Why did the Williams Lake Band, in its documentary Sugarcane, suppress crucial facts about Antoinette Archie?
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By Nina Green
Most Canadians have not yet heard of the Williams Lake Indian Band's pseudo-documentary Sugarcane. It has been heavily promoted at film festivals and limited screenings throughout Canada and the US since it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on 20 January 2024, but was only released for streaming in Canada on 26 December 2024.
The documentary purports to be a 'ground breaking investigation', and triumphantly proclaims in its closing scene that 'The ongoing investigation at St. Joseph's Mission has uncovered a pattern of infanticide', i.e. babies fathered by priests and tossed into the school's incinerator.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The documentary does not produce any verifiable evidence that infanticide ever occurred at St Joseph's Indian Residential School.
The real story - which was well known from 1959 on as a result of articles in the Williams Lake Tribune, Quesnel Cariboo Observer, and Vancouver Sun - is that the newborn child of an Indian mother (Antoinette Archie) and an Indian father (Ray Peters; see below) was placed in the St Joseph's Indian Residential School garbage burner.
Sugarcane, however, leaves viewers with the confused impression that the baby in the garbage burner was fathered by a priest at St Joseph's, and that this incident is evidence of the 'pattern of infanticide' which Sugarcane claims to have established.
The real story of the abandoned baby had nothing whatever to do with a priest. The facts, as reported in newspaper accounts and in court proceedings, establish that late on the night of 16 August 1959, Antoinette Archie, 'a 20-year-old Indian woman from Canim Lake Reserve' delivered her own child at the Cariboo Indian Residential School (St Joseph's) and placed the newborn baby in the school's garbage burner. Fortunately, the baby was found by the school's dairyman, Antonious Stoop, later that night, and survived. At first, no one knew who the baby's mother was. However when her identity was discovered, she was charged with abandoning her child, pled guilty, and was sentenced to a year in jail. She appealed the sentence, but her appeal was denied on 26 October 1959.
As mentioned above, thanks to the St Joseph's dairyman, the baby survived, and grew up to be the artist Edward Archie NoiseCat, who is prominently featured in Sugarcane.
Ed Archie NoiseCat's mother, Antoinette Archie, also appears several times in Sugarcane, and the documentary makes clear that she is a member of the Canim Lake Indian Band. What Sugarcane fails to make clear - or in fact mention at all - is that the father of Antoinette Archie's abandoned baby was also Indian - Raphael Norman 'Ray' 'Zeke' Peters of Skatin, as acknowledged in his obituary in the 100 Mile House Free Press on 7 December 2005.
The fact that both of Ed Archie NoiseCat's parents - Antoinette Archie and Ray Peters - were Indian has been revealed by Ed Archie NoiseCat himself, and by his son, Julian Brave NoiseCat, co-director of Sugarcane, in many previous interviews. See here, here, and here.
The family has always known that Ed Archie NoiseCat is the son of Ray Peters. In fact, Ray Peters' Indian background has been used to promote Ed Archie NoiseCat's art. See, for example, this article in the National Observer by Ed's son, Julian Brave NoiseCat, entitled 'Fatherland':
My dad’s late father, Ray Peters, is Lil’wat. Our ancestor, N’kasusa7, is a noted Lil’wat chief, whose English name was Harry Peters. Our great aunt, my grandfather’s sister Martina Pierre, composed the Women’s Warrior Song that is performed at protests and celebrations across North America. (I’m told Redmond is our third cousin, or something like that — we’re still trying to figure it out.) But my father grew up with his mother’s people, the Tsq’escenemc te Secwepemc, on a small reserve up north called Canim Lake, where the Catholic Church reigned supreme.
My grandfather [Ray Peters], or pé7e (pronounced “pa-ah”) as I knew him, didn’t do much parenting.
He fathered at least 17 children with five different women at our family’s last count. (I was with my dad [Ed Archie Noisecat] when he met two of these siblings for the first time, and we’re almost certain there are more.) What little dad learned about his father’s people came from stories told to pass the time when pé7e, pé7e’s sidekick Harold Frank and my dad would hop in the truck and drive to Indian rodeos throughout the B.C. Interior. A bottle in his hand, pé7e would tell stories about the mountains, like The Place Where Thunderbird Sits and In-SHUCK-Ch, or Gunsight Peak, where our ancestors tied off their canoes during the great ancient flood. But those trips and stories ended when, at 20, my dad flew off a bareback bronc and broke his back. . . .
But my dad has always felt less than these coastal artists, almost all of whom descended from long lines of carvers and many of whom had inherited hereditary chief titles. Even though my dad is full-blooded Salish, he comes from the Interior.
“In the coastal art world, you kind of have to have a pedigree and some crests and symbols and totems to represent your lineage and your family and all of that, and I had nothing,” he said. His buddies, even guys like Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, a painter who is Cowichan from the coast and Syilx from the Interior, would tease him. He developed an inferiority complex — or maybe, more accurately, an “interiority” complex. “There was no St’at’imc artists that they knew of, there was no Shuswap artists that people knew of,” he said. “I always felt like I was that poor Indian kid who just didn’t have anything that anyone else brought.”
