MVPI@50: An Interview with Hugh Brody

Scroll this

This is the tenth and final post in a series on the fiftieth anniversary of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, edited by Mark Stoller.

With the completion of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry hearings in 1976, public attention turned to the release of the Inquiry’s final report. Following its release in 1977, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland, Vol. 1, soon became one of the best-selling government publications of all time. The report, which appeared in two volumes, outlined the rationale for the Inquiry’s rejection of a pipeline across the Yukon Flats – a recommendation that all but killed the proposal and provided the rationale for a similar rejection by the National Energy Board the following year. But Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland also challenged the broader national discourse around northern economic development in Canada, establishing within the popular imagination the realities that resource extraction came at a significant cost to the lives and well being of Indigenous northerners. In turn, it raised crucial questions of the ethical imperatives relating to the participation and input of historically marginalized voices into questions of economic growth and national development.

Hugh Brody was among the Inquiry staff who were central to the composition and preparation of Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland. By the time of the publication of the report, Brody – who’d previously studied philosophy, politics, economics, and later anthropology – had spent nearly a decade working and researching in Arctic and subarctic Canada, becoming proficient in Inuktutit and deeply immersed in the community life in the Eastern Arctic. At the conclusion of the Inquiry, Brody taught at McGill University before being hired by the Union of BC Indian chiefs – then led by George Manuel – to work at Halfway River Reserve in Treaty 8 territory in northeastern British Columbia. He later participated in and appeared on behalf of the Blueberry First Nation and Gitxsan at key court cases regarding Aboriginal title and rights. Having authored numerous government reports and monographs, Brody’s later work came to focus more closely on documentary film. Among his many contributions to northern work are chapters in the Inuit Land Use and Occupancy Project (1976), The People’s Land (1975), Maps and Dreams (1981), and The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers, and the Shaping of the World (2001).1 His most recent book, Landscapes of Silence: From Childhood to the Arctic, was published in 2022 by Faber & Faber.2

Hugh Brody interviewed by Mark Stoller

The following interview was recorded in June, 2025. The transcript below has been edited for clarity and features minor deviations from the audio recording.

Mark Stoller: Hugh Brody, wonderful to speak to you, and thanks so much for joining me.

Hugh Brody: I’m delighted. This is a piece of Canadian history that I’m always very happy to return to.

I wanted to start by painting a broader picture or background of the setting and landscape in the years leading up to the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry. You came to Canada from England in the late 1960s and, in Canada, you worked with the Northern Science Research Group, which was a social research unit within the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern development.3 What was it that put Canada on the map for you and compelled you to come here at first?

As you say, I first came to Canada in 1969. But my awareness of and enthusiasm about Canada predates that – at two levels. One is almost a childhood level. When I was a teenager or even younger – I met a Canadian from the Maritimes who described his life there. And it sounded incredible to me, who loved birds and fishing and the countryside, but had to cope with all those British restrictions on access. The Canadian explained that there, in the Maritimes, I would have more or less unlimited access to rivers and wildlife and birds and open spaces. So it was a kind of a geographical and even ornithological excitement. I seized on this idea of freedom to be had in Canada. Some of this was naive and childish fantasizing, but some of it was deeper, I think. I was drawing on a first sense that in Canada there was not the oppression of class. Even as a very young person, I was aware that there was something in England that had a potential to throttle us all- class and class consciousness – and that Canada, as I understood it from the man from the Maritimes,  and then, no doubt,  from other sources at the time, was somehow free of that. This was a very early and basic layer of my excitement about the very idea of Canada.

Much later, and much closer to 1969, when I first went to Canada, I worked as a young anthropologist on the west coast of Ireland. I was looking at rapid cultural and social change in Irish peasant communities. In the course of that work, I had found the literature on what was called ‘culture contact’ and ‘acculturation’. This included quite a lot about the Arctic, especially Alaska, as also about some parts of the Canadian far north, and a bit about Greenland. This literature focused on many aspects of ‘acculturation’. I was not gripped by those concepts, and quickly became very suspicious of them. But I was fascinated by a sense I got from that literature of a frontier between modernity and the world of hunter-gatherers. The more I read about this frontier, the more I wanted to visit it. So I applied for jobs in the Canadian Arctic. I applied everywhere I could think of – from the Hudson Bay Company to archeological digs to the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs. And got turned down by everyone. Except for the University of Ottawa, which, thanks to Jim Lotz, offered me a kind of fellowship to help me on my way. I think it was worth $250. 

