Notes

1 John Grierson, quoted in D. B. Jones, Movies and Memoranda: An Interpretive History of the National Film Board of Canada (Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 1981), 30.

2 Quoted in Katherine Balpataky, “Call of the Wild,” excerpted from Canadian Wildlife, Winter 2004, Hinterland Who’s Who: 50 Years, https://www.hww.ca/en/about-us/50th/history.html.

3 Brian J. Low, NFB Kids: Portrayals of Children by the National Film Board of Canada, 1939–1989 (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2002).

4 National Film Act, s. 9(a), cited in Canada, Report of the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences (Ottawa: King’s Printer, 1951), 51. The original legislation in 1939 stipulated that it was to “make and distribute films designed to help Canadians in all parts of Canada to understand the ways of living and the problems of Canadians in other parts” (Canada, An Act to Create a National Film Board, Statutes of Canada, 1939, 103). The wording changed in 1950 after the NFB underwent a government review.

5 Zoe Druick argues convincingly that the NFB was a social technology of liberal democracy. See Zoe Druick, Projecting Canada: Government Policy and Documentary Film at the National Film Board (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 3, 23. NFB documentaries were “privileged sites of production,” providing viewers with “a way of seeing the nation,” Druick writes (9).

6 Ibid., 11.

7 Ibid., 23. See also Christopher E. Gittings, Canadian National Cinema: Ideology, Difference, and Representation (New York: Routledge, 2002), 88–89.

8 Federal and provincial bodies mediated the ecological behaviours of Canadians throughout the twentieth century. Education and law-making were the two most effective methods for communicating and enforcing state objectives regarding the environment. Sometimes government institutions used nontraditional approaches, such as publishing comic books, to educate Canadians on how to think about and behave toward nature. See Mark McLaughlin, “Rise of the Eco-Comics: The State, Environmental Education and Canadian Comic Books, 1971–1975,” Material Culture Review 77 (2013): 3–23.

9 National Film Board, Canada: A Year of the Land (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1967), 1.

10 Ibid.

11 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Spread of Nationalism (1983; repr., New York: Verso, 1991).

12 NFB filmmaking activities can also be seen as an extension of a new liberal vision to manage social and environmental spaces. See James Murton, Creating a Modern Countryside: Liberalism and Land Resettlement in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007), 6.

13 See Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007); H. V. Nelles, The Politics of Development: Forests, Mines, and Hydro-Electric Power in Ontario, 1849–1941 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1974); Graeme Wynn, Canada and Arctic North America (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007); and Melissa Clark-Jones, A Staple State: Canadian Industrial Resources in Cold War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987).

14 James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 4.

15 Daniel Macfarlane, Negotiating a River: Canada, the US, and the Creation of the St. Lawrence Seaway (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014); Douglas R. Francis, The Technological Imperative in Canada: An Intellectual History (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009); Matthew Farish and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, “High Modernism in the Arctic: Planning Frobisher Bay and Inuvik,” Journal of Historical Geography 35, no. 3 (2009): 517–44; Caroline Desbiens, Power from the North: Territory, Identity, and the Culture of Hydroelectricity in Québec (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013).

16 Tina Loo, “High Modernism, Conflict, and the Nature of Change in Canada: A Look at Seeing like a State,” Canadian Historical Review 97, no. 1 (2016): 42.

17 This high modernism is also evident in the magical realism of the fictional Ti-Jean series produced by the NFB. For a superb essay on the films of Ti-Jean and its high modern values, see Matt Dyce and Jonathan Peyton, “Magical Realism: Canadian Geography on Screen in the 1950s,” NiCHE, 21 February 2018, https://niche-canada.org/2018/02/21/magical-regionalism-canadian-geography-on-screen-in-the-1950s/#_edn29.

18 Loo, “High Modernism,” 42–43.

19 Jeanne Haffner, The View from Above: The Science of Social Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 112–13.

20 Adrian Ivakhiv, “An Ecophilosophy of the Moving Image,” in Ecocinema Theory and Practice, ed. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt (New York: Routledge, 2013), 88.

21 Several environmental historians have examined the relationship between nature and film. See, for example, Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Finis Dunaway, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

22 See Pat Brereton, Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American Cinema (Bristol: Intellect, 2005); Jonathan Burt, Animals in Film (London: Reaktion, 2002); Cynthia Chris, Watching Wildlife (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007); Sean Cubitt, EcoMedia: Key Issues (New York: Rodopi, 2005); Jhan Hochman, Green Cultural Studies: Nature in Film, Novel, and Theory (Moscow: University of Idaho Press, 1998); David Ingram, Green Screen: Environmentalism and Hollywood Cinema (1998; repr., Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2004); Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films About Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Anat Pick and Guinevere Narraway, eds., Screening Nature: Cinema Beyond the Human (New York: Berghahn, 2013).

23 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), li.

1 National Film Board Archives (hereafter NFBA), minutes of NFB meeting of 14 September 1943, 3.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., 4.

4 Ibid., 3.

5 Advisory Committee on Post-War Reconstruction, Final Report of the Subcommittee (Ottawa: Edmond Cloutier, 1944), 21.

6 An Act to Create a National Film Board, R.S.C. 1939, 2 Geo. VI, c. 20, p. 103.

7 Quoted in D. B. Jones, Movies and Memoranda: An Interpretive History of the National Film Board of Canada (Ottawa: Canadian Film Institute, 1981), 41.

8 John Grierson, “The Documentary Idea,” Complete Photographer 4, no. 92 (1942): 83.

9 Edgar Antsey, quoted in Jones, Movies and Memoranda, 42.

10 William Goetz, “The Canadian Wartime Documentary: Canada Carries On and The World in Action,” Cinema Journal 16, no. 2 (Spring 1977): 65.

11 Although Grierson wanted his films to appear impartial, there was a considerable amount of prestidigitation in the films that he produced. To broadcast government views clearly, NFB directors abstracted images and sounds from specific places and assembled them into sequences. Short films and newsreels about the Second World War frequently utilized Eisensteinian editing techniques, such as jump-cuts and baroque movie scores, to give the films and newsreels emotional subtexts.

