This is the fifth post in a series on the fiftieth anniversary of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, edited by Mark Stoller.
For the last two years, I have taught an undergraduate course called Organizational Report Writing, mostly to design and media students. Even before teaching it, I could think of few reports to highlight other than the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry (MVPI).
But here was the official course description:
Students learn to propose solutions to an identifiable problem, customize a message for multiple audiences, create a work plan, apply primary and secondary research methods, and structure an argument logically and persuasively.
Yes, students would learn to use Adobe InDesign to format their reports and craft executive summaries. But what if students could also learn to critically examine the genre of reports, and develop a deeper contextual knowledge of a report’s history and use?
Official government reports – commonly, the final output of royal or public commissions of inquiry – can often have an understated importance. For students, learning about the processes of investigating, preparing, and publishing these reports also offers insights into the political and social dynamics that influence how each report is received and, ultimately, its ability to effect change.
Even the youngest students in this class would have lived through the Trans Mountain Expansion Project, Site C Dam, Muskrat Falls Dam – energy projects that progressed despite reports flagging environmental concerns and violations of Indigenous rights. To my mind, the MVPI could present a report unlike those they may be more familiar with.
We also discussed reports with – perhaps by design – little public engagement, languishing unread on microform in Ottawa or stalling change and even burying the truth. We compared the Province of Manitoba’s report on the death of Brian Sinclair, an Anishinaabe man who in 2008 died in a Winnipeg emergency room after hours of neglect by hospital staff, to the report Out of Sight by the Brian Sinclair Working Group which, unlike the provincial report, directly named the role of anti-Indigenous racism.1 We discussed Chief Medical Examiner Peter Bryce, who in 1907 penned a report for the Department of Indian Affairs exposing the negative health outcomes in residential schools for the Department of Indian Affairs only to be penalized.2
The MVPI could perhaps serve as a historical counterpoint to many of these. In this course, the MVPI could represent a report that stands on its own – it never needed a counter-report to bring the truth to light. It could stand as a report intended to be widely read and consumed on the radio and nightly news.
But what text, I wondered, would best open this doorway for students? We could read the actual MVPI report, as we did with excerpts from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We could read a secondary source on the MVPI, as we did for the Massey and Hall Commissions, or engage not with the report but its outputs, as we did with a podcast on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
But I worried that directly reading from Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland would reinscribe the dynamic of centring the listener – in this case, Thomas Berger – and not the voices of Dene.
The MVPI has produced many media outputs, but the powerful speech of Chief Frank T’Seleie at the inquiry is the most obvious, leaving two options: 1) the National Film Board of Canada’s 47-minute film Fort Good Hope (1977),3 which documents the speech; or 2) Tłı̨chǫ Dene author Richard Van Camp’s graphic text “Like a Razor Slash.” I chose the latter.
Van Camp’s graphic text, illustrated by Scott B. Henderson with colours by Scott A. Ford, appears in the collection of Indigenous graphic short texts This Place: 150 Years Retold.4 As the foreword by Alicia Elliott states, this anthology assembles stories Indigenous people “have been forced to pass on quietly, to whisper behind hands like secrets, and retells them loudly and unapologetically”.5 The anthology has an excellent teacher guide, created by Christine M’Lot, that provides ideas for discussing other historical speeches and cultural appropriation.6
Van Camp’s 25-page contribution enlivens the coming of the MVPI to Fort Good Hope and Chief Frank T’Seleie’s preparation for and speech at the inquiry. But the text does not open with Berger arriving: it begins with T’Seleie in residential school.
We then see T’Seleie on the band council, processing what this pipeline could mean. We see excerpts of the actual speech T’Seleie made at the MVPI atop images of Dene living their lives unhindered. We then view Berger pensively at his desk. The graphic story ends with excerpts from the final report interlaced with an intergenerational scene of grandparents and grandchildren over 40 years after the report, laughing and speaking K’asho Got’ine on the land.
Students read the Van Camp text at home. In class, I only showed a few scenes of T’Seleie’s speech from the Fort Good Hope film in class.
Why? Perspective and context. In Van Camp’s version, the reader awaits Berger alongside Dene at Fort Good Hope:

Reproduced with permission of HighWater Press (Winnipeg), from “Like a Razor Slash” by Richard Van Camp and illustrated by Scott B. Henderson in the book This Place: 150 Years Retold
But in the film, viewers are on the plane with Berger, about to arrive:

Fort Good Hope. National Film Board of Canada, 1977.
In this still, the audience is flying with Berger over Denendeh, the engine of the plane visible in the top right. Though in the film we hear powerful testimony from T’Seleie and other Dene, it ultimately recentres Berger. His voiceovers are often indistinguishable from the disembodied, unnamed narrator’s, telling us what is and what isn’t. In the film’s framing, Berger descends upon Denendeh, a god-like voice and vantage point.
What is more, Van Camp’s text is chock full of context long preceding the MVPI – residential schools, the Calder Case, treaties, and the Paulette caveat; the film’s historical context, by contrast, is limited to a scene of Treaty Day, with the narrator explaining its meaning as the camera focuses on the RCMP and the Canadian flag. The film begins and ends in medias res, as the inquiry is still unfolding; Van Camp concludes well into the future.
For students, Van Camp’s text further provides a counterpoint to what often happens with other official reports, where the authors stand in for the report itself – the Massey Commission (not the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters and Sciences); the Hall Commission (not the Royal Commission on Health Services).
But countless media representations, then and still today, recall the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry as “the Berger Inquiry,” centring Berger rather than Dene or the issue at hand – the pipeline. “Like a Razor Slash” offers an immensely powerful pedagogical corrective, acknowledging Berger’s contribution without centring it.
Additional Texts
Fraser, Crystal. By Strength, We Are Still Here: Indigenous Peoples and Indian Residential Schooling in Inuvik, Northwest Territories. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2024.
Mountain, Antoine. From Bear Rock Mountain: The Life and Times of a Dene Residential School Survivor. Victoria: Brindle & Glass Publishing, 2018.
- McCallum, Mary Jane Logan and Adele Perry, Structures of Indifference: An Indigenous Life and Death in a Canadian City. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2018. ↩︎
- Bryce, Peter H. Report on the Indian Residential Schools of Manitoba and the North-West Territories. Ottawa: 1907. ↩︎
- Fort Good Hope. National Film Board of Canada, 1977. https://www.nfb.ca/film/fort_good_hope/. ↩︎
- Van Camp, Richard, and Scott B. Henderson. “Like a Razor Slash.” In This Place: 150 Years Retold, 166–90. Winnipeg: HighWater Press, 2019. ↩︎
- Elliott, Alicia. “Foreword.” In This Place: 150 Years Retold, v–vi. Winnipeg: HighWater Press, 2019. ↩︎
- M’Lot, Christine. Teacher Guide for This Place: 150 Years Retold. Portage & Main Press, n.d. https://www.portageandmainpress.com/Books/T/Teacher-Guide-for-This-Place-150-Years-Retold2 ↩︎
Featured Image: Reproduced with permission of HighWater Press (Winnipeg), from “Like a Razor Slash” by Richard Van Camp and illustrated by Scott B. Henderson in the book This Place: 150 Years Retold.

So many scholars have drawn from the Berger Inquiry, many of them northern people like Dr. Cynthia Chambers and Patrick Scott. Then there is the wonderful graphic novel Paying the Land by Joe Sacco. And of course, the Inquiry spawned a range of political and human rights movements. Berger left an amazing legacy.