In promoting Sugarcane, did Julian Brave NoiseCat accuse his paternal grandmother, Antoinette Archie, of infanticide?
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By Nina Green
On 1 March 2025, in the final stages of a 13-month media blitz designed to win an Oscar for Sugarcane, Julian Brave NoiseCat accused his paternal grandmother, Antoinette Archie, a member of the Canim Lake Indian Band, of infanticide when he wrote in an opinion piece in the New York Times:
“Sugarcane” is, to our knowledge, the first work in any medium to uncover evidence of infanticide at an Indian residential or boarding school in North America. In addition, we learned this was, in part, my father’s story. Born to Native parents and found by a nightwatchman after his birth, he is the only known survivor of infanticide at the school.
The findings in our film raise a question: If such things were covered up at one school, what might be true at the other 138 Indian residential schools across Canada? And what remains hidden at the hundreds of Native American boarding schools that operated across the United States — where, unlike in Canada, there has been scant inquiry and even less reckoning with this history?
Let's unpack Julian Brave NoiseCat's astonishing statement.
Julian Brave NoiseCat is the son of Indigenous artist Ed Archie NoiseCat, and in a KAOS Radio interview in 2013, Julian Brave NoiseCat identified Ed Archie NoiseCat's parents as 'Antoinette Archie and the late Ray Peters':
Julian Brave NoiseCat, son of Ed Archie NoiseCat and Alexandra Roddy, is a member of the Canim Lake Band and a descendant of the Lil’Wat Nation of Mt. Currie. His paternal grandparents are Antoinette Archie and the late Ray Peters, and his maternal grandparents are Suzanne Roddy and the late Joe Roddy. He is in his third year at Columbia University where he studies history. This summer he continued learning Secwepemctsín with his kye7e (grandmother) [i.e. Antoinette Archie] while conducting and writing a research paper on current and historical words for the white man in Secwepemculecw. He loves his family.
And in an article titled Fatherland, Julian Brave NoiseCat wrote:
My Dad's late father, Ray Peters, is Lil'wat.
It is thus beyond dispute that Julian Brave NoiseCat's paternal grandfather was Ray Peters, a member of the Lil'wat First Nation who died in 2005. See the obituary below.
Julian Brave NoiseCat's father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, is thus the son of Antoinette Archie and Ray Peters, and in both the final scenes of Sugarcane, and in the 1 March 2025 op-ed in the New York Times, Julian Brave NoiseCat tells us his father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, is the only known survivor of infanticide at the former St Joseph's Indian residential school near Williams Lake, BC.
So what are the circumstances of Ed Archie NoiseCat's survival of infanticide?
We know from contemporary news reports (see the article below from the 3 September 1959 issue of the Quesnel Cariboo Observer), that Ed Archie NoiseCat's 20-year-old mother, Antoinette Archie, who was pregnant and unmarried at the time, travelled from Williams Lake to St Joseph's on 16 August 1959, during the summer vacation when few people were at the school, delivered her baby there herself, and put the baby in the school's incinerator. Fortunately, the school dairyman, returning to the school later that evening, heard the baby's cries and rescued it from the incinerator, and Ed Archie NoiseCat thus survived his mother's abandonment of him in the school incinerator.
Did Antoinette Archie commit infanticide, as Julian Brave NoiseCat says she did in his New York Times op-ed?
Not according to the court proceedings which followed.
Antoinette Archie pled guilty to putting Ed Archie NoiseCat in the incinerator, and was sentenced to a year in jail for the crime of abandoning her newborn infant. As a mitigating circumstance, Antoinette Archie told the court that she thought Ed Archie NoiseCat was dead when she put him in the incinerator.
Antoinette Archie appealed the sentence, but her appeal was denied, and she presumably went to prison to serve out her sentence, while Ed Archie NoiseCat was left to the care of his alcoholic maternal grandparents, Jacob and Alice Archie.
Clearly, there was no infanticide. Infanticide is defined as:
the crime of killing a child within a year of its birth (in some legal jurisdictions, specifically by the mother).
Moreover according to the court proceedings in 1959, Antoinette Archie did not even attempt to commit infanticide. She told the court she thought Ed Archie NoiseCat was already dead when she put him in the incinerator, and the court did not dispute her evidence.
So why has Julian Brave NoiseCat now accused his paternal grandmother, Antoinette Archie, of infanticide in his 1 March 2025 New York Times op-ed?
The short answer seems to be that there is no other evidence of the 'pattern of infanticide' Sugarcane claims to have discovered at St Joseph's, and thus, without the portrayal of the circumstances of Ed Archie NoiseCat's birth as infanticide, Sugarcane is revealed as an empty shell which pretends to be a factual documentary which uncovered horrible crimes, but in fact uncovered nothing at all.
Sugarcane is a deeply deceptive film in which Antoinette Archie's unfortunate crime, for which she paid heavily at the time, is used as a smokescreen for the film's failed investigation at St Joseph's, which turned up no evidence of any criminal activity of any kind apart from the crime committed by the co-director's grandmother, Antoinette Archie, a crime which was already well known to everyone, having been covered in local newspapers at the time.