12 John Grierson, “A Film Policy for Canada,” Canadian Affairs 1 (1944): 3.

13 NFBA, minutes of NFB meeting of 14 September 1943, 4.

14 NFBA, Coal Face Canada file, “Moving Picture: Coal Production in Canada,” n.d.

15 Coal Face Canada, prod. Robert Edmonds, NFB, 1944.

16 The Strategy of Metals, prod. Stuart Legg, NFB, 1941; Battle for Oil, prod. Stuart Spottiswoode, NFB, 1942.

17 Food—Weapons of Conquest, prod. Stuart Legg, NFB, 1941.

18 Hands for the Harvest, prod. James Beveridge, NFB, 1943.

19 Timber Front, prod. Stanley Hawes and Frank Badgley, NFB, 1940.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 See Bruce Hodgins and Jamie Benidickson, The Temagami Experience: Recreation, Resources and Aboriginal Rights in the Northern Ontario Wilderness (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989); and R. Peter Gillis and Thomas Roach, Lost Initiatives: Canada’s Forest Industries, Forest Policy, and Forest Conservation (New York: Greenwood, 1986).

23 Canada, Lands, Parks and Forests Branch: Report for the Fiscal Year Ended March 31, 1939 (Ottawa: Department of Mines and Resources, 1939), 138, http://cfs.nrcan.gc.ca/pubwarehouse/pdfs/30918.pdf.

24 Timber Front.

25 Ibid.

26 NFBA, According to Need file, John Grierson to Donald Gordon, chairman of Wartime Prices and Trade Board, 29 May 1944.

27 NFBA, According to Need file, “Information Sheet,” November 1944.

28 According to Need, prod. Dallas Jones, NFB, 1944.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid.

31 NFBA, According to Need file, “Memorandum to the National Film Board,” 13 October 1944.

32 Ibid.

33 John Grierson, CBC Radio, 30 November 1940.

34 New Home in the West, prod. Dallas Jones, NFB, 1943.

35 Ibid.

36 Canadian Wheat Story, prod. Crawley Films, NFB, 1944.

37 New Home in the West.

38 Canadian Wheat Story.

39 Battle of the Harvests, prod. Stanley Jackson, NFB, 1942.

40 Look to the North, prod. James Beveridge, NFB, 1944.

41 Land in Trust, prod. Lawrence Cherry and Evelyn Cherry, NFB, 1949.

42 Red Runs the Fraser, prod. Sydney Newman, NFB, 1949.

43 Ibid.

44 Carol Payne, The Official Picture: The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941–1971 (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 107.

45 Grierson, “Film Policy for Canada,” 4.

46 Olga Denisko, “Working in the Private Film Industry,” Interlock 4–5 (1976): 15.

47 “They Make Movies,” Free Press Weekly Prairie Farmer, 22 May 1946.

48 Denisko, “Working,” 20.

49 NFBA, minutes of NFB meeting of 14 September 1943, 3.

50 NFBA, Windbreaks on the Prairies file, John Grierson to L. W. Brockington, 1 November 1939.

51 Windbreaks on the Prairies, prod. Evelyn Cherry, NFB, 1943.

52 Historian Finis Dunaway has shown that American filmmaker Pare Lorentz was one of the first to criticize the ecological mismanagement of farmers. His film The Plow That Broke the Plains criticizes agrarians’ haphazard exploitation of the West. Although there is no mention of Lorentz’s work in Cherry’s notes, the director appears to have been a major influence on her work. See Finis Dunaway, Natural Visions: The Power of Images in American Environmental Reform (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

53 Windbreaks on the Prairies.

54 Ibid.

55 NFBA, Windbreaks on the Prairies file, Allan Beaven to John Grierson, 16 October 1940.

56 NFBA, Five Steps to Better Farm Living file, “Condensed Guide for Film Utilization,” n.d.

57 NFBA, Five Steps to Better Farm Living file, “Fact Sheet,” n.d.

58 H. R. Hare, Little Chats on Farm Management (Ottawa: Economics Division—Marketing Service, Dominion Department of Agriculture, 1943), 2.

59 Ibid., 4.

60 Ibid., 22.

61 NFBA, Five Steps to Better Farm Living file, Evelyn Cherry to “Sol,” 16 September 1944.

62 Hare, Little Chats, 2.

63 Joshua Nygren, “The Bulldozer in the Watershed: Conservation, Water, and Technological Optimism in the Post–World War II United States,” Environmental History 21 (2016): 127.

64 NFBA, Five Steps to Better Farm Living file, Evelyn Cherry to Lawrence Cherry, 9 July 1944.

65 Olga Denisko, “Pot Pourri,” NFB Newsletter, Summer 1975, 11.

66 NFBA, Five Steps to Better Farm Living file, Evelyn Cherry to “Sol,” 16 September 1944.

67 NFBA, Land in Trust file, Evelyn Cherry to Roger Morin, 4 March 1950, 1.

68 Quoted in ibid.

69 Ibid., 2.

70 Zoe Druick, Projecting Canada: Government Policy and Documentary Film at the National Film Board (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 82.

71 Donald Buchanan, “The Projection of Canada,” University of Toronto Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1944): 305.

72 Let’s Look at Water, prod. Harold Randall, NFB, 1947.

73 Clinton Evans, War on Weeds in the Prairie West: An Environmental History (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2002), 160.

74 The World at Your Feet, prod. Michael Spencer, NFB, 1953.

75 Ibid.

76 NFBA, The World at Your Feet file, “Background Information,” May 1953.

77 NFBA, The World at Your Feet file, James Gordon Taggart, memo to staff, 8 June 1953.

78 Chemical Conquest, prod. Michael Spencer, NFB, 1956.

79 NFBA, Chemical Conquest file, “Research Summary,” n.d., 1.

80 Ibid., 5.

81 See Edmund Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from WW1 to Silent Spring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

82 Chemical Conquest.

83 NFBA, Chemical Conquest file, “Draft Outline Chemical Film,” n.d., 1.

84 NFBA, Chemical Conquest file, “Research Summary,” n.d., 9.

85 Ibid., 10.

86 NFBA, Chemical Conquest file, “Draft Outline Chemical Film,” n.d., 2.

87 Chemical Conquest.

1 Martin Lefebvre, introduction to Landscape and Film, ed. Martin Lefebvre (London: Routledge, 2006), xxviii.

2 Sherrill Grace, Canada and the Idea of the North (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 51.

3 Margaret Atwood, Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 8.

4 Quoted in Grace, Canada, 14.

5 See Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1991), 31; Renée Hulan, Northern Experience and Myths of Canadian Culture (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002); David Heinimann, “Latitude Rising: Historical Continuity in Canadian Nordicity,” Journal of Canadian Studies 28, no. 2 (1993): 134–39; and John Moss, “The Cartography of Dreams,” Journal of Canadian Studies 28, no. 2 (1993): 140–58.

