A Lantern Films and Experimental Forest Films production, in co-production with the National Film Board of Canada

Nechako is a crucial documentary from Lyana Patrick that follows two Indigenous Nations fighting for our collective future. When the Kenney Dam was built in the 1950s, it diverted 70 percent of the Nechako River into an artificial reservoir, severely impacting the lives of local Stellat’en and Saik’uz Nations. What followed were decades of resistance, including legal actions against the Canadian federal and provincial governments and Rio Tinto Alcan, a subsidiary of a global mining conglomerate.

Nechako follows the people fighting today to restore a river and a way of life: Nations going up against industry, community leaders advocating for their people, Elders documenting their histories and community members living off the land. An urgent call to action, Patrick’s film asks what survival looks like when it serves everyone, in a story 70 years in the making—a story of hope and resistance against all odds, amidst large-scale environmental destruction and despite the will of powerful institutions.

In the face of environmental destruction, two Nations fight to restore their river and a way of life.

Nechako is a crucial documentary that follows two Indigenous Nations fighting for our collective future. When the Kenney Dam was built in the 1950s, the Nechako River was forever changed. The Stellat’en and Saik’uz Nations embarked on a groundbreaking legal proceeding against the Canadian government and Rio Tinto Alcan that lasted over a decade—a battle that continues today. Following community members living day to day on the river while they take on powerful institutions, Nechako is an urgent call to action to restore a river and a way of life.

Nechako is a story of survival 70 years in the making. The saga begins in the early 1950s in northwestern British Columbia, when the Kenney Dam was built to power an aluminum smelter. The for-profit project diverted 70 percent of the Nechako River into an artificial reservoir, flooding lands, displacing wildlife, destroying ecosystems and severely impacting the lives of local Stellat’en and Saik’uz Nations. The dam decimated salmon runs, which are vital to the Nations’ way of life and provide a food source that composes up to 90 percent of their diet.

What followed were decades of resistance, including legal actions against the Canadian federal and provincial governments and Alcan (later Rio Tinto Alcan, a subsidiary of the global mining conglomerate), beginning in the 1980s. Indigenous Elders had to prove not only that they held a right to the lands and waters they’d coexisted with for centuries, but that their people had existed there at all. Fast forward to the present day, as the Nations wage a potentially precedent-setting legal battle against Rio Tinto Alcan.

This crucial documentary follows the people fighting to restore a river and a way of life: Nations going up against industry, community leaders advocating for their people, Elders documenting their histories, and First Nations members living off the land, monitoring and protecting lands and waters, and sharing vital survival skills. It also weaves in the journey of director and Indigenous scholar Lyana Patrick (A Place to Belong, The Train Station), as she reconnects with her Stellat’en First Nation community and lands.

Nechako is a chronicle of hope and resistance against all odds, amidst large-scale environmental destruction and despite the will of powerful institutions. It is also a call to action as the world reckons with waves of climate crises. The film asks what survival looks like when it serves everyone, and urges viewers to consider those already fighting for our collective future.

As a reporter for the Native Voice newspaper in 1994, I wrote about the Aluminum Company of Canada (Alcan) and its efforts to divert the Nechako River for the benefit of its aluminum smelter. This was an intensely personal story, as I knew many of the people who opposed the hydroelectric project and the company’s ongoing attempt to divert yet more of the river into the reservoir behind the Kenney Dam. It would take many years for me to fully understand how the dam impacted my Nation—the Stellat’en First Nation. We relied on the river. Our identity and connection to place is inscribed in the rushing waters of the Nechako, or “Big River.” The destruction of the Nechako created conditions for a multigenerational fight from which there is no backing down.

The story of the Kenney Dam is one of resistance and restoration, of the intimate connections between the health of the land and the health of the people. It speaks to our court case against Rio Tinto Alcan and the governments of Canada and British Columbia, and points to a different way of co-existing on these lands. What the Nechako Nations are seeking is a role in the stewardship of our lands and waters, something denied to us for generations. These are important stories to share with a world that is struggling to address the devastating impacts of climate change. Our resilience and adaptation in the face of colonial policies and practices demonstrates our innovation in addressing the climate crisis. The ongoing cumulative impacts of development make this work ever more urgent.