Then, to my great surprise, the Northern Sciences Research Group, having turned down my request to go to the Arctic, said they did need someone to go to Edmonton. They apparently were looking for a young social scientist to research the whole issue of people from First Nations communities – then called Indians – who were drifting from  Reserves into prairie towns, particularly Edmonton. To some of  the key people of the Northern Science Research Group this was a worrying and puzzling feature of First Nations reality. So they responded to my seeking anthropological experience in the far north by asking me to do on the ground field work in Edmonton. The purpose of this fieldwork would be to help the Department of Indian Affairs understand what lay behind this movement of people, what the conditions were of life on skid row in Edmonton, and what they – the government – might do about it. A huge undertaking for someone who had never been to Canada and never done urban anthropology. So I wrote back to say I couldn’t possibly do this. I wasn’t qualified, and there didn’t seem to be a literature to guide me. Then Jim Lotz at the University of Ottawa heard I had turned it down and wrote and said, “Don’t say no to the Northern Science Research  Group; you should take it, because that way you’ll end up in the Arctic.” So I wrote again, to accept the offer of the work in Edmonton. And it was, indeed, my route to the Arctic. A rather eccentric route. But still, I agreed – and set off in June 1969, staying until October, living on skid row, Edmonton. And that’s where I discovered Canada. A very surprising place to discover Canada, perhaps, but it was an astonishing and an amazing experience. I met people from many different First Nations. I visited homes on Reserves in southern Alberta. I even managed to travel to the subarctic – up the old highway through northern Alberta to Hay River – and also to Haida Gwaii. These trips were in effect following people I had met on skid row back to their homes. So I got to see Canada from and within Edmonton bar and on street corners. And that work in  Edmonton, and the report I wrote about my time there, Indians  On Skid Row, did lead to the Northern Science Research Group offering me a contract to go to the Arctic.4

This was a really fascinating time for anthropology. Anthropology as a discipline was beginning to reflect inward on itself, and especially on its relationship to applied anthropology as applied research in the field, and essentially “solving the problems of government.” What was the state of government sponsored social research at that time?

When I first worked with the Northern Science Research group, and encountered the prevailing ideas about the nature and purpose of northern social science, the core of the work seemed to be what were called Area Economic Surveys. The Northern Science Research Group library seemed to be full of Area Economic Surveys, and I kept meeting people who had done work to show what the employment situation was and what the employment potential was, or the housing situation was, or the migration possibilities were of workers from the north or other parts of Canada. Similarly, Hawthorne and Belshaw had compiled their extensive, detailed account of the realities of “Indians”.5 This was very basic empirical, quantifiable social science. But there were two or three people doing on the ground work that was much more interesting. One of them was Peter Usher, working in Banks Island; another was Derek Smith, more focused on Aklavik in the Mackenzie Delta.6 And the Northern Science Research Group also supported Jean Briggs remarkable work, with its completely new kind of focus on Inuit family dynamics and language of emotional expression.7 I think these were among the very first to be funded to do on the ground, long-term participant observation based field work, with a view to writing reports that would inform government policy. There was a tradition in the Department reaching further back, through Diamond Jenness and Graham Rowley, who was the scientific advisor to the minister at the time I first came to Canada. Both Jenness and Rowley had been explorers, and through exploration had become experts on the Canadian Central and Eastern Arctic.8 So there was an idea, I think, lurking around inside the Department that on the ground knowledge was necessary and appropriate. And the Northern Science Research Group became the centre and, to some considerable extent, the realization of that vision.

There’s an evolution to these reports, thought, from initially gently critiquing government to – by the late ‘60s and into the early ‘70s – being quite openly critical of government policies. How did this critical social research, play out at the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern development?