6 Louis-Edmond Hamelin, Canadian Nordicity: It’s Your North Too (Montréal: Harvest House, 1979), 17.

7 Pierre Berton, The Mysterious North (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1956).

8 Shelagh Grant, “Myths of North in Canadian Ethos,” Northern Review 3, no. 4 (1989): 16.

9 See Russell Potter, Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818–1875 (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007); and Janice Cavell, Tracing the Connected Narrative: Arctic Exploration in British Print Culture, 1818–1860 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008).

10 The term Arctic sublime was coined by Chauncey Loomis in “The Arctic Sublime,” in Nature and the Victorian Imagination, ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 95–112.

11 Lawren Harris, “Revelation of Art in Canada,” Canadian Theosophist 7, no. 5 (1926): 86.

12 Harris, quoted in Christine Sowiak, “Contemporary Canadian Art: Locating Identity,” in A Passion for Identity: Canadian Studies for the 21st Century, ed. Beverly Jean Rasporich and David Taras (Scarborough, ON: Nelson Thomson Learning, 2001), 256.

13 Peter Davidson, The Idea of the North (London: Reaktion, 2005), 194.

14 Canadian Landscape, prod. Radford Crawley, NFB, 1941.

15 Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner, introduction to Cinema and Landscape, ed. Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner (Bristol: Intellect, 2010), 23.

16 Bruce Braun, The Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada’s West Coast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 129.

17 Barbara Wade Rose, “Budge”: What Happened to Canada’s King of Film? (Toronto: ECW Press, 1998), 55.

18 W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (1994; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 262.

19 Canadian Landscape.

20 R. G. Haliburton, The Men of the North and Their Place in History: A Lecture Delivered Before the Montréal Literary Club (Montréal: John Lovell, 1869).

21 George R. Parkin, Imperial Federalism: The Problem of National Unity (London: Macmillan, 1892), 115–19. See also Brian Osborne, “The Iconography of Nationhood in Canadian Art,” in The Iconography of Landscape, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 171.

22 Arthur Irwin, “The Canadian,” Maclean’s, 1 February 1950, 20.

23 National Film Board, Canada: A Year of the Land (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1967), 1.

24 Harold Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (1930; repr., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); Donald Creighton, The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence 1760–1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1937).

25 Northrop Frye, The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Anansi, 1971), 29.

26 Claire Campbell, “‘It Was Canadian, Then Typically Canadian’: Revisiting Wilderness at Historic Sites,” British Journal of Canadian Studies 21, no. 1 (2008): 8.

27 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Spread of Nationalism (1983; repr., New York: Verso, 1991).

28 NFBA, Canadian Landscape file, Ross Mclean to H. O. McCurry, National Gallery, 24 January 1942.

29 Quoted in Carol Payne, The Official Picture: The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canada, 1941–1971 (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013), 168.

30 This was a popular trope in twentieth century Canada. See Joan Sangster, “The Beaver as Ideology: Constructing Images of Inuit and Native LIfe in Post-World War II Canada,” Anthropologica, 49, no. 2 (2007), 192. See also Ann Fienup-Riordan, Freeze Frame: Alaska Eskimos in the Movies (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995).

31 Robert McMillan, “Ethnology and the NFB: The Laura Boulton Mysteries,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 1, no. 2 (1991): 70.

32 Ibid.

33 E. Ann Kaplan, Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze (London: Routledge, 1997).

34 Eskimo Arts and Crafts, prod. Laura Boulton, NFB, 1943.

35 Doug Wilkinson, Land of the Long Day (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1955), 18.

36 Greg Burliuk, “Son of Idlout,” Whig Standard (Kingston, ON), 7 March 1992, 5.

37 NFBA, Land of the Long Day file, “Information Sheet,” n.d.

38 NFBA, Land of the Long Day file, “Toronto Film Society—Member Evaluation Form,” n.d.

39 NFBA, Land of the Long Day file, “Baffin Island Script Commentary,” 17 March 1952.

40 NFBA, Land of the Long Day file, “Shot List,” reel 4, 7 March 1952, 2.

41 Ibid.

42 Wilkinson was not the first filmmaker, of course, to conjure up a sense of spatial and temporal exoticness through behind-the-scenes trickery. In Robert Flaherty’s documentary Nanook of the North (1922), the director famously stages the sequence of Nanook taking a bite out of a gramophone record. The scene is meant to be amusing, but it also expresses the perceived crudeness of Inuit culture.

43 Wilkinson, Land of the Long Day, 11.

44 Shari Huhndorf, “Nanook and His Contemporaries: Imagining Eskimos in American Culture, 1897–1922,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 1 (2000): 134.

45 Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian (New York: Norton, 1999).

46 Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 25.

47 Doug Wilkinson, “A Vanishing Canadian,” Beaver, Spring 1959, 28.

48 Ibid., 25.

49 Adrian Ivakhiv, “An Ecophilosophy of the Moving Image,” in Ecocinema Theory and Practice, ed. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt (New York: Routledge, 2013), 148.

50 Ibid.

51 See Frank Tester and Peter Kulchyski, Tammarniit (Mistakes): Inuit Relocations in the Eastern Arctic, 1939–63 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1994).

52 Frances Abele, “Canadian Contradictions: Forty Years of Northern Political Development,” Arctic 40, no. 4 (1987): 315.

