4 Challenge for Change

Activism and the NFB

To understand the importance of Cree Hunters of Mistassini as both a political text and a new way of representing the environment in NFB cinema, we must situate the film within the larger context of Challenge for Change (CFC), a program created by the NFB to make films that spoke for the dispossessed and stimulated social activism within those groups. CFC operated from 1967 to 1980 and produced 250 films. Many still consider it to be one of the NFB’s most influential and provocative contributions to nonfictional cinema.

The idea for CFC first materialized in 1965 when the Special Planning Secretariat of the Privy Council Office asked the NFB to make a film about poverty, an issue that persisted despite the government’s efforts to expand social welfare services. The Privy Council’s “war on poverty” intersected with the NFB’s own shift to socially conscious filmmaking, and a partnership was formed. Executive producer John Kemeny was particularly excited about the idea and jumped at the opportunity to work on the pilot project. Kemeny appointed the inexperienced but talented filmmaker Tanya Ballantyne to find a Canadian family “trapped in the teeth of grinding poverty.”7 While conducting research for her film, the director was introduced to the Baileys, a family of eleven living in a derelict part of Montréal.8 The Baileys were the ideal subject for Ballantyne and the NFB: they were miserably poor, and Mrs. Bailey was expecting her tenth child. After paying the family a measly sum of $500, Ballantyne and her crew followed them around their small apartment, dispassionately recording Mrs. Bailey’s struggle to feed her ten children and Mr. Bailey’s efforts to rescue his family from the city’s underclass.

Canadian spectators praised The Things I Cannot Change (1967) for its gritty portrayal of destitution.9 It received six awards in Canada and even won the prestigious Robert J. Flaherty Award for best feature-length documentary. The NFB was less impressed, however. Kemeny and others thought that the film was exploitative and insensitive. One of the most vocal critics of the documentary was NFB filmmaker Colin Low. He argued that The Things I Cannot Change revelled in the grimy desperation of the Bailey family’s situation. Worse, the family did not have an opportunity to speak for themselves.

Despite being disappointed with the film, the NFB was intrigued by the political and social ideas that buoyed its production. Members of the Privy Council Office and the NFB began to discuss how they could improve the idea by using nonfictional cinema to cultivate meaningful exchanges between ordinary citizens like the Baileys and larger government institutions. In the winter of 1967, an interdepartmental committee consisting of representatives from the federal government and the NFB was formed. A month later, the committee launched a new production/distribution program to provide marginalized people with opportunities to “talk back” through filmmaking.10 It was called Challenge for Change.

The architects of CFC had two aims for the documentary series. The first aim was to interpret social issues for people who did not have the resources or the education to understand them. According to CFC programmers, film was an ideal medium to reach disadvantaged people because of its affective qualities. “Unorthodox ideas are much more likely to be accepted if presented on emotional as well as intellectual grounds,” the committee explained in its original proposal. “Many of those to whom ideas must be communicated are semi-literate. Film is the ideal way to reach them.”11

The second aim, according to Low, Kemeny, and the other members, was to give a “voice to the voiceless.”12 By handing filmmaking technologies over to the subjects, the NFB believed that it could “cultivate debate,” “disassemble hierarchies,” and stimulate community empowerment through its programming.13 CFC’s founding members proclaimed optimistically that the program would be “an original and effective instrument of democracy.”14

One of the first projects to be made for CFC was the Fogo Island experiment, a series of twenty-six short films about the inhabitants of a fishing community in Newfoundland directed by Colin Low. No longer able to fish because of resource shortages and crippling debts, the islanders were told by the federal government that they had to relocate to the mainland. They were not in favour of the government’s edict, however. Fogo Island was their home. In the midst of this brewing tension, Low arrived with his camera. To help facilitate a dialogue between the disgruntled residents and the federal authorities, Low began interviewing the islanders. They were eager to share their side of the story and talked at length about their hopes and their fears as well as their generational ties to the fishing industry. During production, Low also encouraged his subjects to comment on the process of filmmaking itself. It turned out that the islanders had strong opinions about how they were being presented on film. Many were concerned that they were not being represented fairly by Low, that they were being portrayed as dumb backwater folks. During the interviews, the skeptical fishermen told the director how he should edit the footage. When the interviews were screened for the residents, Low filmed their responses, creating a series of vérité feedback loops that self-consciously documented the relationship between filmmaker and subject. After watching their interviews, the islanders began to form a more cohesive message about their livelihood and the importance of fishing as a cultural rite. When the series was completed, the community used their experience with the project to create more efficient and media savvy approaches to bringing their case to the federal government.

The “Fogo Island process” was a watershed moment for CFC. The film series demonstrated that it was possible to narrate social issues from the ground up and, more importantly, to help facilitate political representation. CFC quickly expanded its scope to include other political topics, such as sexism, racism, and environmental concerns. In 1969, CFC merged with the NFB’s French program, Societé nouvelle. Together they developed “self-examination projects” with small communities around the country. The NFB lent Portapak Sony video cameras and live-sync sound equipment to local groups and taught them how to make their own movies using the lightweight technology. Unlike the cumbersome and complicated film camera, video technology was cost effective and easy to use. More importantly, it provided an instantaneous record of what was being filmed and could thus be shown anywhere at any time. Thus empowered, citizens began making videos about their discontent with the government and its disinclination to fight systemic inequalities.