The Northern Science Research Group constituted itself somewhat on the  lines of an academic department. It had a library and there was a coffee making area; people sat around and talked; it felt very university-like. It was a set of offices embedded in the bureaucracy and had bureaucratic dimensions, but there was a skeptical intellectual curiosity to the place, which led to questioning of policy. This resulted – as you say – in a rather gentle critiquing of policy, through the late 1960s. But then Usher wrote the third volume of his Banks Island report, in which he documented the Minister of Indians, who was Jean Chretien at the time, “misleading the people of Banks Island.”  In this part of his report Usher was directly critical. Of course that volume had to be approved; it had to be signed-off on by the senior bureaucrats.  They were Moose Kerr and Graham Rowley. Moose was the Director of the research group, so he signed off on behalf of the minister. Thus you have the curious circumstance of a report being published under the signature of the minister that accused the minister of dissembling (this is a kind word). Of course, Chretien was extremely angry and in response, he decided that this whole thing – the long term  immersion  of government researchers in communities in the north – had to stop. As this crisis exploded, I was living as one of those researchers in Pond Inlet. Moose contacted me on the old two-way radio phone to say, don’t come south. And when you do come south, he said, don’t come to the office. In this way I was able to stay at work in the Arctic despite the meltdown. Then, about a year later,  when I did come south and did criticize government policies, I encountered real hostility from senior bureaucrats, who were now seeking to  rationalise or defend  forms of industrial development in Inuit lands. I wrote an extended report for the Department – later revised and published as The People’s Land, but realized I had to leave.9  I think that was part of the end of the Department’s internal critical voice.

The Northern Science Research Group came to an end in 1973  but after this point, you and Peter Usher and a handful of others who had been involved and critiquing government through the NSRG, you all went and worked with Milton M.R. Freeman – I want to make sure we distinguish him from Milton Friedman, the economist – who was an anthropologist at McMaster, and was leading the Inuit Land Use and Occupancy Project.

Yes, that became the next phase of my life. I think at that time – the mid to late 1970s – the Inuit Land Use and Occupancy work was by far the most ambitious and wide-ranging research going on in the Canadian north. Milton first worked very closely with Peter Usher on developing a concept of cultural mapping, which Peter piloted and test-ran in the Mackenzie Delta. Then Milton hired a coordinator of each region. Bill Kemp was given responsibility for South Baffin, and also acted as a more general coordinator of the maps that were being generated.  I was made responsible for North Baffin, and Peter for the Western Arctic. Among others, there was also Carol Bryce-Bennett in the Central Arctic, with Fred Schwartz taking on Sanikiluaq in south Hudson Bay.  Bill Kemp had not had much direct involvement with the Department of Indian Affairs. Nor had Carol Bryce Bennett, as far as I know, nor Fred Schwartz or others in the research team. So I think Peter and I were probably the two who had been in the Department who then found ourselves in significant roles in the Inuit Land Use and Occupancy Project.10

So you had largely been working in the Eastern Arctic at the time when political and economic power were really becoming entrenched in the Western Arctic. Was what was happening in the Eastern Arctic different than what was happening in the Western Arctic at that time.

Graham Rowley and Moose Kerr wanted me to go to the Eastern Arctic. (Their names come up a lot: they were central figures in northern research throughout this period.) There was very little anthropology being carried out in the Eastern Arctic. There had been some Area Economic Surveys, but Graham and Moose felt that there was an imbalance of information. And at the same time, especially Graham Rowley, thought that the Eastern Arctic was where Inuit life was at its strongest. It was more isolated; it had been caught in the the fur trade and the missionary frontiers much later than had been the case in any other  part of the north. The Eastern Arctic was, as it were, colonized, relatively recently. Inuit families were still living on the land in significant numbers in the early ‘70s. whereas that was not true, as I understand it, in the Western Arctic. I think the view was that the Eastern Arctic was little known and needed to be known better. So Graham and Moose, on behalf  of the Northern Science Research Group, wanted somebody to immerse themselves in the Eastern Arctic and carry the information back to Ottawa. I think that was the vision. 

By the mid-1970s the Inuit land use and occupancy research, the land claims work, was really underway. The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry coincided with this. It officially began in 1974, it really didn’t get rolling with the community hearings until 1975. Where were you when this was all getting started?