53 It is important to remember that “films stand still, but their subjects move on. . . . Even as a film is being shot, its subjects are in transition, moving toward a future that the film cannot contain.” David MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 33. This is particularly salient in the story of Joseph Idlout. The NFB film Between Two Worlds (1990), directed by Barry Greenwald and produced by Arctic activist Peter Raymont, documents Idlout’s life after the filming of Land of the Long Day. Idlout eventually became a trapper and guide for the government. Trying to improve his family’s fortunes, he gets caught up in the “white world.” Idlout does not know who he is or where he belongs. He is caught “between two worlds.”

54 The Annanacks, prod. René Bonnière, NFB, 1964.

55 Ibid.

56 Matthew Farish and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, “High Modernism in the Arctic: Planning Frobisher Bay and Inuvik,” Journal of Historical Geography 35, no. 3 (2009): 517–44.

57 Annanacks.

58 Across Arctic Ungava, prod. Michael Spencer, NFB, 1949.

59 NFBA, Across Arctic Ungava file, official information sheet, n.d.

60 Jacques Rousseau, “Northern Research Reports: Botany: By Canoe Across the Ungava Peninsula via the Kogaluk and Payne Rivers,” Arctic 1, no. 2 (1948): 134.

61 Ibid.

62 NFBA, Across Arctic Ungava file, Michael Spencer to Chester Kissick, “Re: ‘Ungava,’” 15 June 1949.

63 NFBA, Across Arctic Ungava file, Michael Spencer to P. J. Alcock, 3 July 1949.

64 NFBA, Across Arctic Ungava file, official information sheet, n.d.

65 Across Arctic Ungava.

66 Jacques Rousseau, “The Vegetation and Life Zones of George River, Eastern Ungava and the Welfare of the Natives,” Arctic 1, no. 2 (1948): 93.

67 NFBA, Across Arctic Ungava file, “Jean Michéa Notes,” n.d.

68 J. P. Michéa, Annual Report of the National Museum for the Fiscal Year 1948–1949 (Ottawa: Edmond Cloutier, 1949), 54–55.

69 Jacques Rousseau, “À travers l’Ungava,” Actualité économique 25 (1949): 83–120.

70 Rousseau, “Vegetation and Life Zones,” 96.

71 For the historical roots of this kind of representation, see Janice Cavell, “Arctic Exploration in Canadian Print Culture, 1890–1930,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 44, no. 2 (2006): 7–43.

72 NFBA, High Arctic: Life on the Land file, R. D. Muir, “Statement of Intent,” n.d.

73 NFBA, High Arctic: Life on the Land file, Strowan Robertson to Tom Daly, re “Film Proposal,” n.d., 1.

74 Tom Daly, interviewed in Peter Harcourt, “The Innocent Eye: An Aspect of the Work of the National Film Board of Canada,” Sight and Sound 34, no. 1 (1965): 21. See also Gary Evans, In the National Interest: A Chronicle of the National Film Board of Canada from 1949 to 1989 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 68–70.

75 NFBA, High Arctic: Life on the Land file, “A Teacher’s Guide to the Film,” n.d., 1.

76 Ibid., 3.

77 High Arctic: Life on the Land, prod. Strowan Robertson and Hugh O’Connor, NFB, 1958.

78 Ibid.

79 NFBA, High Arctic: Life on the Land file, R. D. Muir, “Statement of Intent,” n.d.

80 Ibid.

81 Stephen Bocking, “Science and Spaces in the Northern Environment,” Environmental History 12 (2007): 869.

82 Gordon Smith, “Weather Stations in the Canadian North and Arctic Sovereignty,” Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 11, no. 3 (2009): 1–63.

83 Edward Jones-Imhotep, “Communicating the North: Scientific Practice and Canadian Postwar Identity,” Osiris 24, no. 1 (2009): 146–47.

84 Arctic IV, prod. Colin Low, NFB, 1974.

85 Ibid.

86 NFBA, Across Arctic Ungava file, Jacques Rousseau to Michael Spencer, 27 June 1949, 1.

87 Ibid., 2.

88 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 220.

89 Ibid.

90 Ibid., 223.

91 Ibid., 227.

92 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 31. See also John Tagg, The Burden of Representations: Essays on Photographies and Histories (London: Macmillan, 1988). Tagg looks at how photographic documentation contributed to the rise of bureaucratic forms of state power since the late nineteenth century.

93 Highways North, prod. Canada in Action Series, NFB, 1944.

94 Northwest by Air, prod. James Beveridge and Margaret Parry, NFB, 1944.

95 Northwest Frontier, prod. James Beveridge, NFB, 1942.

96 David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).

97 Northwest Frontier.

98 A Northern Challenge, prod. Bill Roozeboom, NFB, 1973.

99 NFBA, Down North file, “Information Sheet,” 1959.

100 Down North, prod. John Howe, NFB, 1958.

101 NFBA, The Accessible North file, “Commentary—The Accessible Arctic,” November 1967.

102 The Accessible North, prod. David Bairstow, NFB, 1967.

103 NFBA, North file, “Film Poster,” n.d.

104 NFBA, North file, T. V. Adams to Frank Spiller, 6 March 1967.

105 NFBA, North file, William Canning to Jon Evans, 3 May 1967.

106 Ibid.

107 NFBA, North file, T. V. Adams to Jon Evans, 14 April 1967.

108 NFBA, North file, William Canning to Jon Evans, 3 May 1967.

109 NFBA, North file, “Distribution Proposal for Film Entitled North,” 2 October 1972.

110 NFBA, North file, J. Soutendum to Lorne Mitchell, 13 September 1971.

111 NFBA, North file, “Film Poster,” n.d.

112 Vilhjalmur Stefansson, The Friendly Arctic: The Story of Five Years in Polar Regions (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 314.

113 Ibid., 687.

114 See Richard Finnie’s In the Shadow of the Pole (1928), The Arctic Patrol (1929), and Patrol to the Northwest Passage (1931) for early filmic examples that documented the opening of the North.

115 P. Whitney Lackenbauer and Matthew Farish, “The Cold War on Canadian Soil: Militarizing a Northern Environment,” Environmental History 12 (2007): 920–50.

116 Lester B. Pearson, “Canada Looks ‘Down North,’” Foreign Affairs: An American Quarterly Review 24, no. 4 (1946): 639.

117 Ibid., 642.

118 Ibid., 646.

119 John Sandlos and Arn Keeling, “Claiming the New North: Development Colonialism at the Pine Point Mine, Northwest Territories,” Environment and History 2 (2012): 7–18.