The most radical films to come out of this venture were documentaries made by Indigenous people. In These Are My People (1969), filmmakers Willie Dunn, Roy Daniels, and Michael Kanentakeron Mitchell documented the negative impacts of white colonial settler policies on the people living at Akwesasne (St. Regis Reserve).15 You Are on Indian Land (1969), directed by Mitchell, recorded the dramatic protest by the Mohawk on the International Bridge between Canada and the United States. Mitchell hoped that by filming the demonstration, he would draw attention to the political grievances of his people.16 The film, a tremendous political and cinematic document, helped lay the groundwork for other Indigenous-authored projects at the NFB, including Cree Hunters of Mistassini and later the remarkable documentaries of Alanis Obomsawin.

The first five years of CFC, by most accounts, were successful. In 1971, the Departments of Agriculture, National Health and Welfare, Labour, Regional Economic Expansion, Central Mortgage and Housing, and Indian Affairs and Northern Development all contributed funding to CFC. A representative from each contributing department, as well as six representatives from the NFB, made up the committee, chaired by a member of the Privy Council Office. The budget for the program was $1.4 million, half of which was supplied by the NFB and the other half by the federal departments. By 1972, CFC had produced fifty-one films, shown on four thousand screens, to over two million viewers. In 1975, though, the program began to stagnate. The committee reluctantly extended funding to CFC in 1978 with the stipulation that the program be terminated if government representation fell below four departments. CFC limped on even though many people in the NFB thought that the program was becoming stale. After thirteen years, in 1980, budget cuts and institutional changes finally killed CFC.

Whether or not CFC was effective in inspiring social activism is up for debate. John Grierson, the cantankerous founder of the NFB and an advocate of a traditional documentary approach, considered the program to be “impractical,” “juvenile,” and “provincial.” The ex-commissioner protested that CFC was contradictory to the NFB’s founding principles because it did not promote “Canada in the making.” If anything, he grumbled, it did the opposite.17 Colin Low, in contrast, believed that the program was a crucial step in “incorporating media into the democratic process.”18 CFC filmmakers Dorothy Todd Hénaut and Bonnie Sherr Klein (mother of activist and writer Naomi Klein) agreed, claiming that the video experiment “accelerated perception and understanding and therefore accelerated action.”19 Boyce Richardson, the director of Cree Hunters of Mistassini, likewise argued that CFC was an effective instrument in fostering dialogue between ordinary Canadians and the government amid a “turbulent period.” “Information is not just the government informing the people of what it is doing, but a loop which includes the response: the people must inform [the] government of what they think,” he explained. For the journalist-turned-filmmaker, CFC helped facilitate this “loop.” It was an “anomaly, but a glorious one,” Richardson concluded.20

A number of NFB scholars also viewed the CFC experiment as a triumph. NFB historian Gary Evans argued that CFC gave the public a means to “vent their frustration and anger,” an act “important to democracy’s health.” Furthermore, CFC allowed marginalized groups to take charge of their destinies and “aspire to an equitable social structure in a complex bureaucratic society.”21 Film scholar Jerry White concurred that CFC was “an aesthetically open-minded, socially engaged vision for Canadian cinema.”22 CFC inspired dialogue between conflicting groups and gave viewers a window into the struggles of the oppressed.

More recently, however, film scholars have questioned whether CFC fulfilled its mission to stimulate social change. In “Amateur Video and Challenge for Change,” Janine Marchessault contends that the program embodied a “technological determinism” that conflated “new communication technologies with democratic participation.” The NFB’s social experiment was not tenable because it was established on two contradictory impulses: liberalism (which sought to preserve the common good) and CFC aims (to guarantee pluralism). This ideological confusion hindered local communities from defying the status quo. As a result, CFC instituted “access without agency.”23 In fact, the interactivity allegedly offered by video perpetuated a form of “self-surveillance.” CFC “diffused action” and limited the potential for “the explosive effects of difference,” Marchessault concludes.24 The program had a lot to say about how and why people should change, but it did little to create opportunities for citizens to mobilize after the director yelled the final “cut.”

Zoe Druick, who has written extensively about the NFB, also questions the progressiveness of CFC. She argues that despite its participatory ethos, CFC was the product of the Liberal mandate to manage populations and monitor political debates. As a result, its outcomes were dubious and contradictory.25 This critique of CFC is compelling, but it overlooks several examples of filmmakers who explicitly challenged the goals of the welfare state. The strategy of the federal government to make Indigenous people full Canadian citizens was an extension of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s vision of a “just society.” CFC films such as The Ballad of Crowfoot (1968), Our Land Is Our Life (1974), and Cree Hunters of Mistassini, however, loudly opposed this idea. The filmmakers and their subjects (often the same people) criticized the schemes of the state to assimilate Indigenous people into mainstream Canadian society. They also challenged the view that subsistence living was a problem that needed to be fixed through education and modernization.

It does appear that certain films created under the CFC umbrella did promote political change. By encouraging different visions of citizenship, CFC documentaries introduced the wider public to the voices and visions of the marginalized.26 This type of representational strategy was itself a radical political act. In Cree Hunters of Mistassini, the conflict between the James Bay Cree and Québec epitomized the helpless position in which many Indigenous communities often found themselves. But the film does not dwell on this power dynamic; it also celebrates the Cree perspective on the world. As coauthors of the documentary, the Cree were able to guide its production in ways that emphasized the vitality and humility of their culture. Furthermore, the film invigorated the James Bay Cree to return to their homeland despite the hydroelectric project, and it helped generate sympathy for Cree sovereignty among non-Indigenous viewers. Cree Hunters of Mistassini also introduced a new way of thinking about the environment—an ecological imagination that challenged white definitions of the meaning and value of nature.

