Pedigree Producers of “Sugarcane” Celebrate a Documentary where Facts Don’t Matter

By Michelle Stirling ©2025

“Sugarcane” may be on its way to an Oscar nomination! It’s a documentary that follows the Williams Lake First Nation and two in-house investigators looking for missing children and unmarked graves, and crimes against humanity at the former St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School. Woven into the story is a heart-warming tale of a father-son reunion after years of separation, as the two try to find out the curious history of the father, said to have been born at St. Joseph’s and chillingly, discovered abandoned in the school’s garbage-burner, referred to as an incinerator.

That baby, now an adult named Ed Archie NoiseCat, an Indigenous carver, is said to have been the only baby known to have survived the incinerator.

The film won the Critics Choice Award for “Best True Crime Documentary” but is it true?

Lead investigator in the documentary is Charlene Belleau, long-time Indigenous activist. Charlene’s investigative colleague is Whitney Spearing, an archeologist with “Sugarcane Archeology,” an enterprise wholly owned by the Williams Lake First Nation. The film follows the two of them going through archival documents and piecing together a ‘crime board’ with the names of various priests who the imagery suggests had impregnated Indigenous students at the school, and then “Baby X” had vanished, either into an adoption or …incinerated, to hide the crime. Or so the film alleges.

But Charlene and Whitney never interview 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. She appears prominently, though unnamed, in the film; she’s the grandmother of Julian Brave NoiseCat, co-director. She’s the mother of Ed Archie NoiseCat. She is the one who put Baby Ed in the school’s incinerator, having given birth to him alone onsite at St. Joseph’s, in the middle of the night on Aug. 16, 1959. She was then a desperate, unwed mother who, she told the court, abandoned Baby Ed because she thought he was dead.

This story is shown in “Sugarcane” as the camera pans across a Williams Lake Tribune story recounting that the unwed mother went to jail for a year for abandoning Baby Ed. It was just good fortune that Baby Ed had been discovered by Antonious Stoop, the school’s dairyman, as he returned home late from a meeting, and he heard mewling sounds from the cold incinerator. He thought a cat had gotten trapped inside. Instead, he found Baby Ed and saved his life.

These are the two living witnesses to what film critics and viewers are now calling the “unpunished crimes of the Catholic Church” – when it turns out, by looking at obituaries, that Ed was fathered by Ray Peters, an Indigenous rodeo rider and backhoe operator. A man who was 11 years older than Antoinette. A man who had 7 more children with Antoinette and 17 children in total with 5 women. This information is confirmed in an earlier article written by Julian Brave NoiseCat, Ed’s son.

Yet most film critics think Ed’s mother was raped by a priest when she was a student at the school.

What kind of ‘true crime’ documentary is it when false allegations are made against Roman Catholic priests which at least three of the parties to the film knew were false? Charlene is a relative of Antoinette Archie. The story of the baby found in the incinerator was headline news in Williams Lake, at the time when the population was about 2,000. So, everyone knew the story.

Williams Lake Tribune, Aug. 26, 1959.

But somehow the super sleuths, Belleau and Spearing, didn’t think to interview either Ed or his mother.

Nor did these sleuths report the fact that Ed’s mother was 20 years old at the time and not a student at the school. It was mandatory to leave Indian Residential School at age 16. It is most likely Antoinette gave birth to Ed at St. Joseph’s because she simply went into labor while driving home to Canim Lake Reserve from Williams Lake, a trip of about an hour and a half. Having been a student there for years, she pulled in to St. Joseph’s in distress, hoping to find help. But it was summer and most of the students and staff were gone.

The film also tries to make the case that former Williams Lake First Nation Chief Rick Gilbert was fathered by a priest. Except that his mother was not a student at St. Joseph’s either – and if the thesis of incinerating babies to hide the evidence was true, if the claim that Ed Archie NoiseCat is the only baby known to have survived, then how did Rick grow up and thrive?

Why was he not turned to ashes?

And speaking of ashes, it is curious that none of the investigative team, nor Chief Willie Sellars, nor the Emmy, Oscar, and etcetera star-studded producers, editors and financiers ever asked a fundamental question.

