abandonment—Ed by his mother; and later Julian by his father separating from his mother.

Julian enquires: “How did it happen?” Ed aggressively replies by asking whether Julian is looking for some sort of acknowledgement. The answer is Yes.

“I didn’t leave you, son,” Ed says: “What was I supposed to do when I was lost in a fuckin’ drunk, just going like a madman.  At the time what I told your Mom [was], I don’t know what the hell is wrong, I’m cryin’ my fuckin’ eyes out every day, every day, and I don’t know why.   That’s what I said to her.”

Both men are now weeping.

Toward the end of their healing journeys, Ed and Julian visit Ed’s mother to fill in the gap in Ed’s existence as a baby, to help him find some peace:

Ed: So Mom, we’re on this journey, just tryin’ to heal, so we just wanted to come and sit with you, I guess.  I just, I mean there’s just, I mean there’s one [deep sigh] gap in my existence as a baby, and I think that if, if I were to know that I would, I could find some peace.

Antoinette:  I don’t like to talk about it.  [voice breaking]  I went through a lot with it. …. It sticks with me all the time.  I just wonder how, why I am still here yet, and I pray all the time, you know, for things that I ….

Ed: Mom, we love you.  I love you so much.  I love you.

The story closes with the two men seen in a field near Williams Lake, Julian brushing Ed with an eagle feather. Cleansing. Healing.

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The NoiseCat story could easily stand on its own as a powerful presentation of seeking personal truths and finding interpersonal reconciliation.

But Sugarcane offers more. The film shows how others have set out to build a broader St. Joseph’s story around the tenuous connection between Ed and the mission incinerator.³

The broader story seeks to identify multiple instances of missing and murdered children; bodies incinerated or otherwise covertly disposed of; priests getting students pregnant; secrecy and denial;  suffering and suicides.

Footage in support of this broader story includes the following scenes:

• ground-penetrating radar “to find” the unmarked graves;

• archival research to enumerate missing children and evidence the relocation of abusive priests;

• a suspenseful moment in the shadowy loft of the school barn, where researchers shine their flashlights and “discover,” between the ceiling joists, the scrawled initials of students and a message about Lucy’s baby and “73 days before home time;”

• painful interviews with former students telling of whippings in the barn loft, of sexual abuse in the dorms at night: “I was abused by Father Price; nobody listened: I told my grandmother; I told a nun; I told a priest; who told me to go to the RCMP, who told my Dad and I was beaten; so I got a bottle of wine and got drunk and I was an alcoholic after that;”

• Rick Gilbert describing the “cattle truck” coming in the first week of September and “people [parents?]⁴ dragging kids to that truck … no-one escaped;”

• Larry Emile having been among five boys who saw nuns packing a baby down by the incinerator and one of them throwing the baby in: “I know I’m the only survivor of that group that seen that;”

• researchers going through the RCMP files on Bishop O’Connor who [with Phyllis Bob,  a 25-year-old seamstress working at the school]  conceived a child, and the uncertainty around what became of it;

• Wesley Jackson—a former employee—recalling being told by a priest to clean out the incinerator and bury the ashes, which he said included bones [of some sort].

The broader St. Joseph’s story features Julian’s auntie, Charlene Belleau, indefatigable in her search for truth.

Two scenes are particularly memorable in that regard.

In the first, Charlene is with Julian in the barn loft, smudging. She says to him:

Our elders are now looking to you to listen to our stories.  You’re bearing witness to a time in history where our people are going to stand up, and you’re going to make sure that people are held accountable for everything that they’ve done to us.

Accountability to victims. 

I don’t think that sort of accountability is primarily what Julian had in mind, although it is clearly what Charlene hopes the film will accomplish.

That hope is made manifest in the second scene. Charlene and her team have constructed an evidence board of the kind familiar from television crime drama, with names and photographs of suspects and victims, annotations of material events, and strands of red wool making connections between and among them.

“We always knew,” Charlene says. “Did they think we’d be stupid all of our lives, the rest of our lives, and nobody would ever find out these things?”

Yet it is not clear from the evidence board (nor from the film as a whole) exactly what has been found out. There is a singular lack of specificity. And what does the totality of the gathered evidence really add up to?