The James Bay Project and Cree Hunters of Mistassini

On 30 April 1971, Premier of Québec Robert Bourassa unveiled his plans for the “project of the century,” a multibillion-dollar hydroelectric enterprise that would increase the power output of the country by a third. Standing in front of a three-panelled screen at the Colisée in Québec City, Bourassa explained to his rapt audience that the province planned to divert and dam three major rivers flowing into James Bay: La Grande, Great Whale, and Rupert. The dams would generate a whopping 10,300 megawatts of electricity for the province alone. But the project was more than just a quest for energy. According to the premier, the James Bay project was “the key to economic and social progress,” “political stability,” and ultimately the “future of Québec.”27 Bourassa’s boast of the magnificent hydroelectric project was a savvy political move. The leader of the Liberal Party was not exactly popular in 1971. He had not made good on his promise that he would bring one hundred thousand jobs to Québec, and worse, he had looked weak during the October Crisis. To conciliate his voters, Bourassa looked to the North. As a young and competent technocrat who embraced the new Québécois policy of nationalism, he saw in the confluence of rivers and lakes at James Bay a bright future for Québec—and a way into the hearts of his voters.

Of course, the space targeted for development was far from empty, as Bourassa assumed. There were approximately ten thousand Cree and Inuit living in the James Bay region at the time of the announcement. And they were not as enthusiastic as the premier or his followers about this technocratic vision. The original inhabitants loudly protested the hydroelectric schemes of the province, which threatened to destroy their homeland and thus their way of life. Damming lakes and rivers would flood their hunting grounds. The deluge of water would also inundate the wetlands of the region and annihilate important beaver and waterfowl habitats.28

Led by Chief Billy Diamond, Cree representatives from Fort George, Rupert House, Eastmain, and other communities in the James Bay area gathered at the village of Mistassini on 28 June 1971 to discuss what to do next. Although it did not gain much press at the time, the meeting was a significant one: it was the first time in modern history that the Cree met as a regional political body. The Elders from the villages decided to ask Indian Affairs to intervene on their behalf. “Only the beavers have the right to build dams in our territory,” the Elders explained in a pointed letter to the then minister of Indian Affairs Jean Chrétien.29 The Cree waited for a response from the federal government, but none came. On 18 April 1972, the Elders decided to file a permanent injunction that prohibited the Québec government from proceeding with the project, which threatened their homes. This time, the government did respond. After months of hearings and legal jockeying about who had rights and who did not, Justice Albert H. Malouf agreed to grant the injunction to the Cree. The victory was short-lived, however. The injunction was overturned a week later by the Supreme Court of Canada. Québec could have its dams. To improve relations with the Cree, the province offered to settle with the aggrieved parties for a total of $225 million. But money was not what the Cree wanted. Dejected, they returned to Mistassini to discuss the settlement. Eventually, the Cree accepted the offer in August 1974. It was officially approved in November 1975 in a contract that became known as the James Bay and Northern Québec Agreement.

The drawn-out legal battle between Québec and the James Bay Cree articulated the fundamental differences between settler and Cree culture. In particular, it highlighted the competing meanings of environment and place. It pitted a dominant society that generally viewed nature as a static object to be used to generate economic profit against a hunting culture that saw the James Bay wilderness as a complex and mysterious web of symbiotic organisms.30 These radically different worldviews made it difficult for either side to understand the other, let alone communicate those differences. Indeed, one of the challenges that the James Bay Cree faced in the ongoing debate about “whose land?” was the court’s limited knowledge of the Cree’s reliance on the James Bay wilderness to provide sustenance. To determine whether the Cree had rights to the land, government lawyers pigeonholed Indigenous hunting culture into Western narratives of science, progress, and ownership. In the eyes of the court, hunting was just an occupation rather than a holistic activity that was cultural as much as it was practical. As a result, the richness of Cree life was reduced to a bland portfolio of statistics, graphs, and charts. As Boyce Richardson observes in Strangers Devour the Land, Bourassa and his gang of lawyers spent months trying to get the Cree to admit that they were “more white than Indian,” since they used snowmobiles and “ate Kentucky Fried Chicken.” They insisted on asking the wrong questions, such as “How much?” “How many?” “Where’s the boundary?” “What’s the address?” It was, as Richardson puts it, “a dialogue of the deaf.”31

After Chrétien’s failure to respond and during the frustrating court battle, the Cree began looking for other ways to demonstrate the breadth and depth of their relationship with the land. One method was documentary filmmaking. With the help of NFB filmmakers Boyce Richardson and Tony Ianzelo, the Cree hunters used the NFB and the tools of cinema to narrate their history and publicize their cause. Richardson and Ianzelo made two documentaries on behalf of the Cree in 1972 and 1974, respectively, Cree Hunters of Mistassini and Our Land Is Our Life. The first film records three Cree families as they establish a winter hunting camp near James Bay. The second film documents the final meeting of the Cree in the village of Mistassini as they ponder the government’s settlement offer and reflect on the hydroelectric project’s possible impact on their culture.

