The story that Sugarcane tells , the stunning documentary from Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, is set in British Columbia. But it resonates even here, in San Luis Obispo County.

The last speaker of her dialect of her language, referred to by scholars as Obispeño Chumash, was named Rosario Cooper. She died in Lopez Canyon, east of Arroyo Grande, in 1917, but her language was recorded and so survives. Many Chumash—the yak titʸu titʸu yak tiłhini (ytt) people—went to the Sherman Indian School in Riverside, where they were punished for speaking Rosario’s language.

So were the children of the Williams Lake First Nations of British Columbia when they were sent to the St. Joseph Mission Residential School, which closed in 1981. The school that Sugarcane (the film takes its name from a nearby reservation) depicts punishments that are unbelievable for little boys and girls. A barn was used to tie up miscreant students and whip them. Six-year-olds who talked in class were made to hold oversized Bibles, the weight of cinderblocks, over their heads for an hour.

The intent of schools like these was, as the film points out, was to annihilate the Indian.

It wasn’t enough to “annihilate” living Native Americans, the little boys who learned manual labor and wood shop and the little girls who learned baking and canning and dusting.

Even the dead have suffered.

In the 1880s, a ytt burial ground that lay in the path of the Pacific Coast Railroad near Avila Beach was obliterated. In the 1890s, crews installing a new water main beneath Chorro Street, near the Mission, did the same to the remains of the indigenous people buried there.

Near the St. Joseph School, a preliminary scan from ground-penetrating radar revealed at least ninety-three potential burials, likely the bones of residential school students whose names will never be known. One former student remembered nuns carrying the body of a newborn infant inside a shoebox down to the school incinerator.

Julian Brave NoiseCat’s Father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, was luckier. A dairyman found him, soon after his birth, in an ice-cream carton hidden inside a dumpster.

What makes the film powerful is the story of reconciliation between Julian and Ed Archie, abandoned by a mother who was ashamed to bear him.

Why was she ashamed? Another former student, at his wife’s behest, has a DNA search done. He is an indigenous Canadian, but his DNA reveals that he is 50% Irish and 5% Scots, and a match is made with a distant cousin named “McGrath.”

Father McGrath was a teacher at the school.

The same priest who heard his confession, one former student remembered, pulled him out of his bed in the boys’ dormitory at night.

Every year, in the first week of September, a cattle truck arrived at “The Rez” to take the children back to school. Parents had to drag some of those students, crying and shrieking, to the waiting truck.

In the late 1940s, the ytt children at the Sherman School were summarily dismissed and replaced by Navajo children. They were no longer wanted.

Neither were the children whose parentage, thanks to the Oblate fathers and brothers, were partly White. They weren’t wanted by either world, Native American or White.

This is a sobering film. It is not hopeless. The grace with which the two NoiseCats find healing is Sugarcane’s pivot, and the courage with which an indomitable investigator, Charlene Belleau, pursues the fates of the missing children and the priests who abused them is remindful of another powerful film about a similar subject, Spotlight.

It’s not incongruous to call this a beautiful film: Dust mites dance in a shaft of sunlight, Native American horsemen pivot together to run down a hillside, rain-slick roads penetrate thick stands of pine.

Above the little Mission cemetery is a statue of Mary, Queen of Heaven, the marble turning mossy.  The same statue, draped softly in snow, reappears later in the film, and it is beautiful. Many indigenous people remain Catholic, to the point of defending their churches in the wake of a spate of arson fires set as retribution as more and more unmarked graves were revealed across Canada.

The sounds, too, are evocative: a horse pulling grass just beyond the cemetery fence, crackling embers as men prepare a sweat lodge, a spade hitting the ground and striking wood, the harsh clank as a gate flies open for a bronco and rider at the Fort Williams Stampede, the cooing of doves within the tragic barn where little boys were once whipped.

The most stunning sound is a long moment of silence, when Rick, a tribal elder, confronts the Superior General of the Mission Oblates with the story of three generations of physical and sexual abuse. The priest is numb, and the filmmakers allow his silent hurt to fill the space.

Near Surgarcane’s end, Ed Archie kneels in the way boys once did in what were called the “Indian Schools” across the United States and Canada. They did so to prepare for the switch.

But this is what happens instead: Julian Brave NoiseCat gently waves an eagle feather above his father’s head and then brushes it along his body in a healing ceremony. It is a moment of redemption that the Mission Oblates had no power to confer.

And, in mid-grilling, noticed the kite flying over the playground at Harloe Elementary. Another sure sign of Spring.

And, doggone it—you’ll forgive the pun—Spring also means new life. We have one example. He’s our neighbor’s German Shepherd puppy, Ralph, who’s just taken up residence in his Forever Home. Walter, our Basset, loves Ralph already.