120 John Diefenbaker, “A New Vision,” opening campaign speech, Winnipeg, 12 February 1958.

121 Northern Challenge.

122 Ibid.

123 William Guynn, A Cinema of Nonfiction (Cranbury: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990), 14.

124 For a good resource on the relationship among the North, nationalism, and cinema, see Scott Mackenzie, ed., Films on Ice: Cinemas of the Arctic (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).

125 Harold Innis, Changing Concepts of Time (Toronto: Rowman & Littlefield, 1952), 18–19.

126 NFBA, “1962 NFB Activities in the North,” 11 February 1963.

127 Ibid.

128 Vincent Massey Archives, B1987-0082/34I, file 4, Vincent Massey, “His Excellency’s Remarks at the National Film Board,” 27 January 1956.

129 Hamelin, Canadian Nordicity, 92.

130 Although I do not examine in this chapter the voices of northern people who produced their own images and stories of the North, there are a few examples worth mentioning. NFB films such as Between Two Worlds (1990), If the Weather Permits (2003), Inuuvunga: I Am Inuk, I Am Alive (2004), Qallunaat! Why White People Are Funny (2006), and the Nunavut Animation Lab series have responded to the dominant discourse that constructed the North as a homogeneous space outside history. Films in the 1990s and 2000s also included ecological critiques of the South’s insatiable appetite in the North and the issues of climate change. People of the Ice (2003), Climate on the Edge (2003), and Never Lose Sight (2009) are but a few examples. This is all to say that the North is continually being reformulated and remapped and that NFB cinema is part of its ongoing construction.

1 An Act to Create a National Film Board, R.S.C. 1939, 2 Geo. VI, c. 20, pp. 101–5. This mandate was slightly modified in 1950 but retained its core objective to present Canada to the world. An Act Respecting the National Film Board, R.S.C. 1950, pp. 1, 567–74.

2 Jim Leach, “Dark Satanic Mills: Denys Arcand’s On est au coton,” in Candid Eyes: Essays on Canadian Documentaries, ed. Jim Leach and Jeannette Sloniowski (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 87.

3 Poison, Pests, and People, prod. Don Mulholland, NFB, 1960.

4 River with a Problem, prod. David Bairstow, NFB, 1961.

5 The Enduring Wilderness, prod. Ernest Reid, NFB, 1963.

6 Death of a Legend, prod. Bill Mason, NFB, 1971.

7 Éric Rohmer and Louis Marcorelles, “Entretien avec Jean Rouch,” Cahiers du cinéma 144 (June 1963): 1–22.

8 Kirwan Cox, “Canada,” in Encyclopedia of Documentary Film, ed. Ian Aitken (New York: Routledge, 2006), 128.

9 Peter Harcourt, “Images and Information: The Dialogic Structure of Bûcherons de la Manouane by Arthur Lamothe,” in Leach and Sloniowski, Candid Eyes, 62.

10 Jim Leach and Jeannette Sloniowski, introduction to Leach and Sloniowski, Candid Eyes, 7.

11 NFBA, Annual Report, 1965–66, 7.

12 Ibid.

13 Samuel P. Hays, Explorations in Environmental History: Essays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), 380.

14 John McCormick, Reclaiming Paradise: The Global Environmental Movement (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 47–48.

15 See Adam Rome, “‘Give Earth a Chance’: The Environmental Movement and the 1960s,” Journal of American History 90, no. 2 (2003): 525–54.

16 Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 3. See also Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the Environmental Movement (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1993).

17 Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 23.

18 Mark McLaughlin, “Green Shoots: Aerial Insecticide Spraying and the Growth of Environmental Consciousness in New Brunswick,” Acadiensis 40, no. 1 (2011): 4.

19 Jennifer Read, “‘Let Us Heed the Voice of Youth’: Laundry Detergents, Phosphates and the Emergence of the Environmental Movement in Ontario,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 7 (1996): 230.

20 Ryan O’Connor, The First Green Wave: Pollution Probe and the Origins of Environmental Activism in Ontario (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2015).

21 NFBA, Chemical Conquest file, “Draft Outline Chemical Film,” n.d., 1.

22 NFBA, Poison, Pests, and People file, “Chemicals in Agriculture Notes,” 17 April 1958, 1.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid., 3.

26 Ibid., 2.

27 Ibid.

28 Cyanamid of Canada, Your Farm and How to Keep It Productive (Montréal: Cyanamid, 1959), 6, 7.

29 NFBA, Poison, Pests, and People file, Julian Biggs, memo to Don Mulholland, 10 August 1959.

30 NFBA, Poison, Pests, and People file, Don Mulholland to Larry Gosnell, 3 July 1959, 1.

31 NFBA, Poison, Pests, and People file, Larry Gosnell to Don Mulholland, 17 July 1959.

32 NFBA, Poison, Pests, and People file, “Chemicals in Agriculture Notes,” n.d., 4.

33 Ibid.

34 Ibid.

35 Poison, Pests, and People, prod. David Bairstow, NFB, 1960.

36 Ibid.

37 NFBA, Poison, Pests, and People file, “Script,” by Larry Gosnell, 1.

38 “Insecticide Film Shelved: Pressure Put on NFB Former Producer Says,” Globe and Mail, 1 February 1963, 4.

39 NFBA, Deadly Dilemma file, Peter Jones to Michael Spencer, “Re: Deadly Dilemma Revision,” 23 May 1962.

40 Ibid.

41 Ryan O’Connor, “An Ecological Call to Arms: The Air of Death and the Origins of Environmentalism in Ontario,” Ontario History 105, no. 1 (2013): 19–46.

42 Ontario Advisory Committee on Pollution, Report of the Committee Appointed to Inquire into and Report upon the Pollution of Air, Soil, and Water in the Townships of Dunnville, Moulton, and Sherbrooke, Haldimand County (Toronto: Queen’s Printer, 1968), 346.

43 Ibid., 285.

44 NFBA, Poison, Pests, and People file, promotional poster, 1960.

45 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Greenwich: Fawcett, 1962), 297.