Although they were not Cree themselves, Richardson and Ianzelo were well suited to the task of making a documentary on Cree hunting culture. Ianzelo was one of the first filmmakers to work with Indian Film Crew trainees at the NFB in the 1960s. Richardson also had experience working with Indigenous communities across northern Québec. He was born in New Zealand and worked as a journalist in Australia, India, and England. He moved to Canada in 1957 and began writing for the Montréal Star. While there, Richardson penned a series of articles on Indigenous rights and the ecological effects of northern development in Quebec. His most important work in this period was on the James Bay Cree and their ongoing fight with the province and its hydroelectric project. Richardson interviewed local Cree and learned about the different ways in which they lived off the land. After talking with various Elders and hunters, the journalist eventually grasped that large-scale development would destroy their assiduous yet fragile subsistence culture. But what could the Cree do? “Never before in Canadian history had so politically powerless a group tried to stop so huge a scheme,” Richardson wrote about the bleakness of the Cree’s situation.32

In the summer of 1972, Robert Courneyer, the chairman of the CFC committee and a civil servant in the Privy Council Office, invited Richardson to make a documentary about Indigenous rights.33 After the meeting with Courneyer, Richardson went back to visit the Cree. He quickly discovered that the James Bay Cree “felt strongly about the need for such a film.” According to Richardson, a number of communities in the North wanted a documentary that presented their “arguments and feelings about the land” to “the dominant society.”34 Richardson approached the NFB to see if it would be interested in a documentary on the impact of La Grande dam on Cree culture in James Bay—a subject that kept coming up in his discussions with band leaders across the province. His pitch was simple: Philip Awashish, a young, university-educated Cree from Mistassini, would travel from community to community interviewing Cree residents about the hydroelectric project. He would then show the footage in the villages throughout James Bay.35 Both Richardson and Awashish believed that the documentary would encourage the Cree to protest the James Bay project as a united people. Cree hunters had been in touch frequently during their hunting season, but none of this took the form of formal political gatherings. The producers of CFC were excited about Richardson’s proposal. It was exactly the kind of film in which CFC was interested. Not only would a film like this generate sympathy for the Cree’s tenuous political situation in predominantly white communities, but also it would provide the Cree with a platform to resist the Québec government and, more broadly, colonialism.

The federal government was lukewarm about Richardson’s proposal, however. According to Gary Evans, “There were powerful forces in Ottawa (in the Prime Minister’s office, some believed) who did not want the subject [of the James Bay project] broached from a political point of view.”36 Richardson was flummoxed. In a memo to the CFC committee, Richardson criticized the Privy Council Office for not supporting the film and yielding to “political pressure from the highest level.”37 Although the reasons behind the government’s opposition to the proposed documentary are not revealed in any internal NFB document, one can speculate that the federal government did not want to antagonize Québec further amid the turmoil. Cree rights and Québec sovereignty were sensitive (and potentially volatile) issues.

Although the “vibrations were bad,” Richardson continued to develop the film project, which he had originally titled Assimilation Blues.38 This time, he took a more tactful approach, pitching a series of benign “anthropological documents” that examined Cree culture. With the help of Colin Low, Richardson outlined a series on “native people in Canadian society.” The ambiguous language gave the filmmaker the latitude to make the film that he had wanted to make all along, but it also had the ring of an ethnographically impartial film that appealed to the scientific sensibilities of the federal government. Richardson believed he had managed to “outsmart the feds.”39 The government accepted the revised proposal, and he began shooting Cree Hunters of Mistassini.

On the surface, the documentary appeared to conform to the wishes of the federal government. It did not discuss the social impacts of colonial projects such as La Grande, nor did it reprimand the state’s callousness toward the James Bay Cree and their legitimate claim to the land. Such commentary only “reinforces everybody’s prejudices anyways,” Richardson admitted.40 As a result, Cree Hunters of Mistassini has no climax, no cut to a wide shot of a flooded forest or Bourassa bragging about the awesome power of the province’s massive hydroelectric project. Instead, the documentary concludes quietly with the Cree families packing their meagre belongings for their journey south after another successful hunting season. As they trek into the wilderness, the narrator simply remarks that the James Bay hydroelectric project is under way. Then the documentary fades to black.41

Cree Hunters of Mistassini was far more political than its austere style let on, however. The ambiguous ending appropriately mirrored the uncertain fate of the Cree. Indeed, a closer viewing of the film and the context within which it was produced shows that the austere work was thoroughly revolutionary in its presentation of the Cree reality and ecological worldview. The documentary not only celebrated an Indigenous perspective of the natural world but also “made an immensely powerful political point” about the impact of La Grande and how the Québec government’s high modern schemes threatened the traditional livelihoods of the Cree. Ironically, Richardson opined that this contemplative approach was actually more effective in persuading audiences of Cree sovereignty than the heavy-handed approach of the sequel, Our Land Is Our Life, “full of heavily ironic juxtapositions designed to irritate right-wingers.”42 By following three hunting families in the wilderness, Cree Hunters of Mistassini boldly asks, “How could anyone think of creating huge man-made lakes, or damming and diverting the ancient waters from which the Cree had received their sustenance since time immemorial?”43

Cree Hunters of Mistassini

The documentary begins in medias res with the filmmakers’ arrival in James Bay occurring at the moment that the Cree are protesting Bourassa’s plan for a mammoth hydroelectric project. An airplane circles the vast wilderness. From the window of the craft, James Bay looks impenetrable. Glassy lakes and winding tributaries surround the forest from every possible angle. Although the terrain appears to be vacant, the narrator informs viewers that both human and nonhuman beings have lived in this remote country for “at least three thousand years.”44 In contrast to earlier NFB documentaries, which depict wilderness as an empty object to be dominated, or as a Platonic ideal, Cree Hunters of Mistassini explicitly declares that these places are in fact homeland. And contested. According to the narrator, the “white man” has begun to challenge Indigenous claims to this abundant land in the form of a large hydroelectric project. The Cree “hunt as they have always done,” but their traditional practices are vulnerable to the proposed damming of La Grande.45 Confronted with the appetite of a growing province flush with nationalist fervour, the Cree must adapt if their culture is to survive.