In 1973-’74 I was working away on the final stages of the Inuit Land Use Occupancy Project reports. I was putting together a quite long, essay on occupancy. This consideration of the meaning of ‘occupancy; was a part of the project that Milton Freeman was especially concerned about. At the same time I was hearing about the emergent Berger Inquiry, and especially about the community hearings. Then Peter Usher, who was coordinating the Committee of Original Peoples’ Entitlement (COPE) presentations to the Yellowknife hearings, got in touch and commissioned me to write a paper. The focus of this paper was to be an overview of the North. At about the same time, Ed Weick, who was working for the Berger team, asked me also to write two presentations for the Yellowknife hearing: one on the strength  and vulnerabilities of the Inuit language, and another on the nature of the alcohol problem in the north.

So I ended up doing those three presentations at the Yellowknife hearings. That was my first involvement in the Inquiry, and it led right away to Berger asking me to continue to have some sort of working relationship with the Inquiry team. I think that he was especially interested in the overview paper. At the end of all the hearings – though Yellowknife  was the only hearing I was involved in – Ed Weick asked me to come to Ottawa and work with the team on the preparation of the background to the report writing. The Inquiry, in fact, had a middle stage that is not often talked about. There were the community hearings as a first stage, and there was Tom Berger and a team writing the report – the  final stage. But there was a very significant stage between these, where the Inquiry team collated and reviewed an enormous amount of material. they went through all the community hearings, they put together background expert reports, and they prepared further papers to help inform the process. I was asked to be part of the team that worked on that middle stage. I remember that when I went to Ottawa to begin work on this middle part of the process, I told people  about the Inuit Land Use Occupancy Project. Of course they were very intrigued by the findings and the maps. This was a new level of description and analysis of the land-based economy, which had  so much been at the forefront of the oral testimony at the community hearings. I recall that Michael Jackson, in particular was excited by the ILUOP project. Then, when it came to the writing of the report, the final stage, Tom Berger asked me to be part of his writing team. That was 1977, I remember.

I have this quote that I came across from Tom Berger in 1975. He wrote, “I’ve been guided by the conviction that this Inquiry must be fair and it must be complete. We have got to do it right.” What do you think it might have meant to “get it right” at the time?11

He said that in 1975, so he’s deep in the community hearings. I am sure that what he is thinking about here is strongly related to those hearings. They had come to be at the centre of the Inquiry; they had generated very widespread excitement. They also generated a very large amount of media coverage.  The Inquiry thus  became  a national phenomenon.  And Berger was more and more committed to the vision that lay behind, and then grew with, the hearings. In this, I think he was much influenced by the thinking of Michael Jackson, who went to live in the north on behalf of the Inquiry.  And I believe it was Michael who successfully urged that the hearings shouldn’t have a time frame. They should have a definite beginning, but no scheduled end. If this was going to be a participatory process, people had to be able to go on for as long as they needed to go on for. Whether that idea was always and uncompromisingly put into practice, I don’t know. But that was the ideal and, often, the experience of those attending the community hearings. I remember Tom speaking to me about this with great conviction. So when he said, “We’ve got to do this right,” that’s what he meant: the people of the north had to be heard, and be able to trust that they were being heard.  It had to be done right. But he also was a believer in bringing in experts, people whose work he admired, people he thought had some relevant intellectual sophistication or scholarly information  that he himself lacked. He was very good  at finding and using other people’s minds. That would also be part of his commitment to “getting it right”.

Was there a guiding belief at all that this was for the public good?

Yes. This was all about the public good because the North was central – this was Tom Berger’s view – the North was central to Canadian identity and wellbeing. Further, on his view, the morality of Canada is inseparable from how it deals with its Indigenous populations; in this case the Indigenous peoples of the North were at the point of asking for, and were going to get, a new deal with and within the nation. Getting this deal right was, in Tom’s view, central to the morality and integrity of Canada. I think that he saw a future for Canada in which it would lead the way in liberal, progressive creations of justice within a capitalist democracy. He might not have put it quite like that, but that view of the  public good, and the way his Inquiry was deeply connected  to the inner wellbeing of Canada, was at the heart of his thinking.

He’d been at the centre of of some fairly significant legal cases involving Aboriginal title, and Aboriginal law, really one of, probably at the time, a handful of lawyers or justices who really had some kind of in-depth understanding of the legal issues as well. But it was also the time when many people in government and the public did not have this language. They did not have the belief or the understanding that Indigenous people had rights. 