To be fair, Charlene’s investigation is still a work in progress. There are some possible lines of inquiry in relation to specific events, but not yet proof of criminal acts. Nor proof of the film’s broader victim story; but mainly gestures in that regard: “We always knew.”

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Sugarcane also features an intriguing ambiguity, in the person of Chief Rick Gilbert.

Three segments are pivotal in setting up that ambiguity.

In the first, Chief Rick’s wife, Anna, is seen trying to persuade him, through links in DNA evidence obtained from Ancestry.com, that his father was Principal James McGrath. Bullying might be the better word. Rick shakes his head and says he needs more evidence.

In the second segment, Rick is shown among those who were invited to the Vatican to meet with Pope Francis. What the Pope said to them, in Italian, was doubtless incomprehensible to him and the others. Rick is afterwards shown wandering around Vatican City, apparently adrift in all the confusion. He ends up at the offices of the Oblates, the missionary organization which ran St. Joseph’s. There, in no uncertain terms, he tells Father Louis Lougen, the superior general, the following:  

My grandmother, she was abused at the mission and she tried to run away.  I was also abused by a priest at the residential school.  And I, I kept that a secret for about 30 years after I left.  And my mother was abused by a priest, and that’s how I was born.

[Rick was born in 1946—the last year Father McGrath was principal. Rick’s mother had left St. Joseph’s two years before and was, by that date, already married to Rick’s legal father.⁵]

My point about the second segment is this: the film intentionally leaves uncertainty around whether, in the intensity of the moment in the office in Rome, Chief Rick was confused or misremembering. Or had he somehow come round to Anna’s view?

The third segment shows Anna on a lawnmower cutting the grass in the cemetery, with Rick on the other side of the fence, digging for evidence of unmarked graves. Just below the turf, his shovel hits something hard. He uncovers it and finds a tiny, buried gravestone. Into the stone is carved a small cross. He runs his finger over the stone and the cross, clearing them of soil. Unmarked as to the decedent’s name but not unmarked in the mind of God. Confusing on so many levels.

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In closing, there is legitimately a story to be told of victimization of Indigenous children at St. Joseph’s residential school.

That victimization included powerful and irrefutable instances of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, vividly retelling the deplorable history of residential schools documented in the TRC report and elsewhere.

However, most of  Sugarcane describes the process of constructing a composite victim story.

The stated goal of those searching for information in support of that victim story is the desire to achieve personal and institutional accountability. Their focus therefore turns to identifying specific victimizers. Regrettably, doing so revictimizes the witnesses, who were asked to go through what they suffered all over again for the camera.

The composite victim story, in all its spectacular, under-supported, and contradictory detail,⁶ has been the highlight of the rave reviews the film received in the mainstream media. Yet those rave reviewers do not mention the film’s inherent ambiguity—manifest in all the contradictions and gaps in the evidence, the depiction of Charlene generally, and the scene in which Chief Rick digs up the grave and finds the cross.

Or perhaps on the other hand, as the film’s equally vociferous critics have insisted, there was no intended ambiguity at all. On that reading, the filmmakers themselves become implicated in revictimization.

One thing is certain: nothing is simple about this film, the current events it depicts, or the historical events it describes. Whatever its intentions, Sugarcane darkly and brilliantly captures the confusion around the residential schools, generally, and the torment which seemingly still afflicts almost everyone involved.

Racing to keep our language alive

The contrast of the openings of the two films could not be more visually striking or telling:

• Sugarcane—dark and brooding; a mottled statue of Virgin and child in the mission cemetery;

• The Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) film—a scene of the pregnant belly of a woman lying down, the room dim, the belly warmed by the light of a single candle. Fingers tracing across the belly, a voice speaking in the Híɫzaqvḷalanguageoverthe child in the womb. Peace and quiet and hope.

The Haíɫzaqv film is about their traditional territory, where ancestors descended from the sky; about the decline of their language, spoken fluently by everyone before contact and now by only 12 individuals; about the passing of time, about redeeming the Haíɫzaqv present and future.

It is about victimization in the loss of language, but unlike Sugarcane, there is no hint of victimhood anywhere.

I intend, over the balance of this review, to let the sequence of scenes in the Haíɫzaqv film speak for themselves in that regard.