The rest of the documentary takes place at the hunting grounds of Sam Blacksmith, an old trapper and tallyman from Mistassini.46 After the opening aerial sequence, the film cuts to a scene introducing the Blacksmith, Jolly, and Voyageur families. The Cree look timidly at the camera as it frames them in a style reminiscent of a family portrait. The images of seminomadic hunters peering at the camera evoke the colonial aesthetics of early twentieth-century ethnography. Yet this kind of “orientalist” reading is subverted in the film. As the scene plays out, it becomes clear that it is the Cree who are scrutinizing us, the viewer, and more broadly, white colonial settlers. The longer the family members gaze at the camera, the more it becomes apparent that the filmmakers (and by extension the viewers) are interlopers, outsiders who have been summoned by the Cree to bear witness to their world.47 The technique of having the Cree stare straight into the camera repudiates the notion that the observer is more knowledgeable and therefore superior than the subject. In fact, it is the other way around.

The sequence also signals to the viewer that the Cree are in fact coauthors of the documentary. As Richardson explains in the film, Cree Hunters of Mistassini could not have been made without Sam Blacksmith and the other hunters. Blacksmith had met with the filmmakers before the film shoot to see whether they could handle the rigours of bush life before filming began. After several conversations with Richardson and Ianzelo, Blacksmith finally permitted the men to visit his camp.48 His motivation for vetting the two filmmakers was political. From the tallyman’s perspective, the documentary was an important opportunity for the James Bay Cree, and he did not want some hacks from the South misrepresenting them. Blacksmith believed that one way his people could resist the James Bay hydroelectric project was to show outsiders the simplicity of their way of life. “[He] understood this film was to be seen by thousands on television,” Richardson reflected after the film was released.49 Blacksmith wanted to ensure that this “white man” communicated their beliefs accurately and respectfully.50 So he closely monitored the production from start to finish. Blacksmith supervised what was shown in the documentary, especially moments that purported to “show the reality and quality of Indian life.”51

Thus, what we see in Cree Hunters of Mistassini is a visual and narrative expression of the Cree worldview. That is not to say Richardson and Ianzelo’s stamp is not on the film. Certainly, their perspective as white southerners is evident in the documentary. But as Richardson explained, the Cree families were instrumental in the aesthetic of the film. They dictated the pace of the movie by helping with the editing.52 A rough cut of the documentary was finally shown to the families in 1973 and again in March 1974. Each time the film was shown, the Cree translated key interviews and provided Richardson with feedback on certain sequences pertaining to food preparation and hunting rituals.53

For the Cree, the most important aspect of their culture that they wanted to convey was their deep relationship with the James Bay environment. On a practical level, the land provided the hunters and their families with physical nourishment. It sustained them with food and other necessities even during the punishing winter months. The documentary has dozens of scenes of harvesting, hunting, and foraging activities. Each sequence is filmed up close and often without the support of a tripod. The jerky motion of the camera, the laboured breathing of the subject, and the ambient sounds of the forest interior create an unromantic portrait of living off the land. These images and the film’s general visual aesthetic are the opposite of the idyllic wilderness cinematography of Bill Mason and Christopher Chapman. James Bay is not an empty landscape viewed from some overlook; it is a place where people live; it is an environment that demands of those who live there that they work hard and skilfully. Nature is a place of labour and meaning. Of closeness. Although the work is gruelling, the Cree enjoy the fruits of their labour at the end of the day in their warm lodges. A close bond is formed between the three families and the filmmakers as they eat and smoke together. Working in nature has produced a deep satisfaction that one can experience only after tracking game for a full day.

The documentary also respectfully expresses the spiritual imagination of the Cree, which sees the land as a sacred place. Activities such as hunting, trapping, and fishing are closely defined by their belief in the supernatural qualities of nature.54 Each time Blacksmith and the other Cree hunters enter the forest, they encounter a world of spiritual beings and forces. Animals such as beaver, bear, grouse, and moose had their own personalities and temperaments. So did the wind and the trees. In one scene, Blacksmith leaves the shell-white bones of a black bear on top of a makeshift edifice. As he performs his duties, he explains that the platform is erected so that dogs cannot “violate them.” Degrading the bones of the bear would make its spirit angry. Precautions must be taken “because nothing can be hidden from the bear,” Blacksmith says. “If the bear knows he is not well respected,” then it will be very difficult to hunt him again.55 The smallest disturbance or spiritual misstep can have an enormous impact on the hunter’s success and therefore a person’s survival. Richardson explains in the narration that Blacksmith and the other hunters frequently have to contend with the capriciousness of the spirits. Any display of impertinence or carelessness can cause the spirits to be resentful and maybe even spiteful. They might not give themselves up as food.