46 NFBA, River with a Problem file, “Info Sheet,” 1961.

47 Morning on the Lièvre, prod. David Bairstow, NFB, 1961.

48 NFBA, River with a Problem file, “Info Sheet,” 1961.

49 “River Pollution a Serious Matter,” Globe and Mail, 15 July 1955, 8.

50 Walter Gray, “A Perfect Example of Pollution,” Globe and Mail, 1 June 1961, 7.

51 River with a Problem.

52 NFBA, River with a Problem file, R. A. Jones, assistant executive secretary, to David Bairstow, 24 July 1961.

53 River with a Problem.

54 Ibid.

55 Ibid.

56 See Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); and Christopher Fullerton, “A Changing of the Guard: Regional Planning in Ottawa, 1945–1974,” Urban History Review 34, no. 1 (2005): 100–112.

57 Gray, “Perfect Example,” 7.

58 NFBA, River with a Problem file, Charlotte Whitton to Graham Parker, 12 February 1962.

59 Ibid.

60 NFBA, River with a Problem file, John Pratt to David Bairstow, 13 February 1962.

61 The Enduring Wilderness, prod. Ernest Reid, NFB, 1963.

62 NFBA, The Enduring Wilderness file, Sid Roberts, National Parks Branch, to Graham Crabtree, liaison officer, NFB, 15 May 1962.

63 Ibid.

64 NFBA, The Enduring Wilderness file, Christopher Chapman, “The Meaning of Wilderness,” 12 June 1962.

65 NFBA, The Enduring Wilderness file, “Script Notes,” n.d.

66 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 68.

67 Roderick Nash, “The American Wilderness in Historical Perspective,” American Society for Environmental History 6, no. 4 (1963): 4.

68 W. L. Morton, The Canadian Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1961), 5.

69 The history of national parks shows us that the meaning and value attributed to these places were multifaceted and constantly changing. In Canada, national parks were first established at the end of the nineteenth century to accommodate middle-class fantasies about the sublime and to protect natural resources from abuse. Seventy years later they were regulated and perceived primarily as ecological preserves. The best book on the subject is Alan MacEachern, Natural Selections: National Parks in Atlantic Canada, 1935–1970 (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001).

70 Canada, Wisdom’s Heritage: The National Parks of Canada (Ottawa: Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, 1957), 1.

71 NFBA, The Enduring Wilderness file, Christopher Chapman, “Wilderness” (script), n.d., 4.

72 NFBA, The Enduring Wilderness file, Christopher Chapman, “The Meaning of Wilderness” (script), 12 June 1962, 2.

73 Ibid., 1.

74 John Hepworth, “Cinema 65,” Loyola News, 26 March 1965, 1.

75 “Canadian Films Win Awards,” St. Catharines Standard, 24 April 1965, 3.

76 Enduring Wilderness.

77 Ibid.

78 William Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956); C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951).

79 Whyte, Organization Man, 3.

80 Richard Harris, Creeping Conformity: How Canada Became Suburban (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004).

81 NFBA, The Enduring Wilderness file, “Look to the Wilderness Review,” n.d., 6.

82 Ibid., 4.

83 Enduring Wilderness.

84 W. Phillip Keller, Canada’s Wild Glory (Toronto: Nelson, Foster, and Scott, 1961), 4.

85 J. Keri Cronin, Manufacturing National Park Nature: Photography, Ecology, and the Wilderness Industry of Jasper (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2012).

86 William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995).

87 MacEachern, Natural Selections, 9.

88 Claire Campbell, “‘It Was Canadian, Then Typically Canadian’: Revisiting Wilderness at Historic Sites,” British Journal of Canadian Studies 21, no. 1 (2008): 6.

89 For scholarship on the origins of the wilderness preservation movement, see Kevin Marsh, Drawing Lines in the Forest: Creating Wilderness Areas in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010); Paul Sutter, Driven Wild: How the Fight Against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002); and James Turner, The Promise of Wilderness: American Environmental Politics since 1964 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2012).

90 Enduring Wilderness.

91 Ibid.

92 Cry of the Wild, prod. Bill Mason, NFB, 1972.

93 Tina Loo, States of Nature: Conserving Canada’s Wildlife in the Twentieth Century (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007), 152.

94 Quoted in ibid., 158.

95 Ibid., 161.

96 Ibid, 158, 159. See also Alexander J. Burnett, A Passion for Wildlife: The History of the Canadian Wildlife Service (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003).

97 Barry Lopez, Of Wolves and Men (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 175.

98 Farley Mowat, Never Cry Wolf (1963; repr., New York: Little, Brown, 1999), vi.

99 A. W. F. Banfield, “Review of Never Cry Wolf,” Canadian Field Naturalist 78, no. 1 (1964): 52–53.

100 Karen Jones, “‘Never Cry Wolf’: Science, Sentiment, and the Literary Rehabilitation of Canis Lupus,” Canadian Historical Review 84 (2001): 71–72.

101 At first, the CWS approached Disney to make the film, but the project never went into production because the two parties could not settle on a viable budget.

102 Library and Archives Canada, RG 84, A-2-a, vol. 2134, file U266, pt. 4, David A. Munro, director, Canadian Wildlife Service, memo to Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 15 December 1967.

103 NFBA, Death of a Legend file, “General Guidelines to Be Used in Developing a Theme for a Canadian Wild Life Film,” 16 February 1966, 1.

104 Ibid., 3.

105 Ibid., 2.

106 NFBA, Death of a Legend file, Darrell Eagles to David Bairstow, 22 July 1966.

107 NFBA, Death of a Legend file, “Wildlife Film Project,” n.d.

108 Ken Buck, Bill Mason: Wilderness Artist from Heart to Hand (Calgary: Rocky Mountain Books, 2005), 163.

109 For more on the intersection between his faith and his environmentalism, see Bill Mason, Path of the Paddle (Toronto: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1980); Bill Mason, “Perspectives on Wilderness and Creativity,” Park News 19, no. 2 (1982): 9–11; Bill Mason, Song of the Paddle (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1988); and James Raffan, Fire in the Bones: Bill Mason and the Canadian Canoeing Tradition (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1996).

110 Bill Mason, Canoescapes (Toronto: Stoddart, 1995), 156.

111 Tina Loo was the first to identify Mason as a vital voice in the history of wildlife preservation in Canada. Loo, States of Nature, 176–81.