The Nisga’a case was formative in Tom’s legal career. He was leading Council for the Nisga’a in the Calder Case, which first came to the courts in 1968, and made its way through the courts – first the Supreme Court of British Columbia, then the B.C. Appeal Court, and finally to the Supreme Court 1973.

Through the Calder Case, Canada was newly adjudicating the question of Aboriginal title. Tom was at the centre of that adjudication for those five years. Canada was being informed about this question, and Tom was playing a central part  in the sequences of trials. So he himself was getting informed – about First Nation history and perspectives, the Nisga’a cultural system and all the arguments relating to the legal existence, and supposed extinguishment, of Aboriginal Title. At the same time, it has to be said that the Nisga’a case did not rely on anything like community hearings. I believe that Wilson Duff – an anthropologist at the University of British Columbia – gave all the evidence on the nature of the Nisga’a cultural and economic system that the courts were to hear. That evidence was not led by the Nisga’a themselves. It was led by an academic. And it was all given in one day. So Tom made a huge journey from the kind of process that the Nisga’a case involved in 1968-9 to what he was going to do in the community hearings in the Mackenzie Valley in 1974-’75. A total rethink about what evidence is and how it should be heard – just a few years later.

How much of the structure of the Inquiry, or how much of (we’ll get to the report in a second) this process, was motivated by this attempt to get these issues out there to the public?

I think that Berger was increasingly excited by the possibilities for  bringing the realities and relevance of the north to Canadian political and social awareness. For him, the pipeline and energy corridor raised profound questions about Canadian national priorities. This was a result of the way the Inquiry unfolded. I think that as the media picked up on the Inquiry, and as Berger realized how huge the interest was in his Inquiry, he saw that it should be taken across the whole of Canada. Hence his putting in place hearings in the major cities of the country, from coast to coast. It was no longer a question about realities and relationships that may have seemed to be belong entirely to the North. Rather,  it was a question about the nature of Canada, and what Canada’s relationship was going to be to Indigenous peoples and development. So it became an inquiry in which the whole country was deemed to be involved. Tom very much wanted to get that vision of the Inquiry and the issues it was addressing to the Canadian public and all it politicians. I don’t think that was necessarily his thinking or intention in the early days of the Inquiry. In the beginning, he was focused on getting the process right for the people of the north. So the Inquiry would have a genuine validity – it would represent the views of the people – he would really listen to them. But getting it out to the nation as a whole: I am sure that grew as a vision, as the Inquiry grew in scale, ambition and national profile.

We talked recently about taking time. This is something that you sort of settled on as a really important piece of the Inquiry, which was taking the time. How was taking time important to getting it right in the way that Berger might have desired?

Let me go back to the idea of hearings that were open-ended. Within each hearing, you listened to the person and they spoke for as long as they wanted. It didn’t matter if they spoke in their own language. They could take the time they asked for. And the Inquiry had to provide the time, also, for the interpreting. This was the taking of time within the hearings, and in relation to the planning of the hearings. And I remember him saying, also, that it did not matter what this might cost. This just was how it was going to be: the time had to be taken and had to be paid for. But behind this, there was also a taking of time that was to do with Michael Jackson’s role. Tom didn’t just consult Michael Jackson, a professor of law at UBC, to advise on the nature of Aboriginal title and questions of the law. He sent Michael and his family to go and live in the Mackenzie Valley, for an extended period of time. Months on end. Then Tom could draw on Michael’s insight and connections, which had been built up over long periods of time. And I think that, to some extent, Tom’s response to my work and his wish to draw me in was to do with the time I had spent living in the north: immersed in Inuit life, I had been taking time. So by bringing me in, just like bringing Michael in, he was getting our spending of time into the findings, into his process.  He was also prepared to spend a lot of time writing the report. He worked on it paragraph by paragraph, page by page. In every phase of the Inquiry, the time was taken that would make sure Tom “got it right.” And he had people around him who worked tirelessly to make sure this all unfolded as Tom required, including the remarkable Don Gamble.12

You were asked by Berger to be part of the team that drafted volume one, which is the substantive volume  Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland. What was the process of actually outlining and writing that report, including this middle phase that you alluded to before?

