New documentary revisits 1985 protest on Lyell Island, Athlii Gwaii
One dark morning in November 1985, a helicopter chops the air at Lyell Island. Boots grind in the muddy logging road as people approach.
A year before, a landslide loosed by clearcut logging tore into a fish-bearing creek right at the spot.
Now, the place is marked by a line of cedar boughs where for weeks young Haida people have stopped Frank Beban’s logging crew from going to work.
Shouting over the chugging helicopter engine someone yells, “The elders are here!”
So goes one scene in The Stand, a new documentary by filmmaker and animator Christopher Auchter about the 1985 protest on Lyell Island.
The film never cuts away to the present day. Starting with over 100 hours of film and audio that were all recorded at the time, Auchter created a 90-minute film with a moment-by-moment sense of how the story unfolded before anyone knew how it would end.
“We have all this footage in the moment, and the words are so powerful,” Auchter says, speaking before The Stand screens on Haida Gwaii next weekend.
“Everybody is playing the role of their lives, and it’s all there in front of us.”
Auchter wasn’t sure at first that the story could be real-time. More than a dozen years of talks and legal action led to the 1985 protest at Lyell Island, and the effects are still rippling today.
But as soon as he started poking around for archival footage, Auchter got lucky.
Following a tip from his uncle Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, who stood on the line at Lyell, Auchter met with Susan Underwood in Vancouver. Together with her colleague Donna Wilson, the young filmmakers flew up to the Haida protest camp in 1985 and stayed for weeks getting interviews with the Haida, loggers and RCMP in the cold and rain.
“We had such a great conversation, and she sent me home with boxes and boxes of film,” Auchter said.
Next, Auchter found out that a National Film Board crew had been on Haida Gwaii in 1985 to shoot a separate project on new and upcoming national parks across Canada.
As it happens, the NFB used hardly any of the high-quality 35mm footage, which included shots of wildlife in present-day Gwaii Haanas, logs splashing off a barge, and the long line of yellow Frank Beban Logging crummy trucks rumbling off to work.
Auchter also mined several interviews from Webster!, a popular 1980s news show hosted by the bombastic TV commentator Jack Webster, a blunt-talking Scot who was once called on to mediate a prison hostage crisis.
Under studio lights, the clips show a young Miles Richardson, then president of the Council of the Haida Nation, who has traded his protest-camp rain gear for button-down shirts to face down Webster’s bluster and take call-in questions from people with all sorts of views from across B.C.
“I found it incredibly compelling to watch them verbally spar with each other,” said Auchter, noting that Webster himself said his sit-down with Miles Richardson and Nisga’a leader James Gosnell at the height of the Lyell Island protest was the toughest interview he’d done.
Coming after Now Is the Time, his 16-minute short film about the first totem pole raised on Haida Gwaii in nearly a century, Auchter had experience with using archival footage for a documentary. He also credits film editor Sarah Hedar, who worked on The Stand after editing the feature-length Haida film, Edge of the Knife.
Even so, the first cut of The Stand ran four hours long.
To get at the heart of the story, Auchter said he and Hedar came up with some ground rules as they began chipping scenes away.
One was to stay in the forest — cutting away to Vancouver courtrooms and other scenes took the film too far from the trees.
Inspired by elder Diane Brown, GwaaG̱aanad, who said she sometimes felt the presence of the supernaturals on the line, Auchter also drew on his animator skills to bring in a tiny character with a big voice.
Voiced by his auntie, Haida elder Delores Churchill, Mouse Woman opens the film and re-appears throughout, sometimes to relay information, sometimes when the wind blows a certain way.
Including Mouse Woman was not only a way to bring in the Haida culture at stake at the protest, Auchter said, but also a reference to a galvanizing speech his aunt gave at the 1976 potlatch where his grandfather Oliver Adams became Chief Gala.
“She said we have barge after barge coming off the islands, log after log, and there’s nothing coming back to the communities from all that is being taken away,” Auchter said.
“It really united the Haida.”
Spending so much time revisiting the events of 1985, Auchter said he was struck by the open dialogue and mutual respect shown between the RCMP, the Haida and the loggers.
Auchter spoke with Inspector Harry Wallace, the presiding RCMP officer of the time, who remembered being served halibut soup by the protestors after his first long, rough boat ride to Lyell Island, and how everyone joked when he asked for seconds.
In the same spirit, The Stand shows loggers put out of work by the blockade but thanking their hosts when the Haida held a dinner to literally break bread with them. The film notes how, after the protest ended, Frank Beban died of a heart attack while packing up his Lyell Island logging camp. He was 47.
Auchter said making the film gave him a chance to get to know the people on all sides of the protest, and feel empathy for them.
“I really hope that all communities feel welcome to come and see the film because it’s everyone’s history to come witness,” he said.
The Stand will have three public screenings on Haida Gwaii. On Sunday, Nov. 3, it will be screened in the George Brown Rec Centre in Skidegate. On Monday, Nov. 4, it will show at the Port Clements Community Hall.
Doors for both open at 5 p.m., with the film starting at 6 p.m.