Lily Gladstone remembers where she was when she first heard that over 200 unmarked graves had possibly been found at Kamloops Indian Residential School—a segregated boarding school for First Nations youth run by the Catholic Church in Canada. At the time, Gladstone was in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, in the midst of filming Killers of the Flower Moon—Martin Scorsese’s staggering film about unrelenting atrocities committed against a different Indigenous community, the Osage Nation, in the 1920s.
“I remember Leo [DiCaprio] texting that to me, asking in all caps and exclamations and question marks, ‘What the hell is this?’” Gladstone exclusively tells VF over Zoom. She remembers how she responded to her bewildered costar: “It really is nothing new to us.”
Just as the Osage were being targeted by a murderous conspiracy bent on taking their oil-rich land, First Nations children in Canada were being separated from their families and sent to boarding schools like Kamloops Indian Residential School, which opened in 1890 and operated until 1978. There, they experienced forced assimilation, abuse, and often worse.
Chief Willie Sellars digs a grave for communty member Stan Wycotte who took his life on the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada. (Credit: Emily Kassie/Sugarcane Film LLC)Emily Kassie
Sugarcane, the documentary from filmmakers Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, dives headfirst into the aftermath of the discovery of these unmarked graves, finding and following First Nation survivors of Canada’s boarding schools and reckoning with the dark legacy of these institutions. Their documentary premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury award for directing. Since then, Sugarcane has been acquired by National Geographic and has played at film festivals across the country—racking up awards, and most recently leading the Critics Choice Documentary Awards with eight nominations. Now Gladstone has boarded Sugarcane as an executive producer.
“You’re not going to find any Indigenous person in North America, Canada, the US, elsewhere, or really Indigenous people worldwide that didn’t go through some kind of program like this,” Gladstone says. “It’s the second wave of colonization.”
The film is deeply personal for Gladstone, as both a member of the Blackfeet tribe and an artist. Before she became the first Native American actress to win a Golden Globe and be nominated for a best-actress Academy Award for Killers of the Flower Moon, Gladstone was a theater artist and activist. “I spent a good part of my 20s doing theater work for social change and social justice,” she says. Part of that involved starring in a one-woman educational show about the Indigenous boarding school experience.