So, yes. Life is good. It takes Spring to remind us of that fact.

Simply Red’s cover of “If You Don’t Know My by Now” has been on my mp3 player for a long time. But I had forgotten this song, “Holding Back the Years.” Here is in, in an early MTV video, from 1985, and I just rediscovered it day before yesterday.

(I started teaching teens in the 1980s and loved their music, almost immediately.)

Simply Red’s singer, Mick Hucknall, lost his Mum. She deserted the family when he was three. He began, about the age of ten, to have huge fights with his Dad. “There was no woman around to referee,” he said many years later. But he found an outlet in art, in dreary industrial Manchester, and then in singing, and with the group that takes its name from his hair.

The Irish imagery comes from his mother’s side of the family, from Offaly, a county dead in the center of Ireland. The song comes from his pain. It’s been transmuted into something beautiful.

Based on one of novelist Roddy Doyle’s trilogy about life in working-class Dublin, The Commitments is one of my favorite Irish movies. Simple premise: A group of Dubliners form an R & B band. The music that results in this 1991 film is divine.

Sample one (my favorite):

And then there’s this:

And just one more:

Okay, just one more. The image of the little girls in their First Communion dresses is So Irish.

My tongue-in-cheek nominee, had People been around in 1874, when a word like “sexiest” would’ve been bewildering.

I hold no brief for wat where once called. “Indian fighters,” but in the Disney film Tonka, for cryin’ out loud, Keogh was played by Guy Williams. As Zorro, he was my childhood hero. Both Williams and a young Lakota, played, of course (?), by Sal Mineio, were devoted to a gelding who turned out to be the lone survivor, human or otherwise, of Custer’s immediate command. Here’s a still from the film, which impressed the six-year-old me deeply. I”ve been obsessed with the Little Bighorn ever since. And, truth be told, I love any film about the love between humans and animals-–War Horse, so many years later, must’ve rought back memories of Tonka.

Nipomo farmer Charles Bristol served with him during the Civil War. I got to teach his great-great-grandchildren, wonderful young people—one a firefighter, one has just become a mother, and their father, Blake, is a superb high school teacher. So these Bristols’ ancestor would known Myles Keogh, an Irish expatriate, a soldier of fortune, dashing and courtly. Sadly, after the war, he wound up assigned to George Custer’s Seventh Cavalry and so was killed on a little rise hafway to Custer Hill along with his Company I. .

Custer was a stickler for appearances, so each company was segregated by the color of their horses—chestnuts, greys, and so on. In the Disney film, Comanche looks too red to be a bay, but it was bayy that made up Keogh’s Company. Comanche, the survivor, was beloved by the Seventh, as was Keogh, so, after the Little Bighorn–the Greasy Grass fight, the Lakota called it—his daily ration, for the rest of his life, included oats and hay. And a bucket of beer. Here he is after the Greasy Grass:

Here is Charles Bristol, and here, at Fort Lincoln, after the war, in his time with the Seventh, is Myles Keogh, on the bottom step at right. Most of the women in this photo became widows.

And Here is his memorial===not at the Custer battlefield, but in County Carlow, Ireland.

And so, of course, here is his song.

I FINALLY got around to watching Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood today. It hasn’t replaced Pulp Fiction in my mind, but sometimes, in these dispirited times, what you need to set the scales of morality straight is some good old-fashioned movie killing. The flamethrower worked for me.

Someday I need to write about the acting—Margot Robbie is both beautiful and gifted. Her trailer-park Tonya Harding in I, Tonya, was spot on and, of course, Tonya’s temperamental opposite is Robbie’s sunny Barbie. She is a joy to watch. Brad Pitt’s Cliff is explosively violent but has a moral compass that points True North. And Di Caprio’s Rick Dalton monologue, in the Western scene while holding the little girl, ten-year-old Julia Butters, at gunpoint, took my breath away.

In the scene before—he’s shooting a TV Western—DiCaprio’s Dalton, massively hungover from too many whiskey sours and trying to contain his Marlboro cough, blows his lines repeatedly. He retreats into his trailer and confronts himself in a furious episode of self-hatred. The scene was completely improvised.

I was once happy, in Titanic, to see Di Caprio’s Jack sink beneath the surface. He has changed my mind since then.

I should write someday about the cars (Sharon Tate’s Porsche 911, Polanski’s convertible MG, the Benedict Canyon guests’ yellow ’68 Pontiac Firebird, Dalton’s Cadillac, now hideous); the minor players (Band of Brothers’ Damian Lewis as Steve McQueen, Margaret Qualley, Andie McDowell’s daughter, as Pussycat) and the one-liners, including, and I apologize for this:

Don’t cry in front of the Mexicans.