What does it take to incinerate a body?

Well, it takes much more than a school garbage burner. Various online sources indicate that cremation of a body takes between 2 to 5 hours at temperatures of 1,400 to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (about 760 to 1,000 degrees Celsius). The bones remain as brittle shards. Typically, a crematorium then crushes the bones so as to return an urn of ashes to the family, without disturbing, identifiable bony parts.

St. Joseph’s school garbage burner from the 1950s could never have attained such temperatures.

Seems like maybe this is not the ‘best’ or ‘true’ crime documentary. The filmmakers say they worked on “Sugarcane” for three years. A few hours of historical research and critical analysis of historical documents led me to produce “The Bitter Roots of ‘Sugarcane’” which exposes such flaws as these.

Bitter Roots of ‘Sugarcane’ on Rumble

Despite these gaping holes in the story, “Sugarcane” speeds on its way to an Oscar nomination. Mostly recently, a private screening of the film was held at the White House, where all the film glitterati from behind the scenes were gathered as well.

Producer and co-director Emily Kassie was there with her father, David Kassie, a Toronto philanthropist and financier and formerly on the board of directors for the Toronto International Film Festival Group.

Julian Brave NoiseCat and Chief Willie Sellars of the Williams Lake First Nation did an impromptu drumming and singing session to add some Indigenous flavor to that colonial White House and the colonial Academy Award potential.

National Geographic’s Facebook page.

How did this flawed film get so far up the ladder? One of the most awarded documentary films of the year, according to National Geographic’s Facebook page.

Behind the scenes of “Sugarcane” there’s a star-studded cast of producers, editors, financiers, parents and siblings who are certainly in a position to pull a few strings, make connections, and add panache to what otherwise might be a kind of downhome family therapy tragedy film with a touch of history thrown in.

But do any of them care about facts? Or was the goal to make a gut-wrenching story that could further a social justice ‘land back’ agenda in an award-winning way, truth be damned?

Emily Kassie’s sister Caroline is a partner with Chelsea Clinton in their venture capital company Metadora Ventures. Caroline is married to Ricky van Veen. As reported by Page Six in 2021, Van Veen made a fortune “after co-founding comedy brand CollegeHumor and the video platform Vimeo. He is now the head of global creative strategy at Facebook.”

Co-director Julian Brave NoiseCat is the son of Alexandra Roddy, a high-powered marketing exec with IBM. Roddy is the daughter of Suzanne Eger and Joseph Roddy. Joseph was a well-respected writer and editor or contributor to LOOK, LIFE, The New Yorker, New York Times.

Impact Partners were involved in the financing of “Sugarcane.” Dan Cogan is a co-founder and an Academy Award®-winning producer of Icarus. Icarus was all about exposing the doping, corruption, and fraud in Olympic sports, particularly on the part of Russia as a nation. Yet, Cogan’s company is a financier/adviser to “Sugarcane” which is a fraud, and the truth exposes the Williams Lake First Nation investigators and the filmmakers as negligent and corrupt for their lack of due diligence, lack of fact-checking, distortion of facts. It exposes their willing participation in this shock-u-mentary that obscures key facts, twists the truth and blood libels the Roman Catholic Church – especially the priests and nuns who dedicated their lives to uplifting disadvantaged Indigenous communities with education, care, and in good faith.

Hard to know on whose advice and whose tab the Hollywood award-winning talent in the form of Kellen Quinn, Producer, Christopher LaMarca, cinematographer, Maya Daisy Hawke, editing supervisor, and Nathan Punwar, editor, were brought on board to polish the final film.

Did they not have any questions like the ones posed above?

Are they all really willing to lay their reputations on the line, purporting that priests at the school engaged in systematic infanticide and incineration based on the ‘eye witness’ recollections of three people - Larry Emile, a self-admitted alcoholic; an unidentified woman who told the RCMP years ago she witnessed infanticide when she was a 'very small' child; and Wesley Jackson, an apparently white individual who worked at the school and whose duties included digging holes to bury the ashes from the garbage burner in which he says he saw fragments of bones.

Screenshot from police files in “Sugarcane.” Red circle added.