For an extensive detailed fact check of Sugarcane, see the fact check document: SUGARCANE'S HORRIFIC FALSE AND UNVERIFIED CLAIM THAT BABIES WERE THROWN INTO THE ST JOSEPH'S INCINERATOR LIBELS CANADA AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH.
Thanks for reading. For more from this author on this topic, read Why did the Williams Lake Band, in its documentary Sugarcane, suppress crucial facts about Antoinette Archie?
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Interesting! I used to live near Lil'wat nation, connected to Mount Currie reservation. I lived in nearby Pemberton, a farming village in the mountains. You'd drive through Mt Currie and see things such as a horse drinking from a bathtub through a hole chopped through the wall of a government built house. There were a lot of housefires, as recorded in a local newspaper column by a native man named Enos, as I recall. I would see old native men walking down the road to Pemberton to go to the bar and liquor store there. I went to a pro wrestling match in Mt. Currie once. There was also a rodeo there.
Mt Currie was a small quiet village where very little happened. I went to the high school in Pemberton. You'd see the native boys listening to Iron Maiden (it was the 1980s), putting on a tough guy act. They worked on cars in the mechanic shop there. The girls dropped out when they became pregnant, though a few stayed in school, visibly with child. None of them made it to grade 12, except for one girl who studied a lot and was more bookish. Native kids generally never said anything, even to each other. I was employed by the government to do fire-fighting with them one time when there were wildfires. They didn't say a word the whole day as I recall.
Years earlier my parents lived further north in BC, in a native village where my father had a job. I was born there. My mother has a lot of stories from that time. The residential schools were still going then. It arose because there were not enough teachers willing to move to reservations to teach, so the kids were shipped to Vancouver to learn to read and write, to give them a chance at success. The alternative back then was a life of poverty, eking out a living fishing and trapping, so native parents thought it was a good thing for the kids. Some natives to this day credit it with learning they benefited from. Grand Chief Phil Fontaine and playwright Thompson Highway for example.
A teacher named Kathleen Howe wrote a memoir about her largely positive experiences teaching native kids. I wish I had a copy. I don't think it's available now. It included an incident which my parents were also part of: a native teenage boy got drunk and held the white teachers captive with a knife for a few hours but was talked down eventually. My mother was a teacher so she decided to teach the kids in the village rather than them going to Vancouver, which caused them to be depressed and their parents missing them. She was part of the first school in the village, to my knowledge. Ms. Howe was employed in that school and from all reports loved the kids and loved teaching and was a good person.
Only much later did we hear the negative allegations against these schools and teachers, blaming churches. There was an incentive to give a damning report to get compensation and it served to boost the white guilt and colonial narrative that Leftists love to foster, to make themselves look virtuous. This whole narrative did not take into consideration that churches and teachers were trying to do a good thing for the native kids, to enable them to make it in the modern world and provide them with positive values. Then much later on came the mass grave hoax, which is still being pushed by the CBC and Trudeau to this day, justifying burning down churches and smearing Christian churches (who for some reason happily go along with it, proffering numerous apologies and compensations). Did children die? Yes, some were suicides and some fell victim to TB. These things happened to white kids too, however -- though it is true that there is a very high suicide rate among natives, but this also occurs on reservations. In the village I was born in (in the Queen Charlotte Island) there was a high suicide rate. It it tied to alcoholism and unemployment and domestic violence.
As you can see I am skeptical of the allegations, which clearly serve a political end and are tied to demands for money. This is not to say that bad things didn't happen in the school. Obviously with you have a bunch of kids living together, some will prey on each other, and it can feel like a prison. That was not the intention though. It's also unsurprising that a case of infanticide would be blamed on the schools even though it was committed by a relative of the child. Infanticide was common among natives before Europeans came. It was part of survival when resources were scarce. Europeans brought prosperity, modern medicine, and all the modern benefits that natives use today. But the downside was a loss of the freedom and autonomy they previously enjoyed. The comforts of modernity have a cost, which is that everyone must comply with its restrictions, white people included. This is the social contract.
Also consider who published this story: the New York Times, which happily ran a misleading headline that included the words "mass graves" a few years ago. The NYT is, I believe, somehow tied to the Communist Chinese Party, which has actively pushed the white guilt agenda in Canada for nefarious purposes, as part of their ultimate ambition to control Canada via Trudeau and the CBC. After all, Canada has a vast amount of natural resources that China covets. Scapegoating Trump plays into that as well. The NYT for eight years in the 1930s told the world that nothing bad was happening in the USSR while Stalin was committing genocide. This same paper also lied to the public during 2020-22 and helped impose medical tyranny in support of Big Pharma and globalists. So not surprising that they would publish this misleading opinion piece.
Infanticide is not as uncommon as many people think especially with young females terrified to find themselves alone while dealing with this event. However, the narrative stops there it has sweet bugger all to do with the Catholic Church or the poor taxpayer who have been coerced into paying huge reparations for no bloody reason.