Just as community members in the film are fighting for their grandchildren, I also feel a responsibility to document the long history of this fight and our vision for co-existence moving forward. Five years ago, Rio Tinto (which now owns Alcan) destroyed 46,000-year-old Aboriginal sites in Australia; today, the company is threatening sacred land that holds great spiritual significance to the San Carlos Apache Tribe in the United States. As someone whose ancestors travelled these lands and waterways, whose family continues to access the lands and waters, I feel these are timely and important stories to share in a world where, now more than ever, co-existence means fighting together for the future of our planet.

What prompted you to make this documentary, and why does it feel vital to get this story out now?

This film is really part of a 70-year-long struggle to protect and restore the Nechako River. The Kenney Dam was built in 1952, and that’s when lands were flooded and 70 percent of the river was diverted for an aluminum smelter. And the legal struggle really started in the 1980s, when our communities were preparing to be intervenors in a court case that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans brought against Alcan. We were never granted intervenor status, but we ended up documenting our Elders’ oral histories, and some of those testimonies are in this film.

Then about five years ago, right around the time when the court case was about to be heard in the B.C. Supreme Court—the court case that is documented in the film—the Chief of the Saik’uz First Nation reached out to our production company, Lantern Films, and asked if there would be interest in making a film about the community’s struggle to protect the Nechako River. So it was very much a community-driven project, and we were able to start documenting it at a very important time of that court case, and then follow it through right until the end of the line, basically, for our legal story.

You often interview people out on the land, and also appear on screen as a member of the Stellat’en First Nation. How did you take this approach, as a filmmaker?

I really wanted to show the people living, being, doing things on the lands, on the waters, and just really allow the viewer to have a strong sense that we continue to use and occupy our lands. I felt like that was important to show, alongside documenting the efforts in the legal system.

I also wanted to show how much work people have to do, especially community leaders like Jasmine Thomas, who are called on to be on councils and attend all of these meetings and to constantly be travelling, being that mediator between government and industry and the community. And then they also have cultural responsibilities and social responsibilities and responsibilities on the land and the water.

I think for many of the participants in the film, they would prefer to be doing that work—to be with their families, teaching, learning. But they have to do this other work. So I wanted to show these different spaces that we have to occupy in order to protect those lands and those waters. I really wanted to show that active and ongoing connection that people have to the land.

I grew up in the north interior, and I talk about this in the film—that I didn’t always feel connected. That was in part because we lived outside of the community, and also because of what my dad experienced going to residential school, and the kinds of things that you learned to feel shame about as a kid.

So the film was also a process of reconnection for me in really profound ways. I just feel very grateful that I was able to bring my lived and ongoing connections to that territory to this film, and I think it created a different kind of storytelling.

The film features archival footage—interviews with Elders as well as old commercial newsreels. How did that come about, and why was it important to include?

I felt like the archival piece was really important because these recordings of Elders were created when we were involved in trying to negotiate treaties. We were being asked to prove our existence on the land, that we had always lived there as we had.

For the newsreels, when we were in development I went to the B.C. archives to see what kind of materials they had related to Alcan’s history and presence, because the industrial films from that era are quite significant. They tell a pretty telling story about how such a massive displacement could happen.

In other places, dam and hydroelectric are for power generation, but this was specifically for industry, for this aluminum smelter. The industrial videos really highlighted the scale of what had happened, the intent of what had happened, and just the perspectives. Because the perspectives are very dehumanizing—they portray lands and waters as wasted unless they’re making money.

And I think those messages are still resonant. Because I feel like there’s a shadow over this film, and that is climate change. By sharing these histories, we can see how there continue to be these ideas reproduced that are not helping us in this crisis. That’s the power of delving into these archival stories.

You include both intimate human stories and issues that affect the entire world, as well as sweeping visuals of the landscape. How do you balance these micro and macro perspectives, visually and thematically, as a filmmaker?

