Some People Are "Special"

Special enough to have a gravy train:

Communities could previously receive up to $3 million per year through the Residential Schools Missing Children Community Support Fund, but the government had moved to cap funding at $500,000.

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Anandasangaree said the government will now lift that cap and remove planned restrictions on the funding, which goes toward locating burial sites at former residential schools and identifying children who never returned.

The recent changes, he said, “fell short of our solemn commitment to finding the children.”

 

But you know where the children are.

Dig them up.

 

 

If the sad dysfunction in aboriginal communities was put front and centre, the obvious questions of why no one is addressing it properly instead of blaming an entire country would be asked.

The narrative of blame must be allowed to continue, even if it destroys everyone:

From the get-go, based on previously published material by Julian Brave NoiseCat and in bios about his father Ed, it is clear that both men know that Ed’s father was Ray Peters.

Ray Peters married Ed’s mother in 1958, according to his obituary, and they had eight children together. Ray Peters was not a Caucasian priest but an Indigenous man from Skatin, BC. Ray not only had eight children with Ed’s mother, but in total he had 17 children with 5 different women. Ray was 11 years older than Ed’s mother.

Ed was found as an abandoned newborn in the St. Joseph Indian Residential School’s incinerator on August 16, 1959. According to the Williams Lake Tribune headline news of that day that is partially read out in the film, the dairyman was coming by with his morning run and heard a strange noise coming from the incinerator. Thinking a cat had gotten trapped in there, he opened it up and found Baby Ed in an ice cream box. He saved his life.

Ed’s mother was not a student at St. Joseph’s as she was 20 years old.

The exploitation of this family tragedy by the filmmakers and National Geographic gets worse.

After the rescue of the baby, Ed’s mother was tracked down by the authorities and she was sent to jail for a year for abandoning her baby.

Thus, Baby Ed was raised for much of his early life by his paternal grandmother, a woman who died of alcohol poisoning when he was about eight, according to her death certificate.

None of these facts are in the film, though Julian or his father Ed do mention that the paternal grandmother died of hypothermia when she went outside to find her husband who had been drinking. At one point in conversation with Martina Pierre, an aunt, she asks, “Where does my brother fit in with you?” and Ed answers “He was my dad.” He adds, “There was some turmoil at the beginning.”

However, this information slips by, almost unnoticed. Ed has taken the family name of his paternal grandmother, Alice Noisecat, who married Jacob Archie. It is difficult for viewers to make family connections from the short, often emotionally charged vignettes.

“Deadline” frames the movie thus: “Sugarcane explores the lasting intergenerational legacy of trauma from the residential school system including forced family separation, physical and sexual abuse, and the destruction of Native culture and language.”

In fact, underlying this exploitative film about family dysfunction is a steady stream of alcohol.