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It is summer time in Waglisla (Bella Bella). We meet Marvin, in his early teens, jumping off pilings into the sea, cavorting with his friends, not a care in the world. Then on the computer at home taking lessons in how to count in Híɫzaqvḷa. “I’m bored,” Marvin says. Totally bored, as only a boy of his age can look. Later, happier, gaming with a friend. 

We then meet Nusi, a community leader and carver, in his studio. Nusi is reflecting on the residential schools and the loss of language.⁷ A victimization story.

Not long ago … we went to jail for speaking our language. [i] [But] we’re still here … [and] it’s through the power of the language that we’re able to be here. I’d love for all the kids to learn how to speak the language.

[i] Well not exactly, but close enough. Neighbouring Kwakwakaʼwakw were sent to jail in the 1920s for violating the Indian Act ban on potlatches—ceremonies where stories and singing and dancing and art works expressed who the people were, what bound them together and what always had. Those things and activities collectively were their “language.”

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The seasons turn and we are outside the big house; and then inside where Marvin and his friends are practising singing and dancing and drumming. Marvin looks disengaged. They all do.

The teacher says she wants better help from them with the singing. She tells them a story. She tells them she felt lost on her first day of school in Vancouver, scared without her sister. Then a kid by the stairwell said “You are so ugly you don’t even belong on the face of this earth.” So, from that day on at school, she says, I hated being an Indian.

When she came home, she says, she wanted to compose a song to make all the children in the village feel good about who they are: “We are Haíɫzaqv, we are strong, we are proud, we are beautiful.”

Not a victim story.

Marvin, with his head down, glancing at the others, laughing a little behind his hand, feeling awkward.

Later, with his friends, one of them says he felt pretty good doing the drumming. Marvin says he did too, but was pretty shy about the singing: “I need a Híɫzaqvḷa teacher with me.”

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Later still in the year. Nusi with his family on the beach. Later, on the way home, he says:

It’s all connected; the language came from the land. We are able to go out onto the land and bring the kids, so they’re not on their Wifi anywhere … and [are] forced to use a different part of their brains, which brings out a different part of their being.[i]

[i] I am reliably informed that Nusi’s comment about Wifi is directed to kids in general. His own children have very limited access in any event.

A father (Nusi?) in the forest showing his children ancient ochre paintings on stone. “Can we take this one home?” asks one of them. “No,” the father says, “it stays here because this is where it comes from.”  Then—”this is our home too.”

Marvin has caught a salmon. Back on the dock, a young man shows the kids how to clean it. An elder repeats the young man’s explanation in Híɫzaqvḷa. Another gets the children to repeat the word for salmon roe, a traditional staple and an ontological source of Haíɫzaqv life.

Marvin is taking part in wellness class at Kvai, about a two-hour boat ride from Waglisla. He is the only boy there. A peace offering is given in Híɫzaqvḷa. Marvin takes part in the exercises, able to count along as he had learned to do in his home lessons. Later, Marvin alone by a fire, praying in Híɫzaqvḷa: “Thank you Creator for what you’ve done for us.”

Nusi at home, playing with his daughter, feeding an Elmo toy. In Híɫzaqvḷa, “Eat Elmo eat.” Then chanting, using his son’s small drum, with daughter and Elmo listening. He explains:

I like to sing to ground myself every once in a while. It’s where I get my power from. I can’t describe the feeling or the medicine it provides. I don’t get that feeling anywhere else … that happy, that uplifted.

Now back with Marvin at Kvai: walking, singing in Híɫzaqvḷa, gently beating his own drum, slowly in time with his steps. Overcome with emotion, he looks out over the sea where the sun is going down: “So beautiful.” The setting sunlight on his face creates the same skin tones as the candlelight on the pregnant belly in the opening of the film.

Snow is falling. An elder has died. Aerial shots of Waglisla in winter. Marvin out with his auntie (?) delivering food—possibly to a bereaved neighbour. “It’s been a heavy couple of weeks for the community,” Auntie says. “Everyone stepping up and helping out.” Marvin: “Yeah … yeah.” Auntie: “Always my lifesaver, Marv.”

Overwhelmingly touching.

Marvin walking in the snow with two other kids, gender indeterminate. Talking about asking a girl on a date. One of them: “Do you know how to say snow?” Marvin answers.