Tom took the materials that were prepared by his team in what I called the middle phase of the work, and on the basis of  all these he wrote a rough first draft of what was to become Volume 1. He drafted this himself. He then sent that draft to me, asking me to read it and then come to Vancouver. That was. I remember that sat in the plane on New Year’s Eve, 1976-’77, rereading this draft, puzzling over it. I was a little incredulous. It was very rough, less even than a first draft. I started marking it up, and then realised it was beyond marking up – if all the concerns and questions to which it gave rise were to be marked on the text, it would all disappear into illegibility. So I went to his house on, it must have been January 1st or 2nd, sat with Tom and I plucked up courage to say, You know, I think you’re going to have to start again. There are some basic issues that are completely unresolved, especially from the point of view of the socio-economic side of things. For example: there’s a big question that emerged in the course of the Inquiry about what the shape of economic development in the north looks like and ought to look like. There was a point of view put forward by some experts, I think they were led by Arctic Gas as one of the proponent pipeline companies, who said that the inevitable and natural process of social economic life in the north is towards industrial labour. That’s what we have to anticipate. That was another way of continuing to draw on acculturation theory – indigenous culture was inevitably going to yield to some form of southern Canadian, largely working-class realities. On the other hand, the people, the voice from the communities, were for the most part saying: there’s a completely other model for northern development, which would be rooted in what can be called the mixed economy, led by people’s relationship to their land and heritage, and which would resist incorporation into the industrial labour market rather than welcome it. I suggested that without spelling out and reaching a view  of this fundamental disagreement, the Report of the Inquiry would be confusing or implausible or both. The same kind of unresolved thinking surrounded other key issues, including the question of Aboriginal title.  Everything remained to be written.

Tom’s response was to be open to all such criticism; he expressed enthusiasm about the suggestions I and others were making. My job then was to redraft his text. And for a while we became a sort of writing team. I would draft stuff and give it to him, and then we’d go through it, and he would have made lots of suggestions, and then more redrafting. We got to a fairly good first draft of the whole, and then he moved the whole thing to Ottawa. He then worked with members  of the Inquiry team. Among others we had Michael Jackson and Ed Wick at the table, and we brought in Alan cook as editor.  We went through the text  of the report, line by line, idea by idea, and that would lead to the need for certain new bits to be written, or sections to be rewritten. And we  would go off  and draft or work on bits, while Tom would work on bits, and then they would be integrated. Thus the next draft would be produced. We worked like that day in, day out, for very long hours. I remember being completely exhausted. It was about the toughest work process I’ve ever been through. But It was informed and sustained by a sense of real excitement.

The report itself, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland, Volume I, it doesn’t read like a government commission report. It’s got photographs, it’s presented in language that is accessible. Was there always a sense that this was going to have some public purchase?

Tom was was very interested in writing; he especially valued clarity and, wherever possible, a direct and uncluttered style. He was resolutely opposed to acronyms, and bureaucratese of any kind. The quality of the text and the design of the report were the result.  There should be pictures it should be very accessible. Volume One was written to be read. Tom insisted that even if it was the report of a Royal Commission, it should look like something people would want to read and, when they did begin reading, would find that they were quickly able to get to grips with it. This did not mean that the ideas he was arguing for, in relation to social science, engineering or legal issues, be dumbed down in some way. On the contrary, Berger very much wanted intellectual sophistication, but he wanted it to be of a literate rather than a scholarly form – if that’s a distinction that makes sense here. The two volumes of the report are, of course, scholarly, and Volume 1 constantly references the voice of the community hearings. But Tom wanted the Report to reach the same popular status as the Inquiry as a whole had achieved.

It became for a long time, and quite probably, until the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, it was the, the best selling government publication. I don’t know how many versions of the Glassco Commission report were ever sold. But at what point did it sort of catch on that this was was becoming part of the popular conversation?