The Cree perception of the James Bay environment as a place of mutable entities and entangled spiritual relationships is an important aspect of the documentary’s ecological imagination and in particular its subversive representation of environmental care. Animals and plants are presented as dynamic entities. Recognizing that nature is an interrelated system of both human and nonhuman figures means that the Cree must be respectful as they carry out their rituals. Nature is not there just for the benefit of hunters. It exists to sustain life in all its forms. The Cree hunter kills sparingly and with gratitude and humility because he recognizes that such violent acts, though necessary, reverberate throughout the entire James Bay world. This understanding of the natural world is explained when Blacksmith kills a pregnant moose. Before they haul the carcass back to their camp, the hunters perform an important ritual over the dead animal. The moose was unable to fulfill her role as a mother, so the hunters “give a little of the life of the mother to the calf,” Blacksmith explains. After cutting a piece of flesh from the dead cow, Blacksmith opens the jaws of the fetus and places the meat in its mouth. The hunters honour the moose so that it might “continue to flourish.” “This is always done,” Blacksmith explains gravely to the camera.56 Hunting is a sacred act, and carelessness or indifference can disrupt the delicate web of existence.

According to the Cree, responsibility for the forest was given to them by the spirits. As scions of the land, they are obligated to tend to it as a garden. They help maintain it by balancing growth and harvest in a pattern analogous to modern land management practices.57 Ronnie Jolly, for instance, had not been to his hunting territory in several years because it needed time to replenish. Later in the film, Blacksmith tells the crew that he “may leave the ground alone for a year or two so there will be something there when we return.” “The [beaver] becomes scarce if we hunt every winter,” the hunter says.58 Blacksmith’s and the other families’ reverent attitude toward nature is a clear counterpoint to the high modern schemes of Bourassa and the state. The hydroelectric project proposed to modify the land without restraint or spiritual sensitivity. In contrast, Blacksmith and the hunters believe that nature has its limits and that for it to endure, they need to live simply and humbly.

The point of all this in the film is to argue that the Cree are the rightful heirs to James Bay, not the provincial government. For centuries, they have been the caretakers of the land, protecting it from harm and drawing meaning from its mysterious cadences. As Blacksmith informs viewers, the area where he lives was given to him “after the old man who hunted on it died.” Since then, he has toiled on the land as a trapper, a fisherman, and a hunter for thirty years. But this does not mean that he is the “master” of the land. “A man who lives by hunting cherishes the land. A man who lives by hunting truly respects the land. A man who owns the land really cannot because he dies,” Blacksmith says pointedly.59 There is something important in this Cree perspective on caretaking that transcends Western notions of ownership. In the film, it becomes clear that the Cree have a cultural and spiritual union with the wilderness that supersedes the Québec government’s legal definition of property and ownership.60

Cree Agency and Ethnographic Cinema

Although Cree Hunters of Mistassini respects the ecological wisdom and humility of Cree hunting culture, it is nonetheless important to acknowledge some of the documentary’s limitations. Perhaps the most conspicuous problem with the film is that the directors sometimes cultivate an image of the “ecological Indian.” Richardson romanticizes the Cree community for surviving in the isolated wilderness “without accidents, illnesses, or quarrels.”61 As we saw in chapter 2, such representations were common in NFB films about Indigenous peoples and demonstrated their enduring status as “ecological Indians” in Canadian culture.

There are other issues in the film as well. According to the production notes, Richardson and Ianzelo contrived certain scenes to enhance the story’s drama. To create moments of excitement, the filmmakers flew several of the Cree hunters to different parts of James Bay so that they could kill a moose for the camera. The documentarians also brought in building supplies to construct a hunting lodge that accommodated the film crew and their gear.62 On a practical level, these decisions made filming in the bush easier, cheaper, and more engaging. But, as Graeme Wynn notes, this decision also reaffirms a colonial way of representing Indigenous peoples.63

But one must be careful to only see the film as a questionable piece of colonial work. If anything, the use of modern tools during production demonstrates Blacksmith’s adeptness in using traditional practices and appropriating so-called modern technologies to sustain his family’s long-standing ties to the land. If nails and hammers provided by Richardson and Ianzelo made building their cabins easier in the challenging wilderness, then why not take full advantage of them? Cree adaptability is evident in the documentary itself. On several occasions, Blacksmith shows the cameraman that he uses the “white man’s technology” to survive the winter. Snowmobiles, chainsaws, and bush radios are all common features in the hunting camp of the Cree. The difference between Cree society and modern Canadian society, however, is that the people of Eeyou Istchee use technology carefully and purposefully. A Cree hunter “always places skill above superfluous technology,” anthropologist Ronald Niezen explains.64

Furthermore, the Cree participated in making the documentary. They demonstrate their adaptability and resiliency to colonial assimilation in the documentary by taking over the cinematic means of production. Blacksmith is cognizant that filmmaking (even its moments of artificiality) can help the Cree show outsiders their vibrant culture and thus help amplify their grievance against the Québec government. This agency exemplifies their ability to navigate both continuity and change in the extrafilmic world. Despite the remoteness of their land, the Cree were willing to engage with outsiders and share their own visions of the world. As Carlson writes, “Contact was not so much a moment in time as an ongoing process through which two culturally different peoples began to live with and speak to and about one another.”65

Challenge for Change?

Although some scholars claim that the CFC program provided its subjects with only an illusion of political agency, the legacy of Cree Hunters of Mistassini hints that in certain instances, NFB cinema was in fact a springboard for political action and self-determination. For the James Bay Cree, the production and distribution of Cree Hunters of Mistassini and its follow-up, Our Land Is Our Life, was a major moment in their confrontation with the state. The film rallied local Cree to return to the bush and encouraged them to unify against the government of Québec and protest its hydroelectric project.