Wesley Jackson told investigators Belleau and Spearing that he’d been paid to dig deep holes and bury the ashes from the school’s furnace, claiming that he’d seen scraps of bones. This ‘eye witness’ statement is compelling in the context of the film’s storyline, but it is meaningless as evidence without factual proof of the origin of the bones.

Wesley Jackson. Screenshot from “Sugarcane.”

Likewise, did he mean the furnace inside the school? Or the garbage burner in the yard?

Of course there would be bones in the school’s garbage burner! St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School was feeding ~300 students three meals a day; kitchen garbage was burned to prevent attracting wildlife like coyotes and bears. As noted above, the garbage burner could never reach temperatures necessary for turning bones to ashes. Certainly, the school’s furnace could never reach such heat, either. For historians, sleuths and investigators, assessing these facts are elementary to solving an alleged crime.

So, Roman Catholic priests and nuns are being vilified as infanticidal murderers over kitchen scraps, the delusional claims or psychotic hallucinations of a self-admitted alcoholic, and questionable memories of a ‘really small’ child!

And the story of Baby Ed. Who was never interviewed by Belleau and Spearing. And whose mother put him in the incinerator. Did they not read the Williams Lake Tribune article of Aug. 26, 1959. It’s right there in the film! “New-born Babe Saved from Garbage Burner. Unwed Mother Sentenced to One Year.”

Screenshot from “Sugarcane” claiming that Ed is the only known survivor of the school’s incinerator. In fact, he is the only known baby to have been put there, by his own mother. Thus, no “pattern of infanticide” has been uncovered. The film is a blood libel on Roman Catholics and Canadian history.

In “Sugarcane,” the Williams Lake First Nation investigation revealed “93 is our number” – as if this is the number of missing children. But no list of names of those children has ever been presented. By Sept. of 2023, they claimed their number was 159. And most recently, the claim is their number is 55 – again, no names.

It’s a no-name genocide being propagated worldwide through an un-fact-checked shock-u-mentary via National Geographic, riding on the reputations of all those noted above who are said to be extraordinary filmmakers. But none of them are good historians.

St. Joseph’s was a mission site before it was a school, and as historian Robert Carney has noted, the missions and schools were the local social services and medical hubs in the earliest times. There certainly may be unmarked graves of unknown people who came there for help or last rites. But graves are not evidence of nefarious deeds. And neither are garbage burners. Nor is eye-witness testimony. As criminal defense lawyer Nicholas Wansbutter stated in an interview with me, the first-person statements in “Sugarcane” are not evidence, even if they are emotionally compelling. There’s no cross-examination. The statements are made in a room full of others, which tends to skew people’s statements as in the Asch Conformity experiment.

Certainly Historic Sexual Assault claims and memories from childhood are deemed to be especially unreliable by psychologists and lawyers.

And as for the crime scene? In most parts of the Western world, it is unheard of that victims of an alleged crime become the sole owners and authorities over the scene of an as yet-uninvestigated crime, but that’s not how things work in Canada today.

The Kamloops First Nation made the original ‘gut-pulling’ claim of finding 215 human remains of missing children in unmarked graves in their orchard. Genocide? Remember? The most heinous crime!

The RCMP turned the investigation over to them. Kamloops First Nation has claimed this is ‘sacred ground’ and they are the sole authority of this alleged crime scene. They gained control of the investigation. And the world has no answers.

The Williams Lake First Nation had a similar win. Yet, they claim that at St. Joseph’s there was systemic rape, infanticide and incineration! The RCMP were a prominent part of “Sugarcane” – so where’s the investigation into these heinous allegations? Will there ever be one?

As reported on Sept. 5, 2023, Williams Lake First Nation became owners of St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School and lands, thanks to BC ‘colonial’ taxpayers – “The First Nation and B.C. government bought the 13.7-acre property for $1.2 million from its private owners, with $849,000 coming from the province.”

Canada’s reputation and that of the Roman Catholic Church (in particular) has been smeared worldwide by this blood libel fiction that masquerades as a documentary. What does it say of the Oscars and of this pedigree talent pool that they have willingly participated in this historical fraud?

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