112 NFBA, Death of a Legend file, film information sheet, n.d.

113 Buck, Bill Mason, 166.

114 Ibid.

115 Death of a Legend.

116 Ibid.

117 NFBA, Death of a Legend file, film information sheet, n.d.

118 NFBA, Death of a Legend file, Bill Mason, “Outline for ‘The Wolf,’” 3 October 1967, 4.

119 Quoted in Raffan, Fire in the Bones, 188.

120 Cry of the Wild.

121 NFBA, Death of a Legend file, “Notes of a Meeting Held to Discuss Production Plans for the Wolf Film,” 21 September 1967.

122 Death of a Legend.

123 NFBA, Death of a Legend file, Bernard Devlin to David Bairstow, “Wildlife Project Feasibility,” 27 June 1966, 2.

124 NFBA, Death of a Legend file, Ernie Kuyt to Bernard Devlin, 8 November 1966.

125 Derek Bousé, Wildlife Films (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2000), 4.

126 Béla Balazs, “Theory of the Film,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Reading, 3rd ed., ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 256.

127 Cry of the Wild.

128 Ibid.

1 Hans Carlson, Home Is the Hunter (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009), 5.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid., 204.

4 Ibid., 257.

5 Carolyn Merchant, “Shades of Darkness: Race and Environmental History,” Environmental History 8, no. 3 (2003): 381.

6 Richardson, quoted in Gary Evans, In the National Interest: A Chronicle of the National Film Board of Canada from 1949 to 1989 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 170.

7 Ibid., 158.

8 NFBA, The Things I Cannot Change file, “The Bailey Family: Eleven Going on Twelve: Proposal for a Half Hour 16mm Black and White Film to Be Produced for the Privy Council,” n.d.

9 The Things I Cannot Change, prod. John Kemeny, NFB, 1967.

10 NFBA, Challenge for Change (CFC) file, “Challenge for Change: Proposal for an Action-Program of Film Activities in the Area of Poverty,” 16 January 1967, 1.

11 NFBA, CFC file, “Proposal for a Program of Film Activities in the Area of Poverty and Change,” 16 February 1967, 1.

12 Ibid.

13 NFBA, CFC file, “Challenge for Change Program: A Report Prepared by the National Film Board of Canada,” 11 December 1967, 1.

14 NFBA, CFC file, “Challenge for Change,” 18 December 1973, 2.

15 Noel Starblanket, “A Voice for Indians: An Indian Film Crew,” CFC/SN Newsletter 2 (1968): 2.

16 You Are on Indian Land, prod. George C. Stoney, NFB, 1969.

17 John Grierson, “Memo to Michelle About Decentralizing the Means of Production,” CFC/SN Newsletter 8 (1972): 4.

18 Colin Low, “Grierson and Challenge for Change,” in Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada, ed. Thomas Waugh, Michael Brendan Baker, and Ezra Winton (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 17.

19 Dorothy Todd Hénaut and Bonnie Sherr Klein, “In the Hands of Citizens: A Video Report,” CFC/SN Newsletter 4 (1969): 5.

20 NFBA, CFC file, Boyce Richardson, “Film in the Service of the People,” n.d., 1.

21 Evans, In the National Interest, 175.

22 Jerry White, “The Winds of Fogo,” in The Cinema of Canada, ed. Jerry White (New York: Wallflower, 2006), 79.

23 Janine Marchessault, “Amateur Video and Challenge for Change,” in Waugh, Baker, and Winton, Challenge for Change, 365.

24 Ibid., 360.

25 Zoe Druick, “Meeting at the Poverty Line: Government Policy, Social Work, and Media Activism in the Challenge for Change Program,” in Waugh, Baker, and Winton, Challenge for Change, 344.

26 CFC also affected documentary cinema. Although the program ended in 1980, CFC filmmakers such as Bonnie Sherr Klein went on to New York to preach the “media to the people” movement. Other filmmakers used the ideas and resources of CFC to form the short-lived Studio E (Environment) of the NFB in 1974.

27 Quoted in Carlson, Home Is the Hunter, 207.

28 Ronald Niezen, “Power and Dignity: The Social Consequences of Hydro-Electric Development for the James Bay Cree,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 30, no. 4 (1993): 512.

29 Quoted in Boyce Richardson, Strangers Devour the Land (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1991), 84.

30 Harvey A. Feit, “Hunting and the Quest for Power: The James Bay Cree and the Whitemen in the 20th Century,” in Native Peoples: The Canadian Experience, ed. R. Bruce Morrison and C. Roderick Wilson (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995), 4.

31 Richardson, Strangers Devour the Land, 23.

32 Ibid.

33 Before he made Cree Hunters of Mistassini, Richardson directed Job’s Garden (1973), a documentary about Job Bearskin and his wife, Mary. For the journalist-turned-filmmaker, the Bearskins’ lives exemplified the Cree’s profound understanding of humans’ role in taking care of nature.

34 NFBA, Cree Hunters of Mistassini file, “Boyce Richardson to Interdepartmental Committee, Challenge for Change” (memo), 2 December 1973, 4.

35 Boyce Richardson, “Doctorate for Philip Awashish,” Nation, 11 September 2009, http://www.nationnewsarchives.ca/article/doctorate-for-philip-awashish/.

36 Evans, In the National Interest, 170.

37 NFBA, Cree Hunters of Mistassini file, “Boyce Richardson to Interdepartmental Committee, Challenge for Change” (memo), 2 December 1973, 1.

38 NFBA, Cree Hunters of Mistassini file, Boyce Richardson, “Assimilation Blues Film Notes,” n.d.

39 Quoted in Michelle Stewart, “Cree Hunters of Mistassini: CFC and Aboriginal Rights,” in Waugh, Baker, and Winton, Challenge for Change, 182.

