Sugarcane – April 16th
Film at 6:30pm – Wednesday, April 16th
Room 137, Isenberg School of Management
UMass Amherst
Sugarcane
(2024, Julian Brave NoiseCat & Emily Kassie, Canada & United States, 107 min, in English & Secwepemctsin w/ English subtitles)
A stunning tribute to the resilience of Native people and their way of life, SUGARCANE, the debut feature documentary from Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, is an epic cinematic portrait of a community during a moment of international reckoning. In 2021, evidence of unmarked graves was discovered on the grounds of an Indian residential school run by the Catholic Church in Canada. After years of silence, the forced separation, assimilation and abuse many children experienced at these segregated boarding schools was brought to light, sparking a national outcry against a system designed to destroy Indigenous communities. Set amidst a groundbreaking investigation, SUGARCANE illuminates the beauty of a community breaking cycles of intergenerational trauma and finding the strength to persevere.
Film Screening
Wednesday, April 16th
Free and open to the public
Introduced by Abigail Chabitnoy (Assisstant Professor at UMass Amherst)
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Abigail Chabitnoy
Assistant Professor at UMass Amherst
Abigail Chabitnoy is a Koniag descendant and member of the Tangirnaq Native Village in Kodiak. She is the author of In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful (forthcoming, Wesleyan 2022) and How to Dress a Fish (Wesleyan 2019), shortlisted for the 2020 International Griffin Prize for Poetry and winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award, and the linocut illustrated chapbook Converging Lines of Light (Flower Press 2021). She was a 2021 Peter Taylor Fellow at Kenyon Writers Workshop and the recipient of the 2020 Witter Bynner Native Poet Residency at Elsewhere Studios in Paonia, CO. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Boston Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, LitHub, and Red Ink, among others. She has previously taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts and joined the faculty as an assistant professor at UMass Amherst in the fall of 2022.
Abigail holds a BA in Anthropology and English from Saint Vincent College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University. Find her at her website.
Trailer