Given this history, why would the Williams Lake Band and the co-directors of Sugarcane, Emily Kassie and Julian Brave NoiseCat, obscure the Indian identity of the father of the baby abandoned in the St Joseph's garbage burner, and intimate that the baby was the son of a priest?
The answer appears to be, as noted above, that the premise of Sugarcane is that babies were fathered by priests at St Joseph's and disposed of in the school's incinerator. Since no verifiable evidence has ever been found to substantiate that horrific and baseless claim, the story of the birth of Ed Archie NoiseCat has been deliberately muddied in Sugarcane to leave the impression that, as is claimed at the end of the film, 'Ed Archie NoiseCat is the only known survivor of the school's incinerator'.
In fact, Ed Archie NoiseCat is the only baby ever placed in the school's incinerator, and he was the son of an Indian mother, Antoinette Archie, and an Indian father, Ray Peters, and was put in the incinerator by his Indian mother, and was fortunately saved from death by the school's dairyman, Antonious Stoop.
Not content with misleading viewers into thinking that Antoinette Archie's baby was fathered by a priest, Sugarcane also withholds from viewers another piece of crucial evidence about Antoinette Archie - the fact that she attended the Kamloops Indian Residential School.
This fact was revealed by her grandson, Julian Brave NoiseCat, in an article in The Walrus on 24 May 2023 when he wrote:
In May 2021, ground-penetrating radar detected more than 200 potential unmarked graves of children in an apple orchard beside the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, where my kyé7e (“kya-ah,” grandmother) completed high school.
As Julian Brave NoiseCat's Sugarcane co-director, Emily Kassie, has stated, the entire motivation for the making of Sugarcane was the Kamloops Band's false claim on 27 May 2021 that it had discovered 'the remains of 215 children'(now downgraded to '215 anomalies'). In an interview on 13 August 2024, Kassie revealed that she had been 'gut-pulled' to the Kamloops story as soon as she heard about it, and had phoned Julian Brave NoiseCat the next day, urging him to make a documentary about it with her. He demurred for a time, and Kassie went ahead.
Since she was 'gut-pulled' to the Kamloops story, it seems logical that Kassie would have immediately contacted the Kamloops Band about making a documentary at Kamloops, but if so, the Kamloops Band turned her down, and Kassie had to look elsewhere for an Indian residential school about which to make her documentary. As it happened, she settled on St Joseph's at Williams Lake, the very school Antoinette Archie had attended as a young girl, and the very school building in which Julian Brave NoiseCat's father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, had been born. As both Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie have stated, this was a truly remarkable coincidence.
But since the Kamloops Band's false claim to have discovered 'the remains of 215 children' was the motive for the making of Sugarcane, and video clips from the CBC's 1962 documentary The Eyes of Children about the Kamloops Indian Residential School dominate Sugarcane, why would the Williams Lake Band and the co-directors of Sugarcane fail to mention that Antoinette Archie had completed high school at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, and had then gone on to take a practical nursing course in Vancouver at the Vancouver Vocational Institute before becoming pregnant by Ray Peters and abandoning her new-born baby in the garbage burner at St Joseph's?
The fact that Antoinette Archie had not been a student at St Joseph's in Williams Lake for years before she gave birth there on the night of 16 August 1959 when staff and students were all away during summer vacation is highly relevant, yet Sugarcane suppresses that significant information.
The fact that Antoinette Archie was a student at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in the late 1950s when the Kamloops Band claimed alleged murders and clandestine burials of 215 students were going on is also highly relevant, yet Sugarcane suppresses that information as well. Could that be because Antoinette Archie knows from her own personal experience at the Kamloops Indian Residential School that there were no murders or secret burials going on there in the late 1950s, and that if Sugarcane had drawn attention to her attendance there, journalists might have asked her uncomfortable questions which would blow the Kamloops Band's false claim that it had found 'the remains of 215 children' out of the water?
There is much more that can be said about Sugarcane. Suffice to say at this point that the documentary is highly misleading for the reasons discussed above, and in particular for its claim that the so-called 'ongoing investigation at St. Joseph's Mission' by the Williams Lake Band, Charlene Belleau and Whitney Spearing 'has uncovered a pattern of infanticide'. Not a shred of verifiable evidence to support that completely false claim has been put forward in Sugarcane. On the contrary, the millions of dollars that have been spent on the so-called investigation have established the opposite. There was never a case of infanticide at St Joseph's.
Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Is the CBC pressuring the federal government to continue funding conspiracy theories about 'missing' and 'disappeared' children which originated with Kevin Annett?
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For the indigenous activist, Canada is just a convenient pork barrel to be mercilessly exploited and feverously devoured. The taxpayer is the enemy and fair game for any attack without any rules of engagement. Victimhood is very profitable and money is the casus belli in the war on truth. Thanks again, Nina, for exposing the hypocrisy on those who speak with forked tongue.
"A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies." ~ Mark Twain
Follow the money that is what this entire debacle is about and the truth be damned.