A Historic Fight for One River and Our Collective Future

Nechako: It Will Be a Big River Again, a new documentary from Lantern Films and Experimental Forest Films, co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada, will be screening at the VIFF Centre June 6 to 21 after a sold-out world premiere at DOXA in May.

Hear from director Lyana Patrick about how the film came to be:

What prompted you to make this documentary, and why does it feel vital to get this story out now?

This film is really part of a 70-year-long struggle to protect and restore the Nechako River. The Kenney Dam was built in 1952, and that’s when lands were flooded and 70 per cent of the river was diverted for an aluminum smelter. And the legal struggle really started in the 1980s, when our communities were preparing to be interveners in a court case that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans brought against Alcan. We were never granted intervener status, but we ended up documenting our Elders’ oral histories, and some of those testimonies are in this film.

Then about five years ago, right around the time when the court case that’s documented in the film was about to be heard in the B.C. Supreme Court, the Chief of the Saik’uz First Nation reached out to our production company, Lantern Films, and asked if there would be interest in making a film about the community’s struggle to protect the Nechako River. So it was very much a community-driven project.

You often interview people out on the land and also appear on screen as a member of the Stellat’en First Nation. How did you approach this as a filmmaker?

I really wanted to show the people living, being, doing things on the lands, on the waters, and just really allow the viewer to have a strong sense that we continue to use and occupy our lands.

I also wanted to show how much work people have to do, especially community leaders like Jasmine Thomas, who are called on to be on councils and attend all of these meetings and constantly be that mediator between government and industry and the community. And then they also have cultural responsibilities and social responsibilities, in addition to their responsibilities on the land and the water.

I grew up in the northern Interior, and I talk about this in the film — that I didn’t always feel connected. In part because we lived outside of the community, and also because of what my dad experienced going to residential school, and the kinds of things that you learned to feel shame about as a kid.

So the film was also a process of reconnection for me in really profound ways. I just feel very grateful that I was able to bring my lived and ongoing connections to that territory to this film, and I think it created a different kind of storytelling.

The Nechako River — and water itself — is its own character in the film. How did you capture and communicate its importance?

We talked a lot about how the river is central to everything. I wanted people to hear the water, when it’s rushing, when it’s more calm, to see it in all its different manifestations.

That’s one thing I struggled with: the complexity of the Nechako watershed. It’s not just one river. It’s a tributary to the Fraser River, which goes down to the ocean. It has streams and creeks and rapids and areas of salmon spawning. It’s a really complex system, and I wondered, “How do we represent that?”

What I realized was that we didn’t necessarily have to explain anything. The water is and the water is going to keep doing what it’s doing.

I was also thinking about how we can take access to clean drinking water for granted. Up until just a few short years ago, our community, my dad’s community, was on a boil-water advisory. The idea that “water is life,” which seems so fundamental to our understanding of ourselves in relation to our environment, is sometimes something that just slips away from us.

Someone says in the film that 90 per cent of our diet was once fish, and many if not most of those fish came from the Nechako River. So what does it mean, to lose 90 per cent of your diet? And so we’re just trying to bring it back into view, that question, why water would be so important. “Water is life” is not just a metaphor, it’s an actuality.

Is there a call to action contained in this film? What do you want audiences to do after the credits roll?

The reason that the community asked us to make this film was because they wanted to get a really wide audience to learn and understand what we were doing, why we were doing it and how important it was to us. I would love for people to watch it and have a better understanding of how the health of our lands and waters is so intimately connected to our individual and community health, and to feel a sense of responsibility for that.

I’m an instructor at Simon Fraser University, and I talk to my students all the time about the responsibilities we need to take for the lands and the waters that we live on, that, some of us say, we are guests on. I like to say that I’m “trying to be a good relative on lands that are not my own.”

As a filmmaker, there can be so many ways to approach a subject. I wanted to make this a story of hope. To show the care and the love that our people have, even for those spaces on our lands and waters that have been devastated. And if we can hope, in the face of such oppression and destruction, then how can others not hope?

Lyana Patrick is an award-winning, Vancouver-based director, writer and researcher from the Stellat’en First Nation.

Get tickets to see ‘Nechako: It Will Be a Big River Again’ at VIFF Centre here.

Read more: Indigenous, Film, Environment

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