Mad Men and Indians – What “Sugarcane” Left Out

A Sweet Fabrication.

By Michelle Stirling ©2024

Is a knack for advertising, marketing, branding, inherited?

By http://www.artofthetitle.com/2011/09/19/mad-men/, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26607045

“Sugarcane” is a new documentary that may be headed for an Oscar win, according to Variety’s predictions. It is a disturbing film that has 100% “FRESH” ratings from film critics on the “Rotten Tomatoes” review site.

Co-director Julian Brave Noisecat is the son of Ed Archie NoiseCat, an Indigenous wood carver. They co-star in the film in a sub-theme story of healing and reconciliation. Ed had abandoned Julian and his mom when Julian was a child. The film brings them back together as Julian tries to uncover the truth of his father’s birth, said to have happened at St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School.

From Alexandra Roddy’s page on “X/Twitter”

Julian’s mom is a woman named Alexandra Roddy. While viewers have explored Julian’s father’s life to some extent in the film “Sugarcane,” there is no reference to Julian’s white Irish-Jewish mom, whose on-line profile indicates that she is a high-powered marketing executive with IBM in the C-suite. Her father was Joseph Roddy, a writer for LOOK, LIFE, The New Yorker, The New York Times and Harpers Magazine, all back in the Helter-Skelter days of “Mad Men,” as artfully depicted in the Netflix series of that name.

One of Roddy’s articles for LOOK was about B.F. Skinner’s work on behavioral sciences, on how to teach a dog to climb a wall in 20 minutes.

From Gail B. Peterson’s “The World’s First Look at Shaping: B.F. Skinner’s Gutsy Gamble:”

Accordingly, Mr. Roddy acquired a dog, a young Dalmatian (registered name "Roadcoach Cheerful", call name "Agnes"), and brought her to Skinner. In the resulting magazine article, Roddy wrote:

At Skinner's workshop, the Harvard Psychological Laboratory in Cambridge, the feeling is that a man can have a dog doing anything reasonable he could want a dog to do within twenty minutes of their first encounter. We doubted that, and visited Skinner with a camera on our hip and Agnes on our leash. Dog and psychologist were introduced to each other. Skinner asked us what we would have the dog do, and we said, "Run up the wall." Twenty minutes later, we were convinced. (LOOK magazine, May 20, 1952, p.17)

I mention this because I feel like Canadians, in particular, but most global citizens, have been progressively taught to ‘climb the wall,’ not with tasty incentives but with the evermore horrific atrocity claims from Indigenous individuals and groups. These campaigns, which remind me a lot of ad campaigns, are mostly led by people I call “part-endians.” Unlike ‘pretendians’ who just dress up and pretend to be of Indigenous heritage, part-endians are people who are either part white and part Indigenous, or who are in a marital relationship between these races. Oddly, they are bent on ending Western Civilization born of their white heritage, through the use of atrocity propaganda, like that found in “Sugarcane.”

Skinner’s demonstration for Joseph Roddy, from Peterson’s article.

Julian Brave NoiseCat co-directed and starred in “Sugarcane.” So far, it has 100% ‘Fresh” rating from film critics on “Rotten Tomatoes” website. The fact that National Geographic picked up this film for distribution means most people believe it to be factual. But it is not.

Julian’s grandfather, Joseph Roddy, passed away in 2002, when Julian would only have been about 9 years old. Julian and his mom Alexandra apparently spent most of their time on the West Coast, while Grandpa Joe would have been in New York, so it is unclear what influence he may have had on Julian’s life. But clearly, Julian did not grow up in a dysfunctional, nepotistic society such as proliferates on Canadian Indian reserves.

But there is nepotism in Julian’s film.

For instance, his aunt, Charlene Belleau, is one of the investigators supposedly finding new evidence about St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School, the subject of the film. Neither Charlene nor investigative partner Whitney Spearing are qualified investigators or historians.

In one scene, Charlene Belleau reads from a document as though she's just discovered new evidence. When you do a Google search for a few words from what she was reading, you find that it was the quotation from Father Thomas' Memoirs which is at the beginning of Victims of Benevolence, published in 1995. She wasn't reading from the published book, but from a typed transcript, but nonetheless she was trying to give the impression that she and Whitney had discovered 'new evidence' when it was something that had always been known since it was in Father Thomas' Memoirs and had even been published in 1995.

In another scene, Whitney Spearing reads from a document mentioning the two girls who drowned at Kuper Island. She doesn't read the part which says they stole the skiff, nor does she reveal that the incident happened at Kuper Island, on the Pacific sea coast of British Columbia. That is a 9 hr 29 min (626.5 km) drive away from Williams Lake.

Viewers are left with the impression that two girls died trying to escape ‘the horrors’ of St Joseph's at Williams Lake. In fact, they were trying to get to the Indian dance on the mainland.

