NFB doc The Stand returns to screens after triumphant Haida land agreement
At Vancity Theatre, Christopher Auchter’s film takes us back to the 1985 protest that led to a historic win
The Stand.
VIFF Centre’s Vancity Theatre screens The Stand starting Friday, February 28
IN MID-FEBRUARY, in an agreement with the federal government, the Haida Nation was finally granted title over the archipelago of Haida Gwaii. To commemorate, the Vancity Theatre brings back The Stand for six screenings starting Friday (February 28). Justifiably an audience award-winner when it played at last year’s VIFF, Christopher Auchter’s lyrical documentary provides the 40-year backstory to this historic win for environmental justice and Indigenous rights, which all began with a protracted protest on the then-Queen Charlottes in the mid-’80s.
Reviewing The Stand last autumn, we praised the “touching and instructive” NFB-produced film while emphasizing its most potent quality: from the small group of Haida who first mounted a peaceful blockade on Lyell Island in 1985, to the loggers, the cops, and even the media, The Stand bears witness to a rare time of mutual respect and open dialogue between competing interests if not hardened foes. Told entirely through crisp archival footage (and some animation), we see visible reluctance on all sides when the protesters defy mounting court orders, the loggers politely confront them, and the cops begin the arrests. There’s no chaos. There’s no violence. It’s a game in which everyone knows the rules. Even the quality of the 40-year-old video image feels like one beautiful world away. It all seems unthinkable now.
“I would wish that the RCMP could go, ‘Look at how we handled this situation,’” say Auchter, speaking to Stir from his home in Burnaby. “This is a shining example of how things can be done. You don’t need to look like a military force to deal with this. Just communication and a willingness to talk.” It’s dispiriting to learn that the RCMP wouldn’t grant access to its own footage of the 1985 blockade, but Auchter did manage to track down now retired Inspector Harry Wallace, who led the seasick and weary force who landed on Lyell Island by boat in November, 1985. The first thing they encountered was a Haida camp.
“So they offered halibut soup to all the officers and Harry said it was so good he asked for more,” Auchter says. “He said it was such a great way for all of this to start. This respect was starting to build, this open communication. And he said that he actively tried to visit with the Haida as much as he could when this was happening. He was staying at Frank Beban’s camp so he wanted to make sure that it didn’t look like they were Beban’s police.”
Frank Beban was the owner of the company subcontracted by Western Forest Products to log the territory on Lyell. He might appear at first as the film’s antagonist, but there’s clearly more to this giant of a man with the fighter’s mug. Says Auchter, who was five years old when his aunt and uncle “put their freedom on the line” for the protest, “I was always looking for more on Frank Beban. He was a strong kind of logging personality. I grew up around logging, I know the characters, and they’re very likeable, and very funny, but also very tough. There’s the business side of it and obviously, Frank Beban was running the business and it was all very serious for him. I did not hate him. I didn’t really see him as a villain.” In the film’s final minutes, it’s Frank Beban, smiling for the first time, who tells an interviewer that “half of these people are my friends.”
No less formidable is Miles Richardson, president of the Council of the Haida Nation and Beban’s designated opponent in the standoff. He speaks with devastating precision and persistently reminds everyone that a satisfactory negotiation is possible. “I know that a lot of our people intend to continue working in the logging industry and depending on the forest resource,” he argues. “But not in this particular area.” In contrast to Beban, Richardson’s expression is wide open and projects big emotions kept under careful control.
“You see it from the moment they meet on the road for the first time, and you see it when he’s talking to Webster,” says Auchter. “His face gives us so much information about how he’s feeling about the situation.” Webster is Jack Webster, the pugnacious Scottish broadcaster and showman. We return to Webster’s BCTV program throughout The Stand, opening another window into a long-gone Canada. Webster talks about “the jobs” while predictably siding with the rule of law and capital, but again it’s not that simple. With Richardson and Nishga Tribal Council President James Gosnell as his guests, he visibly revels in a fair fight. So what is he? Good guy, bad guy, provocateur? Is he playing a character? At a certain heated point in the interview, a brief smile passes between Webster and Richardson, suggesting friendly collusion in the project of presenting robust and honest debate.
“Yeah, he’s all those things,” Auchter says with a chuckle. “What a character. I was actually so grateful that he covered this, it gives another angle to explore the story and the issues at hand, and to include the voices of British Columbia, in terms of what they’re thinking about all this. It’d be a great loss to the film if this didn’t exist and he didn’t interview Miles and Gosnell and David Suzuki. But especially his interview with Miles and Gosnell, it’s just so electric, and I love how Webster was honest with that one statement: ‘This has got to be the hardest interview I’ve ever had on my program.’ You can tell it was weighing on him too. It was a sparring match between great minds, I think.”
Auchter began work on The Stand in 2019, partly as a way to honour his own family’s role in the story. Naturally, he now reports that he “didn’t know what I was getting into” after a visit with filmmaker Susan Underwood, who was welcomed into the Haida camp with Donna Wilson, and who filled Auchter’s car 40 years later with box after box of 3/4 inch and beta video tape. The NFB digitized and upscaled the footage once an early attempt at AI was mercifully rejected by Auchter. Frankly, it looks amazing, partly because of the visual noise inherent in a format always considered somewhat downmarket.
“I agree,” says Auchter. “I think it’s actually quite beautiful in its imperfection. There’s something human about that in some weird way.” Alongside his animations of a guiding supernatural spirit called Mouse Woman (voiced by Auchter’s aunt, Dolores Churchill), BC-based composer Genevieve Vincent’s score is the only other modern intervention in The Stand, and it deserves more than passing mention. It’s staggeringly beautiful. (Let’s repeat the demand in Stir’s initial review: “Soundtrack album, please!”) Vincent describes her strategies in a brief email shared by Auchter:
“… the analogue synth was to evoke that early analogue synth tone from the ’80s. I like that the tuning is a bit warbly which reminded me of the imperfections in the archival footage because of its age, and gives it a living quality that blends with the real instruments. The other instruments: woodwinds and harp for the forest and spirit of the land, ocean, and air; frame drum played by your uncle and sampled throughout for gravitas and to ground us in the Haida’s world; horns for strength to enhance moments of resolve and authority; snare drum for the RCMP. Everything had a reason as we built it. It was a reflection sonically of what you made.”
Of course, what Auchter made comes after 40 patiently observed years of negotiation, pressure, commitment, and non-violent resistance. We’re lucky to have The Stand but it wouldn’t exist without the triumphant moment that took place on February 17 and the signing of the Big Tide Haida Title Lands Agreement.
“It’s massive,” says Auchter. “We’ve had to do so much rebuilding since smallpox, and residential schools, and the bans on our art, and the bans on our potlach. It’s kinda been under a steady bombardment and in taking a stand on the road in 1985, I think that’s the first time ever that the Haida Nation has come together as a full group, the two Haida communities of Skidegate and Masset, at least in terms of recorded history. It’s something special. They’ve come together in protection of our land and our culture. So for this to happen nearly 40 years later, I think it’s amazing. And the Haida want so much to just work with the people who are living on Haida Gwaii now, and in the future.” 
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