This was always in the back of my mind—this need to make this a story that was bigger than B.C., maybe even bigger than Canada. What I realized, as we were making this, was that at the end of the day, the film is very much grounded in the participants. And I think in that local context, we can see connections to much larger stories. Within the stories of the people is a story that resonates with many other communities, particularly Indigenous Nations who have had their lands colonized and destroyed by industry, and yet who have continued to survive, and to speak their language, and to pass on what they know to future generations.

One of the ways we zoom out is literally, using a drone. I was really intentional with the drone because I wanted to show those cumulative impacts of the mining, of forestry, of agriculture, of pipelines, all of this activity. And I think by zooming out, we can have a much greater sense of these larger processes that are at work. It gives you that scope.

And then, when we are back with the people and with the stories, we’re really grounded in that space. I wanted to convey that intimacy, to really privilege that.

The Nechako River—and water itself—is its own character in the film. How did you capture and communicate its importance?

We talked a lot about this, how the river is a central participant. It’s central to everything. I wanted people to hear the water, when it’s rushing, when it’s a little more calm, to see it in all its different manifestations.

That’s one thing I struggled with—the complexity of the Nechako watershed. It’s not just one river. It’s a tributary to the Fraser River, which goes down to the ocean. It’s got rivers that come out of it. It has streams and creeks and rapids and areas of salmon spawning. It’s just a really complex system, and I wondered, “How do we represent that?”

What I realized as we travelled around getting all of this footage was that we didn’t necessarily have to explain anything. The water is and the water is going to keep doing what it’s doing. To flow as best as it can, even at such a massively reduced rate.

I wanted us to be able to sit with this and feel some peace with it. Some sort of grounding with it, at the same time as you feel sadness at the loss, at what that dam represents.

I was also thinking about how we can take access to clean drinking water for granted. Up until just a few short years ago, our community, my dad’s community, was on a boil-water advisory. The idea that “water is life,” which seems so fundamental to our understanding of ourselves in relation to our environment, is sometimes something that just slips away from us.

Someone says in the film that 90 percent of our diet was once fish, and many if not most of those fish came from the Nechako River. So what does it mean, to lose 90 percent of your diet? And so we’re just trying to bring it back into view, that question, why water would be so important. “Water is life” is not just a metaphor, it’s an actuality.

The concepts of “doomsday prepping” and survivalism exist in non-Indigenous communities, but often with a different approach to the land and community. Do you think your film will shift viewers’ concepts of survival?

I certainly hope so, because I think what we’re saying in this film is that our survival is interconnected with the rest of humanity.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with knowing how to survive, knowing how to preserve food. We say that in the film: “Unless you know how to live off the land, you’re really going to suffer.” But the problem we are trying to highlight is that, in a society that really values individualism, that is often the source of these problems in the first place. And if that’s the case, individual solutions are not going to produce the kind of transformations that we need. We have to work together in community, find common grounds of understanding, and find a way to move forward together.

And I think that this is nowhere more clear than in these climate crises. We all have been experiencing wildfire smoke. We have all been experiencing heat waves. We have all been experiencing floods. Nobody’s going to be immune from that, and therefore we have to figure out some collective ways of responding.

Is there a call to action contained in this film? What do you want audiences to do after the credits roll?

The reason that the community asked us to make this film was because they wanted to get a really wide audience to learn and understand what we were doing, why we were doing it, how important it was to us. I would love for people to watch it and have a better understanding of how the health of our lands and waters is so intimately connected to our individual and community health, and to feel a sense of responsibility for that.

I’m an instructor at Simon Fraser University and I talk to my students all the time about the responsibilities we need to take on the lands and the waters that we live on, that, some of us say, we are guests on. I like to say that I’m “trying to be a good relative on lands that are not my own.”

As a filmmaker, there can be so many ways to approach a subject, so many different endings. I wanted to make this a story of hope. To show the care and the love that our people have, even for those spaces on our lands and waters that have been devastated, that have been burnt by wildfire, that have been reduced to just a trickle. And if we can hope, in the face of such oppression and destruction, then how can others not hope?