Before Cree Hunters of Mistassini was released, programmers at CFC envisioned how it might be used by the Cree to oppose the claims of Bourassa and, more broadly, the James Bay hydroelectric project. From an educational standpoint, the documentary would inform Cree on the current state of affairs. “Clearly, there is a need for an effective means of communication so as to improve the chances of the affected Indian population to become fully aware of the effect of the project on their lives,” the NFB report explained.66 But education was not enough. The CFC model demanded that the subjects participate in the distribution of the documentary:

Then there is a need to bring these people together to form a common front to defend their rights and have a voice in the decisions affecting their lives. The aim of the James Bay Communications project would be to fill those needs for communication between the Indians, and subsequently between Indians and Southern decision-makers. With the help of VTR [video tape recorder] equipment in the hands of Native social animators, information can be rapidly disseminated, exchanges of views with and between the communities aided, and awareness of problems and possible solutions can be accelerated. The Cree will then be in a position to communicate with the Southern Québec Indians, with the James Bay Corporation and the Québec Government, and with Ottawa and can use videotape as one possible means of supporting their views.67

Cree Hunters of Mistassini was more than an informative documentary; it was a way to spark a communications network that bridged the spatial and temporal gaps that historically had confounded unity among the isolated Cree communities. Eventually, the chorus of voices and shared experiences would reverberate all the way to the halls of Québec City.

To ensure that the documentary had maximum political effect, the NFB strategically released Cree Hunters of Mistassini during the court case. In a 1974 memo, CFC producer Ian Ball relayed to the regional distribution coordinators that “the negotiations between James Bay residents and the PQ government [were] underway” and that they should seize the moment and “expose the film as widely as possible.”68 The NFB acted quickly. Between April and June 1974, the NFB screened Cree Hunters of Mistassini and its companion, Our Land Is Our Life, for sixty-one different Cree communities across James Bay and down into southern Québec. CFC used “animators” from major communities affected by the hydroelectric project to promote the film and facilitate postscreening discussions with Cree audiences.69 Travelling around the province with their projection equipment, the CFC animators had three tasks: “to stimulate a reflection on the life, the culture, and the situation of the Indian; to sensitize Québecers to the problems of the Indians and to the questions surrounding the economic development of the North; and to contribute to a growth in the solidarity between Indian groups by exposing the similarities of the kind of life they lead.”70

Mark Zanis, a distribution coordinator with the NFB, urged the distributors to learn all the details about the hydroelectric project and its potential impact on Cree culture. Many of the viewers were informed of the situation, and they were deeply concerned about its potential impact on their livelihood. Zanis warned the animators to be prepared to answer questions such as, “When did we consent to bargaining away our natural resources?” He also instructed them to remind “audiences that the Cree allowed filmmakers to participate.”71 This was not just a film about the Cree but also a film authorized and indeed endorsed by the Cree.

By all accounts, the James Bay Cree responded strongly to the film after it was shown. Viewers understood what Blacksmith said about life in the bush on both cultural and symbolic levels. They got the references and the metaphors. They laughed at the jokes made at Richardson’s expense and nodded when the Cree hunters talked about the “old ways.”72 Screening after screening, Cree audience members approached the animators to tell them what they thought of the documentary. A travelling report from Indigenous filmmaker Michael Kanentakeron Mitchell, who toured across James Bay with the film, noted that the Cree response to the documentary was “overwhelming.”73

After a screening on Kipawa Reserve in Québec, an animator reported that the crowd was “enthusiastic” about the film and talked extensively about it “for hours.” According to the animator, spectators from the reserves recognized Sam Blacksmith and the other hunters in the film, which generated even more buzz for the documentary.74 In a screening that took place at Chief Billy Diamond’s home at Rupert House, Cree Elders were moved to tears. They were overjoyed after seeing their own people “speaking publicly about what they feel about the land.” One trapper in attendance agreed with its portrayal of hunting life. “What they say is very true.” “Are they planning to make more films about life in the bush?” he inquired.75

The full emotional resonance of the documentary could be appreciated only by the Cree. In his report, Zanis explained that the documentary “revived memories of what that life was like in the wilderness” for Cree viewers.76 There was an exciting momentum after each screening. Over time, Cree Hunters of Mistassini encouraged a growing number of Cree to return to their hunting grounds and reestablish their connections with the land despite the looming hydroelectric project. Mobilized by the stirring portrait of their culture, many viewers began to think about what it would be like to return to the old ways. Several families revisited the bush after seeing the documentary. “Many of the Cree trappers announced they were going to make plans to return to the bush in the winter,” Zanis explained. Cree families from the villages followed suit and “packed their belongings for the winter hunt.”77

The documentary also directly supported the James Bay Cree in their battle against Hydro-Québec.78 Before the announcement by Bourassa, Cree political life generally had been organized through family based hunting communities. Rarely did Cree interact with other Cree from outside their villages. Under the leadership of Chief Billy Diamond, Cree hunters from all over James Bay began meeting to determine how they could oppose the hydroelectric project. Zanis further reported that Cree Hunters of Mistassini and Our Land Is Our Life generated interest in the court case and encouraged the Cree to attend the briefing in Fort George with their lawyers.79 Richardson and Ianzelo similarly claimed that the documentary heartened the hunters to negotiate a small reduction in the scope of the project and to receive some financial compensation.80 Although a settlement was not the ideal outcome for the Cree, it did allow them to determine their future in certain respects. As Diamond mentioned to the Montréal Gazette, the Cree were “very reluctant to sign the agreement” but realized that by settling, “the rights and the land are protected as much as possible from white man’s intrusion and white man’s use.” “It guarantees that we can continue to live in harmony with nature,” Diamond added.81