Knowing Híɫzaqvḷa is now cool, it seems. So are girls. “Can’t wait til summer,” Marvin says. Jumping into the sea, fishing, maybe going out with girls. The future.

Nusi painting a design on a door panel:

I was a lazy boy and didn’t want to go to school. But it’s come full circle for me. I soon realized there is nobody else going to fight for our language, for our ceremony. We’re the only Haíɫzaqv in the world. We’re all we’ve got.

Contrast Sugarcane’s preoccupation with accountability for the past.

A ceremony in the big house. Nusi’s son Eli drumming and singing, Nusi beside him. Marvin in the audience but interested. Marvin now part of the ceremony, drumming along and smiling, now singing as the tempo increases.

Scenes of a birth. Blessing in Híɫzaqvḷa. The baby falls asleep.

Closing Credits:

Over the course of filming, the community lost an additional five fluent elders. Today only seven fluent elders remain. But more young people are learning Híɫzaqvḷa and 18 community members could be fluent soon.

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I very much like this film.⁸ Looking back over the scenes as I have described them, it may seem a little scripted and artificial. But it doesn’t feel that way while watching. The imagery is unrelentingly beautiful, the overall message both moving and inspiring.

Racing to keep our language alive: H̓ágṃ́ṇtxv Qṇtxv Tx̌ (We’re all we got) has so far managed to escape much notice in the popular media. It is nonetheless a remarkable testament to community truth and reconciliation, every bit as poignant as the NoiseCat story in Sugarcane, and brilliant in its own brighter, forward-looking way. “Uplifting,” as Nusi would say.

It has my highest possible recommendation.

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Richard Butler lives on the traditional territory of the lekwungen-speaking Peoples, a retired lawyer and sometime law professor, and more recently a writer on various Indigenous subjects. He is the author of Taking Reconciliation Personally, I Dare Say… Conversations with Indigeneity, and the recent title What Is This? Who Am I?: Culturally Informed Appreciation of Coastal Peoples’ Artworks, published through A & R Publishing. [Editor’s Note: Richard Butler recently wrote the essay An Exercise in Futility and has recently reviewed books by Philip Seagram, Val Napoleon, Rebecca Johnson, Richard Overstall and Debra McKenzie (eds.), Angela Cameron, Sari Graben and Val Napoleon (eds.), Adam Jones, The Honourable Murray Sinclair CC, Mazina Giizhik, and Reverend Al Tysick for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster

1. See C.P. Champion and Thomas Flannigan (eds), Grave error : how the media misled us (and the truth about residential schools) Dorchester Books, 2023, reviewed in The British Columbia Review. ↩︎
2. See Terry Glavin, https://therealstory.substack.com/p/progressive-journalism-is-reactionary ; see also https://therealstory.substack.com/p/try-not-to-misplace-your-marbles. ↩︎
3. Neither Ed nor his mother attended St. Joseph’s. Nor did Ray Price, Ed’s Indigenous father. Nina Green, “Sugarcane’s horrific false and unverified claim,” https://irsrg.ca/articles/sugarcanes-horrific-false-and-unverified-claim/. ↩︎
4. Points in square brackets not in the film. ↩︎
5. Id. ↩︎
6. See Barbara Kay, “Oscar-nominated documentary on residential-school horrors runs thin on facts,”  https://www.barbarakay.ca/Pages/article/Oscarnominated_documentary_on_residentialschool_horrors_runs_thin_on_facts;  and Michelle Stirling, “Deeply Deceptive Documentary: Sugarcane”  https://medium.com/@UndauntedArtz2/deeply-deceptive-documentary-sugarcane-96b52d03263b . ↩︎
7. While there were many deaths at residential schools over the years, and deplorable incidents of physical and sexual abuse, the loss of language through residential schooling (as well as through the Indian day schools—see Helen Raptis et al, What We Learned: two generations reflect on Tsimshian Education and the day schools, UBC Press 2016), and the knock-on effects of intergenerational trauma, was a pervasive and arguably more damaging harm to families, communities and their members over many years. This film is an answer to that harm. ↩︎
8. Full disclosure: this film was brought to my attention by my friend and former professor, Hamar Foster, whose daughter Cayce is married to Nusi and the mother of their children. I am grateful, as ever, for Hamar’s ongoing support and encouragement, not to mention some important fact-checking and corrections. ↩︎