40 NFBA, Cree Hunters of Mistassini file, “Notes from a Conversation with the Filmmakers,” n.d., 1.

41 Stewart, “Cree Hunters of Mistassini,” 183.

42 Quoted in Stewart, “Cree Hunters of Mistassini,” 183.

43 Richardson, “Doctorate for Philip Awashish.”

44 Cree Hunters of Mistassini, prod. Colin Low, NFB, 1974.

45 Ibid.

46 Mistassini is a small settlement originally established as a meeting place where the Cree gathered during the warm months of summer to catch fish, hunt caribou, and trade furs. Even in the 1960s, the village was little more than a collection of tents and huts congregated around the Hudson’s Bay Company trading post and the Anglican church. In an effort to put Indigenous people in villages, the provincial government built roads and power grids across the James Bay region. Despite these changes, the majority of the Cree preferred to dwell in the forested region outside Mistassini. Blacksmith, for example, had been hunting on his 1,200 square acres of territory for approximately thirty years.

47 Stewart, “Cree Hunters of Mistassini,” 185.

48 Richardson, Strangers Devour the Land, 201.

49 NFBA, Cree Hunters of Mistassini file, “Notes from a Conversation with the Filmmakers,” n.d., 2.

50 NFBA, Cree Hunters of Mistassini file, Boyce Richardson, “Assimilation Blues Film Notes,” n.d., 2.

51 Cree Hunters of Mistassini.

52 Richardson, Strangers Devour the Land, 288.

53 Ibid.

54 Claude Peloquin and Fikrit Berkes, “Local Knowledge, Subsistence Harvests and Social-Ecological Complexity in James Bay,” Human Ecology 37 (2009): 535.

55 Cree Hunters of Mistassini.

56 Ibid.

57 Feit, “Hunting and the Quest for Power,” 4.

58 Cree Hunters of Mistassini.

59 Ibid.

60 Stewart, Cree Hunters of Mistassini, 186.

61 Ibid.

62 Richardson, Strangers Devour the Land, 273.

63 Graeme Wynn, “Foreword: Dignity and Power,” Home Is the Hunter, xvii.

64 Niezen, “Power and Dignity,” 515.

65 Carlson, Home Is the Hunter, 17.

66 NFBA, Cree Hunters of Mistassini file, “The James Bay Communications Project” (memo), n.d.

67 Ibid.

68 NFBA, Cree Hunters of Mistassini file, Ian Ball to Lynne Williams and Regional Distribution Coordinators, 17 March 1974.

69 NFBA, Cree Hunters of Mistassini file, L. Renaud-Roberts, memo to Regional Distribution Coordinators, 1 October 1974.

70 NFBA, Cree Hunters of Mistassini file, Mark Zanis, “NFB Distribution Plan,” 24 September 1974.

71 NFBA, Cree Hunters of Mistassini file, “Distribution Kit for Cree Hunters,” n.d., 2.

72 NFBA, Cree Hunters of Mistassini file, B. Petawabano, “Report on the Screening of Our Land Is Our Life and Cree Hunters of Mistassini at Rupert’s House and Eastmain in Québec,” 1975.

73 NFBA, Cree Hunters of Mistassini file, Michael Mitchell, “North American Indian Travelling College—Report of Screening of National Film Board’s Films,” n.d., 2.

74 NFBA, Cree Hunters of Mistassini file, “Kipawa Reserve (Québec) Report,” 22 December 1974, 1.

75 B. Petawabano, “Report on the Screening at the Rupert’s House and Eastmain in Québec,” 1975, 1.

76 NFBA, Cree Hunters of Mistassini file, Mark Zanis, “Animator’s Report,” 1974, 1.

77 Ibid.

78 Rick Moore, “Canada’s Challenge for Change: Documentary Film and Video as an Exercise of Power through the Production of Cultural Reality” (PhD diss., University of Oregon, 1988).

79 NFBA, CFC file, “Challenge for Change Report on Cree Hunters,” 29 November 1974, 1.

80 NFBA, Cree Hunters of Mistassini file, Boyce Richardson and Tony Ianzelo, “Report on Cree Hunters,” 24 September 1974.

81 Quoted in Linda Diebel, “The Aftermath: Natives Settle for 150 Million,” Gazette (Montréal), 16 November 1974, 1.

82 NFBA, Cree Hunters of Mistassini file, Rick Dale, “National Film Board, Challenge for Change, Animator’s Report, Ontario Region,” 27 June 1975, 1.

83 Ibid.

84 Joan Irwin, “Film Explains Life of Cree,” Montréal Star, 2 July 1974, 4.

85 “Cree Hunters of Mistassini Film Review,” Booklist, November 1975, 1.

86 NFBA, Cree Hunters of Mistassini file, “Notes from a Film Showing in Montréal,” 20 November 1974.

87 Matthew Coon Come, quoted in Graeme Wynn, “Northern Exposures,” Environmental History 12, no. 2 (2007): 389.

88 NFBA, Cree Hunters of Mistassini file, “Information Sheet,” n.d., 1.

89 NFBA, Cree Hunters of Mistassini file, “Notes from a Conversation with the Filmmakers,” n.d., 2.

1 Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner, introduction to Cinema and Landscape, ed. Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner (Bristol: Intellect, 2010), 24.

2 Stephen Rust and Salma Monani, “Introduction: Cuts to Dissolves—Defining and Situating Ecocinema Studies,” in Ecocinema Theory and Practice, ed. Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1.

3 Despite the NFB’s decision to move the headquarters to Montréal in 1956 and despite its efforts to establish regional studios in the 1970s, francophone, Indigenous, and local voices on the homeland were generally overshadowed by an emphatically Anglo-Canadian idea of nationhood.

4 Canadian Wheat Story, prod. J. Stanley Moore, NFB, 1944.

5 James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 88.

6 The Great Plains, prod. Tom Daly, NFB, 1950.

7 Philip Rosen, “Nation and Anti-Nation: Concepts of National Cinema in the ‘New’ Media Era,” Diaspora 5, no. 3 (1996): 391.

8 NFBA, “Government Film Commissioner’s Report,” in Annual Report, 1979–80, 6.

9 Peter Stevens, Brink of Reality: New Canadian Documentary Film and Video (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1993), 8.

10 Zoe Druick, Projecting Canada: Government Policy and Documentary Film at the National Film Board (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), 164.

11 Guy Dixon, “Budget Cuts? The National Film Board Is Not Afraid,” Globe and Mail, 16 April 2012, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/budget-cuts-national-film-board-is-not-afraid/article4100642/.