A detailed account of the two girls from the Kuper Island Indian Residential School who drowned while trying to get to the Indian dance on the mainland is given in the CBC's A Dinner At Oblate House, which can be downloaded here.

It is doubtful that Grandpa Joe Roddy would look kindly on this type of manipulation that is more suited to the world of “Mad Men,” not journalists or documentary filmmakers.

I bring up the series “Mad Men” for another heart-rending reason.

“Sugarcane” revolves around the fact that Ed Archie NoiseCat, Julian’s father, was found, as a baby, abandoned in the incinerator at St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School. The incinerator was cold at the time. The school’s dairyman, Antonius Stoop, was returning from a Knights of Columbus meeting and heard sounds coming from the incinerator. Believing that a cat had gotten trapped inside, he went to investigate and discovered baby Ed, alive and crying. He took the newborn to Williams Lake hospital and Ed survived.

Williams Lake Tribune article of Aug. 26, 1959 which was briefly shown in “Sugarcane.”

It turned out that Ed’s own mother, Antoinette Archie, had put her newborn in the incinerator. As she later told the court, she thought the baby was dead. The court did not buy it and sent her to jail for a year, denying her appeal.

So. Julian’s grandmother almost caused the death of his father, Baby Ed.

No wonder Antoinette did not want to talk about it for the busybody filmmaking duo NoiseCat, Jr., and Emily Kassie. Though the newspaper story appears in the film, it is almost as if no one read it or understood that it was talking about Julian’s own grandmother.

Thus, along with Aunt Charlene, who surely knew that Ed was fathered by Ray Peters and not a priest, the filmmakers and investigators Belleau and Spearing created a nefarious plot around Ed’s unfortunate birth. The contrived story goes that at St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School, Roman Catholic priests raped and impregnated underage female students and then cast the unwanted babies into the school’s incinerator, exploiting Ed’s tragic entry into the world.

They ramp this up in the film with stark black and white titles like this one.

Screenshot from “Sugarcane” - Fair use.

Belleau and Spearing somehow gain access to RCMP police files that the RCMP officer says they normally don’t give the public any access to. Inexplicably, the RCMP allows this unqualified investigative duo access to the files. Belleau and Spearing appear shocked to find that St. Joseph’s had an arrangement with a Vancouver Catholic home for unwed mothers. Pregnant girls were sent there until their babies were born; the babies were given up for adoption.

This sounds cruel and shocking to today’s audiences. It also implies that students became pregnant because of priests.

But here’s where “Mad Men” can help us understand. We may also understand the impulsive, desperate act of Antoinette Archie abandoning her newborn in the incinerator.

From Wikipedia - According to [Mad Men's creator, Matthew] Weiner, he chose the 1960s because:[47]

[E]very time I would try and find something interesting that I wanted to do, it happened in 1960. It will blow your mind if you look at the year on the almanac. And it's not just the election [of JFK]. The pill came out in March 1960, that's really what I wanted it to be around.… That's the largest change in the entire world. Seriously, it's just astounding. Especially if you look at the movies from the 50s. Once it was acceptable to talk about this idea that teenagers were having sex, which they have been doing, obviously, since time immemorial, there were all these movies like Blue Denim and Peyton Place.… [T]he central tension in every movie that does not take place on the battlefield is about a girl getting pregnant. So all of a sudden that entire issue [of pregnancy] has been removed from society. That was what I was interested in in 1960. (bold emphasis added)

Antoinette Archie, in 1959, was a 20-year-old woman who’d been impregnated by Ray Peters, a man 11 years her senior. She was an unwed mother. She’d taken a practical nursing course in Vancouver and was just starting her career, no doubt. Like many women of the time, an unexpected pregnancy was about to end those hopes and dreams. She’d delivered the baby herself, according to the Williams Lake Tribune report. She may have been in shock. We don’t know, because she did not want to tell the filmmakers the truth of this story. As I have written elsewhere, this is extremely unethical that the filmmakers ignored her refusal to tell her story which we hear in her anguished cries at the end of the film.

So they just made up something else – a lie – that blood libels all the good and decent priests and nuns who worked at St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School. The priests and nuns at the school understood human nature. They made sure that girls who did get pregnant by boyfriends and handsome rodeo cowboys, also got proper maternal care and delivery at a Vancouver Catholic charitable home for unwed mothers. The babies were adopted out to give them a better chance in life – a chance that even the not-yet-famous unwed Joni Mitchell gave her own daughter. Are feminists who laud Joni’s courage willing to compassionately look at Antoinette’s desperate situation?

The ”Sugarcane” filmmakers cruelly ripped open the deep wound that Antoinette Archie had been trying to heal for the past 64 years.