I loved the dog. Our nephew, Brendan, has an American Bull Terrier that looks just like the one, Brandy, so devoted to Brad Pitt’s Cliff. In defense of her human, Brandy latched onto Tex Watson’s crotch (that was Austin Butler, Elvis. Tex Watson, as far as I know, is still in CMC.) in the break-in scene. She did not let go. Brendan’s dog, angelic and a happy volunteer pillow, is likewise devoted to their little girl.

This is Brandy, whose real name is Sayuri.

I read the prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s book, Helter-Skelter, many, many years ago, and it was the barking and the baying of the dogs on Camino Cielo as the murders got underway that kept me up that night. It was a stunning passage.

The address was 10050 Cielo Drive, in Benedict Canyon. The home, a low-slung amalgam of French Provincial and American Ranch, was lived in by Lilian Gish, Henry Fonda, Cary Grant and Dyan Cannon, among others. The home was razed, as was the address, after the five murders. Nevertheless, the lot’s neighbors, even today, claim to hear voices, rising in argument. Some of them hear screams.

I’m a little obsessive about Los Angeles history, thanks to detective novelist Raymond Chandler. I’m a little obsessive about that part of El Lay, because those hills produced such beautiful music—Manson thought himself a musician and songwriter—until that terrible, terrible night, the hottest night of 1969 in Los Angeles.

The murders destroyed this. This performance, from a Lady of the Canyon, is from 1969, too.

I had to look it up. El Coyote was the restaurant where Sharon Tate and her friends had their last meal. El Coyote was founded in 1931. In the scene that Tarantino shot, the actors sat in the same booth where Sharon—she ordered enchiladas with corn tortillas— and her friends sat that night in August 1969.

Shivers.

While it’s not my favorite Tarantino movie, he chose the music with such expertise, with such feeling for history, that it made the film, while not history, history as you wish it could have been, which was exactly his intent. We need a little history as we wish it could have been. Today.

Here are some examples of the music he chose.

I had forgotten how much I liked this Deep Purple song, so here’s the first tribute video I found on YouTube that I wanted to share.

Another tribute video. My favorite Mamas and Papas song.

And I can’t tell you how much I loved this Bob Seger song:

But maybe Tarantino’s best choice of songs was this one, from the Rolling Stones, made so poignant for its foreshadowing. Polanski, after all, had Chinatown ahead of him. Sharon Tate was twenty-six years old.

I am not an angeleno, but I loved the neon signs that even I could recognize, including an early Taco Bell. I spent many happy hours at SLO’s Taco Bell on Santa Rosa when I was in college.

I am seventy-two now, of course. This film reminded me of how much I enjoyed the music from “my” 1960s. Thank you, Quentin Tarantino, for two hours well spent.

Dear Family,

I plunged back into genealogy this morning and found our grandfather again. You may remember that, in Taft, he had a habit of borrowing cars without first notifying their owners. That was later. This is from 1917:

Here’s the house he was living in at the time, on Main Street in Lodi:

Couldn’t stay out of trouble. From the Bakersfield Echo, 1919:

Mom’s birth announcement (the address is now an industrial area and seems to be a vacant lot):

And in 1902, his big brother Willie got into a little hot water, too.

But Granduncle Willie turned out just fine. He was an engineer on the Great Northern Railway and died at his post:

And that Great Northern wasn’t some mouse fart railroad, nor was the Empire Builder. Here’s a photo:

And, as to the Irish part of our background, I’ve been able to push about as far back as is possible for the Irish, to the 18th century. I’ve just discovered a “Margaret Lambert,” who married Patt Keeffe, who was born in Edinburgh, but I haven’t positively identified her as the same Margaret Lambert who would be our 4th great-grandmother.

Meanwhile, as to Grandma Kelly, I’ve found the German village, Geißelhardt, Schwäbisch Hall (I have no idea how German names work) where her grandfather, Michen Kircher, was born and baptized. It’s beautiful.

And this is the church (Lutheran), appropriately named St. Michael’s, where Michen Kircher (“Kirch” = “Church”) was baptized in 1831.

Given the last century’s unpleasantness (1939-1945), I’ve always been a little uneasy about our German heritage. But our ancestral village is in Baden-Wurttemberg, the home of Claus von Stauffenberg, played, not too ineptly, by Tom Cruise (Valkyrie),  who tried to blow up Hitler in July 1944.

And, by golly, we even have a sort of connection to von Stauffenberg. I got to do an inservice at Stanford twenty years ago, and we visited the Hoover Institution, whose archives include the X-ray of Hitler’s skull taken immediately after the bomb went off. I got to hold it in my hot little hands!


So there is your genealogy update for March.

Love,

Jim