An Open Letter to Premier David Eby of British Columbia

RE: Screening at the BC Legislature of the film “Sugarcane”

By Michelle Stirling ©2025

Honorable Premier Eby,

RE: Screening at the BC Legislature of the film “Sugarcane”

In your comments on social media, you recognize the courage of people telling their personal stories in the film ‘Sugarcane.’ Did you notice the 1959 article from the Williams Lake Tribune that was briefly flashed on screen which told the story of the baby found in the St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School garbage burner? You can see it at the bottom of this letter.

The baby was put there by his own mother.

The baby was Ed Archie NoiseCat.

His mother, unnamed in the article and unnamed in the film ‘Sugarcane’, was Antoinette Archie, then a 20-year-old woman who had just given birth, alone, at the school. It is likely she had gone into labour on the way home from Williams Lake to her home in Canim Lake Reserve, an hour and a half away on a mostly empty highway in the middle of nowhere in 1959.

She testified to the court that she thought the baby was dead and put little Ed’s body in the school’s garbage burner.

The school’s dairyman, Antonius Stoop, returning from a Knights of Columbus meeting in Williams Lake happened to hear noises from the cold incinerator, and thought a cat was trapped inside. He opened the lid to let the cat out, and instead, he found a baby. A baby that he took to the Williams Lake Hospital, saving the baby’s life.

Ed. Ed Archie NoiseCat.

Ed’s mother, Antoinette Archie, went to jail for year for this crime of abandonment.

Ed was thus raised in abject poverty, by his alcoholic NoiseCat grandparents until his grandmother died of alcohol poisoning when he was about 8 years old. Ed never had that important baby-mother bonding with his mother who was in jail for the first year and on-going early years of his life.

It is a shame that the filmmakers did not make a documentary about Ed’s incredible survival story – truly a phoenix from the ashes.

In this Western Standard this article of Oct. 23, 2024, former Manitoba provincial court judge Brian Giesbrecht, denounced the lack of fact-checking on the part of National Geographic, which picked up ‘Sugarcane’ for global distribution.

Sadly, Antoinette Archie’s grandson Julian Brave NoiseCat, and investigative journalist/producer Emily Kassie, made a movie that exploited Antoinette’s personal torment of 66 years ago, trying to claim that priests fathered illegitimate babies and then burnt them in the school’s incinerator to hide the crime, using Ed as the example of one who survived.

What kind of investigative journalism is that?

Premier Eby, in your public support of ‘Sugarcane,’ you are advancing a blood libel against the hundreds of dedicated Indian Residential School priests, nuns, and Indigenous staff.

Martha Sellars, the grandmother of Chief Willie Sellars worked at St. Joseph’s.

You are accusing Chief Willie Sellars’ grandmother and dozens of other Indigenous staff members of being complicit in years of alleged Indigenous infanticide at St. Joseph’s. They were silent. Their own family members? Or was it that the stories of the priests, babies, incinerator … indeed the ‘no-name’ phantom genocide, was it all just a ‘rez legend’ that became a profitable cash cow to milk and ride?

British Columbia’s population is made up of about 12% Roman Catholics – about 588,000 people, most of whom are or were part of the taxpaying workforce. At the same time, British Columbia’s Indigenous population is about 290,000 (First Nations (180,085), Métis (97,865), and Inuit (1,720) being the main groups) of which, only the First Nations had the right to go to Indian Residential Schools – schools that were part of treaty negotiations and that were requested by chiefs and council.

Below, an excerpt of a previous commentary showing, for example, that the Kamloops Indian Residential School land was sold to the government for the purpose of a school by Mary Hli-hle-Kan, wife of the Chief.

Source: Were Residential Schools A Tragedy?

Almost all the film reviews on Rotten Tomatoes mistakenly conclude the following about ‘Sugarcane’ to a greater or lesser degree. Here is the Christian Science Monitor’s review – filled with falsehoods. And why? Because the filmmakers intentionally misled viewers.

https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Movies/2024/0815/canada-sugarcane-documentary-indigenous-first-nations

Premier Eby, you spoke of how so many documentaries are made and how, incredibly, ‘Sugarcane’ managed to rise to the top and get to an Oscar nomination. Clearly, you don’t understand the pedigree production team and their network behind ‘Sugarcane.’

If anything, you should be asking yourself why “Pedigree Producers of “Sugarcane” Celebrate a Documentary where Facts Don’t Matter.”

Though the emotional impact of ‘Sugarcane’ is very deeply felt by most audiences, on further reflection do you not wonder why investigators Charlene Belleau and Whitney Spearing never directly interviewed Ed Archie NoiseCat about what he knows of how and why he ended up in the school’s incinerator. And they never interview his mother, Antoinette Archie, either. Belleau was your government appointed Indigenous liaison in 2021. Was it through this position that she and Spearing gained access to the RCMP files, after the officer stated this is something they never do – allow members of the public to access their files?

It seems this was an unethical production. As we heard at the end, with Antoinette Archie’s off-camera heartbreaking sobs, she did NOT want to tell her story to producer/director Emily Kassie (as also reported in the press). Why did the producer/directors manipulate the tragic facts of Antoinette’s unwed mother dilemma of 1959 and try to pin it on the Roman Catholic Church as infanticide? Documentaries that are ethical require informed consent.

Then, there is the issue that facts matter in documentaries.

These facts.

Students had to leave Indian Residential School at age 16. Antoinette was 20. She had been studying practical nursing in Vancouver. The father of Ed Archie NoiseCat was Ray Peters, an Indigenous rodeo cowboy and backhoe operator, 11 years older than Antoinette. Julian Brave NoiseCat had written about this years prior to the film. Why then did he and Emily Kassie contrive the story to mislead viewers into thinking a priest impregnated Antoinette as a student??? Just to make money? To cash in? To push the ‘land back’ agenda through atrocity propaganda and public guilt?

In the interest of full and fair public debate, I request that you show my fact-based mini-documentary rebuttal “The Bitter Roots of ‘Sugarcane’” in the BC Legislature.

Why?

Because facts matter. To everyone.

Sincerely,

Michelle Stirling