Reel Life: Screening one of Canada’s oldest documentaries on the shores of Alert Bay
YOU CAN TELL Wayne Alfred is at work by the smoke rising from the stovepipe above his Cormorant Island carving workshop, on the shores of Alert Bay. When I visit, tables, tools, and books are all out in the open air. Alfred and his four Kwakwaka’wakw apprentices are taking advantage of the long August evenings. Wood shavings blanket the ground, burying various books splayed open to photographs of totem poles and ceremonial masks for inspiration.
The carvers take a short break to gather around my iPad and look at some of Canada’s oldest documentary footage of the Far North—older, even, than Nanook of the North, which is held up as the quintessential classic in Canadian film circles. The material Alfred is watching was shot in Alert Bay for the Hudson’s Bay Company’s 250th anniversary in 1920, long before the fifty-four-year-old carver was born. For six months, a film crew visited fur trade outposts across Canada, travelling by company steamer, kayak, canoe, even dogsled. The Romance of the Far Fur Country played in cities across western Canada, and across the pond in London, where the reels of nitrate film were squirrelled away at HBC’s then headquarters.
Later, the collection was moved to the British Film Institute Archives, where I first encountered it. While winding the reels onto a Steenbeck viewing machine, my brother and I hatched the idea of taking the footage back to the communities where it was shot. Two years later, the Return of the Far Fur Country project arrived in Alert Bay.
Before starting our journey, we had been prudently warned by academics and advisers that this was culturally sensitive material; HBC, after all, was a colonial venture. I keep this in mind as the first shots of Alert Bay appear onscreen, the iris of the camera opening around a totem pole with a raven’s beak cut from half a canoe.