On April 1, 2025, Premier David Eby of British Columbia screened the Oscar-nominated film “Sugarcane” at the BC legislature. Through a woven tapestry of beautiful imagery and an emotional father-son journey, the film presents the claim that priests impregnated indigenous students at St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School (aka Cariboo) and incinerated the illicit babies in the school’s garbage burner.The film has 100% “Fresh” ratings from critics on the film review website “Rotten Tomatoes” — they fell for this improbable storyline of incinerated babies hook, line, and sinker.But then, so did the world’s most rational man, Dr. Jordan Peterson.Peterson, who flatly refused to comply with compelled speech over pronouns, had no questions for his good friend, indigenous carver Charles Joseph, when he lent his massive online YouTube platform to Joseph to tell his residential school story in Episode 223, “Cruelty,” of the Peterson “Dialogues.”Ironically, there is the possibility that we may all be forced to comply with compelled speech on Indian Residential School claims or be punished for residential school ‘denialism.’Peterson had just returned from Russia and a harsh detox from benzodiazepines and a severe bout of pneumonia, so he was not his usual feisty self. Empathy overruled rational thinking.Charles Joseph’s story is shocking. But it is difficult to decipher fact from fiction in his emotional, convoluted claims. He explains that his parents gave him to his great-grandparents. Then he’d suffered bouts of mumps, measles, and chickenpox. He’d been at the hospital in Alert Bay and said he was in a special incubator tent. In that time period, this device was used to provide enhanced oxygen to small children..Joseph claims to have then been taken away to St. Michael’s Indian Residential School at Alert Bay, his great-grandparents unable to take him home. His recounting of the rape that he claims to have suffered on day one, first from a nun, then a preacher, at age 5 at the school, is shocking, as are his statements that children who died of Hepatitis C or tuberculosis were wrapped in a cloth and their bodies incinerated in the school’s garbage burner. It was stuffed with paper, he recounts, and the school children were forced to light the match; the smell of burning flesh was a pall over the whole community, he claims. He went on to live a life of alcoholism and drug abuse until returning to his roots and taking up carving.Peterson is in tears. In the comments on the video, which has well over 600,000 views on his YouTube platform of 8.8 million subscribers, people are crying or enraged or both.No probing questions are asked about these claims. Hep C was not even discovered and named until 1989. Joseph would have left St. Michael’s in 1972. The minimum age for admission to residential school was seven, unless a child was destitute, neglected, or orphaned. Joseph was enrolled at age five. There were indigenous staff at Indian Residential Schools. Would they have allowed their child relatives to be burned in a garbage bin? And…cremation requires extremely high temperatures that could be impossible to achieve in a school’s garbage burner filled with paper.Peterson would not have known this at the time, as this report had not been leaked, but the Royal Canadian Mounted Police spent 8 years from 1995-2003 and $1 million investigating claims of abuse at 15 Indian Residential Schools across British Columbia. This included St. Michael's in Alert Bay, where Charles Joseph attended. Indigenous activists like Charlene Belleau were involved. The RCMP were unable to substantiate all but a handful of the allegations.So how does this connect to “Sugarcane?”At the beginning of the podcast, Dr. Peterson notes that Charles Joseph is webcasting from his carving tent, located on the land of Darrell Sellars, father of Chief Willie Sellars of the Williams Lake First Nation in BC. He also thanks Chris Wycotte, saying, "We’re going to start by thanking the crew, Chris Wycotte, that helped Charles set up this interview from inside his carving tent at Sugar Cane."Wycotte is a long-time Williams Lake First Nation band councillor..Thus, it is highly coincidental that this Peterson “Dialogue” podcast, titled “Cruelty” that was recorded on November 10, 2021, and posted February 3, 2022, has parallels to “Sugarcane”, but with a more charismatic indigenous carver who just happened to have been rescued from the incinerator as a baby, at St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School.“Sugarcane” was released in January 2024 at the Sundance Film Festival to rave reviews. It was picked up for distribution by National Geographic. The film is set at the Williams Lake First Nation and claims to expose the dark history of the adjacent St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School. The storyline is that priests raped and impregnated female students and burned the illicit babies in the incinerator. Ed’s miraculous rescue is said to be proof of these heinous crimes.However, all the key figures from the Williams Lake First Nation involved in “Sugarcane” knew that it was Ed’s mother who put Baby Ed in the incinerator. It was sensational news in the Williams Lake Tribune! Ed grew up being tormented as “Trashcan Baby” by classmates.“Sugarcane’s” producer, Emily Kassie, says her collaboration with indigenous friend and journo colleague, Julian Brave NoiseCat, was by invitation. Both say they were shocked to realize that Julian’s family is related to St. Joseph’s School.The filmmakers offer only a glancing pan of the news story in the Williams Lake Tribune, where Julian’s grandmother, Antoinette Archie, was sentenced to jail for a year for abandoning her baby in the incinerator. Antoinette is seen on screen in the film but never identified by name.Ed’s father was not a priest. He was Ray Peters, a well-known backhoe operator and rodeo rider. Julian recounts in articles prior to the production of “Sugarcane” that Ray had fathered 17 children with 5 different women. He was 11 years older than Antoinette.A central figure in “Sugarcane” is Julian’s aunt, Charlene Belleau, who was part of the RCMP investigation years ago.Someone cashed in on the tragic story of a desperate unwed mother with consequences for all of Canada with this blood libel film. Now the claim of Indian Residential Schools incinerating babies and students is found in Kimberly Murray’s reports sent to the UN Human Rights bodies, propagated at the recent Permanent People’s Tribunal, and even Chief Teegee claimed this is why no bodies might be found at Indian Residential Schools. The April 1, 2025, screening of the shock-u-mentary at the BC Legislature is widely accepted as truth. Eby strongly castigates ‘denialists.’Not even the world’s most rational man, Dr. Jordan Peterson, had questions about incinerated bodies of children.Watch my mini-doc rebuttal to “Sugarcane.”Be sorry no more.