On a more general level, Cree Hunters of Mistassini’s cinéma-vérité style prompted non-Indigenous viewers to reconsider their own views of the natural world. As the camera shadows the Cree hunters, outsiders become immersed in an ecologically rich landscape and are thus invited to contemplate how people are shaped by the natural world and vice versa. According to NFB employee Rick Dale, audiences in Ontario connected the documentary to the media coverage of the Berger Inquiry into the Mackenzie Valley pipeline and the Indigenous blockade of a BC railway. The film helped raise consciousness in meaningful and productive ways. “In all these events, the lifestyle, talents, and rights of our Indians were brought to the consciousness of non-natives. The Indians are making all kinds of waves. It is in this milieu that the Challenge for Change films are at their best—audiences want to know what’s going on and why,” Dale reported.82

The Anglican Church in Québec exclaimed—based on the film—that it wanted the provincial government to halt all northern development until land claims had been settled.83 In the Montréal Star, film critic Joan Irwin praised the documentary for giving her a “clear view of real life of the North American Indian.” It convinced her that the government should “leave in the Cree’s hand . . . the huge tracts of wilderness land they need and tend so carefully.”84 A review in The Booklist likewise praised the film for its visual splendour, which highlights the Cree’s intimate relationship with the environment. The film “uses superbly restrained cinematography” that never forces one to be conscious of “technique.” Richardson frames the narrative elements with a “minimum of visual bias, allowing one to discover each element for oneself.” The documentary also “avoids the easy approach of stimulating the audience’s response by placing the Indians in a pathetic context, asking for pity rather than encouraging respect.”85 In a screening in Montréal, the predominantly white audience remarked that the film was a “powerful” treatise on Cree rights. An hour-long discussion held after the screening revealed that people in the crowd asked for suggestions on what they could do to help the Cree cause.86

In its first two decades of documentary filmmaking, the NFB framed the environment as a resource to be managed and exploited. Its emphasis on control and order embodied a state way of seeing geographic spaces in the middle of the twentieth century. In the 1960s, discourses about nature began to evolve. Some filmmakers argued that nature was not static or uniform. Rather, it was an intricate and dynamic ecosystem, and its value was multifaceted. They also contended that efforts to control the environment tended to produce disastrous ecological problems that ruined local ecosystems and human bodies. Although these protoenvironmental works challenged normative attitudes toward nature, they were also conspicuously whitecentric. Issues such as wilderness preservation and ecological protection were generally portrayed as white, middle-class issues. There was no mention of how environmental damage disproportionately affected marginalized groups or of how nonwhite discourses could cultivate a more holistic (and therefore sustainable) way of thinking about nature. This would all change, of course, with Cree Hunters of Mistassini. The NFB film, directed by Boyce Richardson and coauthored by the James Bay Cree, was the first to posit an environmental ethic that embraced Indigenous viewpoints.

The ecological imagination of the CFC documentary is significant for several reasons. The documentary advanced the idea that the Cree were the stewards of the James Bay wilderness and had been for thousands of years. This long-standing connection with the natural world, which Richardson depicts as a physical, emotional, and spiritual bond, buttresses their claim to this territory, a fact disputed by Québec. Indeed, the film does a superior job of expressing the hunter’s complex relationship with the land compared with that of the Cree’s lawyers.

By celebrating this representation of nature, the film implicitly critiqued Québec’s hydroelectric project and by extension the state’s high modern vision of the land. Not only would La Grande have dreadful consequences for the James Bay environment, but also it would threaten the very basis of Cree culture. For Sam Blacksmith and the other Cree hunters, the hydroelectric project represented “a terrible and vast reduction of [their] entire world.”87 The film does a fair job of explaining why this is the case. The land is more than just a source of occupation; it is a source of their nourishment as a people. “Nothing, neither jobs nor money, meant more to [the Cree] than their land,” the information sheet for the documentary states.88 “You can’t just run a road in and say, ‘we’ll need some gas stations along the way and the Indians can run the gas stations.’ No Indian in James Bay has asked for gas stations,” Richardson remarked pointedly in an interview.89

In this sense, the film exceeds all other NFB environmental documentaries that came before it. It skilfully challenges certain Western definitions of the meaning of nature through its cinematography and narrative arc. Furthermore, the film helped activate marginalized communities that called the wilderness home. Inspired by the documentary and its accurate portrayal of hunting in the bush, Cree from all over Québec returned to the forest and reestablished their ties with the land.

More broadly, Cree Hunters of Mistassini is a clarion call to viewers across Canada to meditate on the true value of nature. Its meditative approach encourages viewers to develop a more respectful and humble attitude toward the environment. Although the NFB was a way for the government to teach audiences how to think about and behave toward nature in ways that aligned with its nation-building project, Cree Hunters of Mistassini demonstrates that NFB cinema sometimes challenged the hegemony of the state. The CFC film objected to the high modern schemes of Québec and disavowed its reductive view of the human and nonhuman world.