Matthew Weiner wrote of “Mad Men” star, Peggy Olson who, in the series, worked her way up from secretary to copywriter – then found herself pregnant, single, and forced to give up her baby, something that scarred her for the rest of her life.

Peggy's "psychic scar for the entire show, after giving away that baby," Weiner said, is "the kind of thing that would have never occurred to me before I was on The Sopranos."[21] (Wikipedia)

Like millions of women at the time, Antoinette Archie was undoubtedly poor and with few choices. Her fateful decision to put Ed in the incinerator meant that Ed would never have a chance to bond with his mother as babies need to do. She spent the first year of his life in jail. Antoinette’s alcoholic grandparents brought Ed up, living in extreme poverty.

“Ed Archie NoiseCat grew up on the Canim Lake reserve in the early 1960s, in a cold place with no running water and no electricity, plywood floors and ice-crusted windows.” (bold added)

Then, about age 8, Ed’s grandmother died of alcohol poisoning and hypothermia while wandering around outside in winter, looking for his grandfather who had been drinking as well.

Death certificate of Alice Archie, Ed’s grandmother.

“Mad Men” embodies the craziness of the post-war period where alcohol flowed freely through many people’s lives, on and off the job. It also flowed freely on many Indian reserves and does to this day.

“Sugarcane” loads the blame for Indigenous intergenerational trauma, abandonment, dysfunctional families and suicides on to Indian Residential Schools, when the truth is closer to the insanely wild alcoholic carousel portrayed in “Mad Men.” Indeed, the village of Alkali Lake, where Charlene Belleau was Chief for three years, was once known as “Alcohol Lake.” All of the adults and many of the children were alcoholics, as portrayed in the documentary re-enactment of the community’s challenging move to sobriety “Honor of All.”

As reported by the LA Times in 1989:

The Shuswap Indians of Alkali Lake came by their abstinence the hard way: Throughout the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, the alcoholism rate here was 100%, and when recovery did come, it involved a sort of house-to-house combat with booze.

“It was continuous drinking,” said Francis Johnson, a 40-year-old recovering alcoholic who now teaches fourth through seventh grade at the village school. “Because of the drinking, there was a lot of child neglect, wife abuse, rape, gang rape--the worst kind of things you can imagine.” (bold added)

St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School rescued Julian’s aunt, Charlene Belleau when she was orphaned when her father rolled his vehicle and died. She has stated that he was an alcoholic so she ‘knew how to defend myself’ when she went to Indian Residential School. In the earlier 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) transcripts of the 1993 hearings at Canim Lake, Belleau describes her experience at St. Joseph’s as having been good. She said that her grandmother and mother both benefitted from Indian Residential School. This is how Charlene repays St. Joseph’s charity decades later – by co-creating a blood libel based on her pretend investigation, with her leading questions to a small bevy of people who spew unsubstantiated claims to the camera.

Yes. Personal eyewitness testimonials are compelling, but they are not credible.

As “Sugarcane” filmmaking began in 2021, Belleau changed her tune from her RCAP testimony and now claimed Indigenous children were hung up in the barn and lashed with whips; that priests raped female students and burned the babies in the school’s incinerator to hide the crime. No evidence is presented for either claim – except of course Baby Ed.

Like alcoholics, addicts and adult children of alcoholics, it is easier to lie than to face the facts and state the truth.

“Sugarcane” is the “Mad Men” of documentaries. Wikipedia writes: As “Gawker” wrote of “Mad Men’s” charismatic lead character Don Draper, “Just like one of his campaigns, his whole identity is a sweet fabrication, a kind of candy floss spun out of opportunity, innuendo, and straight-up falsehood.”

So it is with “Sugarcane” – a sweet fabrication. Did Julian inherit an adman’s knack from his Grandpa Joe Roddy or from his marketing mom; would the serious journalist Joe approve of Julian’s distortion of fact?

Ironically, the “Sugarcane” filmmakers received early grant funding from the Independent Documentary Associations “Enterprise” fund. The fund’s mandate is described thus: “The fund prioritizes projects attempting to combat the misinformation being shared on social media and other internet platforms, using journalistic principles (such as fact-checking and rigorous, methodical research) to arrive at a verifiable truth.”

“Sugarcane” is verifiably false and filled with misinformation. For Julian’s own grandmother, a practicing Catholic who is suffering a deep moral wound, a woman who had begged the filmmakers not to go back there, her tragic story is now exposed worldwide.

That makes “Sugarcane” morally reprehensible and horribly cruel. Is that worthy of an Oscar?

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Watch my mini-doc rebuttal “The Bitter Roots of Sugarcane:

On Vimeo:

Or on Rumble - thousands of views!

Read the backgrounder discussion piece.

The Bitter Roots of “Sugarcane”