Nechako: It Will Be a Big River Again follows the flow of a multigenerational legal battle at DOXA
In NFB documentary, Lyana Patrick chronicles the environmental harm caused by the Kenney Dam
Filmmaker Lyana Patrick in Nechako: It Will Be a Big River Again.
DOXA Documentary Film Festival presents Nechako: It Will Be a Big River Again at the VIFF Centre on May 3 at 5 pm and the Djavad Mowafaghian Cinema on May 9 at 5 pm
IN 1952, THE KENNEY DAM brought havoc to a vast watershed in northern B.C. Flow was diverted to an aluminum smelting plant, gutting the great Nechako River and pushing the Stellat’en and Saik’uz First Nations to the point of ruin. Flooding, logging, and a laundry list of environmental harms followed.
While filmmaker Lyana Patrick was working on Nechako: It Will Be a Big River Again, which screens May 3 and 9 at this year’s DOXA Documentary Film Festival, salmon stock in the river dropped to a historic low. Patrick’s film was also in production when the BC Court of Appeal declared its findings in a daunting, generations-long legal battle with mining company Rio Tinto Alcan and two levels of government.
Nechako does a great job of summarizing this gruelling and complex fight, but its real strength lies in the affection Patrick summons for the people behind the struggle—including her own father, former Stellat’en chief Archie Patrick. The film has its political thrust, but Nechako is very much about the lives of ordinary people facing an existential test. It’s anything but didactic.
“I have a deep love of slow films,” says Patrick, speaking to Stir from her East Van home. “My family calls them ‘Lyana movies’, the ones that take their time, with long scenes, and you’re kinda feeling sleepy. I want to be immersed in a space and I was really hoping to make something like that. And I’ll just briefly say: this film was asked for by community, to tell a particular story, so I needed to convey certain pieces of information. But I wanted to do so in a way that let the people speak for themselves, and the land and the water speak for themselves. It was a very intentional strategy.”
Patrick also identifies a “cultural approach” to the film, drawn in part from her own proximity to the subject. “I feel like when we were growing up, the quiet and the silence were really valued, and you didn’t have to fill every moment with speaking,” she says. “Just observing.”
In mid-April, Patrick took the NFB-produced Nechako to Vanderhoof, previewing the film for its participants in the theatre she frequented in her youth. There’s a personal arc to the project that broadly mirrors the history of Indigenous resistance in the latter half of the 20th century. In her regular life, Patrick works as an assistant professor at SFU. In Nechako, she takes on the role of student.
“For one thing it took me a year to even figure out what this dam system is,” Patrick says. “Understanding the extent and the breadth of the Nechako watershed, learning so much more about the places, the spaces, the waters where I grew up, in the north Interior in the ’70s and ’80s like I did—you didn’t necessarily get a straight explanation of what’s happening. So people of my generation, we kind of pieced it together for ourselves and figured out that there was all this colonial violence, these polices, and there were reasons why we witnessed what we witnessed, and realizing that this dam was responsible for so much damage.”
Her choices as writer-director are illuminating. There’s one technical marvel in the film’s opening minutes that needs to be appreciated on a big screen—you’ll know when you see it—but the more intimate moments resonate. Patrick confesses that “as an academic, I know I can get stuck my head”, but she doesn’t cut away from a tearful Jasmine Thomas as the Saik’uz First Nation councillor weeps over the impact of her work on her young family’s life. Elsewhere, her camera pours over affectionate conversations between Archie Patrick and former Saik’uz chief Jackie Thomas, both veteran warriors for the river, both colourful personalities.
There’s a key moment in the film’s final minutes involving one of its most endearing figures, a beansprout former Saik’uz chief in a cowboy hat named Rodney Teed. Hearing the final decision of the BC Court of Appeal on Aboriginal fishing rights, he asks his partners to “dumb it down for me a little”. As viewers, we also appreciate the help.
“I think what it represented was, okay, this is an endpoint in this particular journey,” says Patrick with a sigh; she shares the ambivalent reaction we witness in the movie. In deciding that liability rests with government and not Rio Tinto Alcan, it seems that the court has lent the two Nechako nations a small tactical victory while also extending an already exhausting standoff. But who’s going to back down after 70 years?
“This is the result, now we think about what we do next,” says Patrick. “Jasmine says at the end, ‘They hope they’ll bleed us out, we’re gonna do what it takes.’ And Rodney say this too: ‘They can take everything and leave, but we’re not going anywhere.’ And that’s the crux of it. Our lands can be absolutely hollowed out. There can be nothing left. But we’re not leaving.
“You hear people say, ‘Why don’t they just leave and go get jobs?’” she continues. “I still hear it, and I hope this film is the response. And it has global resonance. Why would anyone stay in a place that’s so horrible, that doesn’t sustain life? Because that’s where you’re from.” 
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