We knew when we were working on the Inquiry that it was part of the popular conversation. Whenever I had time off and spent time hanging out with friends in Ottawa, everybody was talking about the Inquiry. What was Berger going to say? What were the findings going to represent for the future of Canada? Then there were the media. CBC had been very focused on the hearings, and media attention sustained through the writing process for the public in a way that kept the Inquiry alive in public consciousness. And when it came to the release I remember the lock-up: public interest was astonishingly high. It was a big deal, with very high levels of public awareness.

I want to shift then, with that in mind, to think about the legacy of the lasting impacts of the inquiry. For me, there remains a discrepancy between how the inquiry is imagined at a popular level and what its significance was on the ground. And I’m thinking especially about the political evolution of the north, of the Territories. We think about the Dene movement, especially because this is the pipeline through Dene land, but by the end of the community hearings, many of the Inuit, Inuvialuit, Metis, and Dene organizations were all pursuing separate land claims proposals. The Metis had changed their position around pipeline development. Do you feel that the inquiry achieved the kind of broader transformation that has been popularly imagined or attributed to it?

I wasn’t spending time in the Mackenzie Valley or in the Western Arctic, so I don’t know a lot about how consciousness evolved on the ground, along and around the areas of direct impact of the the proposed pipeline. Nationally, in the immediate aftermath of Berger, there was a very significant effect on subsequent inquiries. The Lysyk Inquiry in 1977 and the Mair Inquiry in 1978, for example, attempted to follow the Berger model.13 There was a sense that if you were going to look at any project that was being put forward for the north, you had to follow the Berger model: the people who were to be  directly affected had to have their say. My impression is that this continues to be the case. So if we’re looking at the history of public inquires in Canada, we could say that Berger had a very long shadow. Perhaps not long enough, but the standard it set has to some considerable extent remained in place.

Not long enough?

Not long enough. Nobody came to hold Berger type hearings in relation to the Site C hydro project in British Columbia, or the liquid natural gas pipeline, the Northern Gateway project.14 I don’t have a sense that in these, and no doubt other important developments, there  has been anything like the process that Berger would have insisted on, or that his legacy would have required. But that is to speak to the level of inquiry process. Your question is probably about something that’s at another level: that is how the whole atmosphere in the North was affected by Berger. And I think the answer there would invite a focus on land claims. I suspect that the Berger process gave confidence to the Dene voice. It probably also gave confidence to the Inuvialuit. They both sought to negotiate their separate deals. They did so with great energy and confidence, and were both paying very close attention to the Indigenous economy and the right to protect and manage their own lands. Perhaps some important part of this was fuelled or given confidence by the Berger Inquiry hearings process and all that that had meant within each community.

I seem to remember when we spoke years ago that you talked about when you were writing Maps and Dreams you’d spent about a year and a half up in the northeastern part of British Columbia.15 But as you described it, that book was not just a reflection of your experience in BC, it had been part of an attempt for you to reflect upon your longer experience around land claims research and some of the work you’ve been doing since you first arrived in 1969, `so on a personal level, what has stayed with you about your time working with the inquiry?

This is a very interesting question. When I think back to what was so compelling about working with Inquiry, I realize how much faith I had in benevolent bureaucracy. That’s a very outmoded view, but it was very strong at the time.  A view held by many at the time – I’m thinking now of the 1950s to 70s – was that we could look to government to make things a hell of a lot better, and secure people’s wellbeing in the long term. To go back to the Berger saying, we need to get this right –  and similarly, if government gets it right, it will be right for the people. And I think this was a huge part of the belief system underlying the Inquiry. And that continued through my working on Maps and Dreams. And had been important to much of my writing about the north, along with my earlier involvement in government. Trying to influence  public policy, including with the writing of Maps and Dreams. But that belief in benevolent bureaucracy didn’t sustain. Possibly it was in the latter stages of working on Maps and Dreams that I began to realize that there had to be a completely different kind of voice in this, and it wasn’t the voice of people like me; it wasn’t the voice even of people like Tom Berger. The voice had to come from elders and leadership in the communities. I think that Berger was very exciting at the time, but it lost an important element of its hold on me. Other than as a model for an Inquiry (if you’re going to have an Inquiry, then you better do it like that). But then I came to be caught up in the courts: some of the important questions being raised by First Nations were being resolved not by Inquiries but by legal cases. This was obviously picking up on the thread of Calder and through a series of cases, particularly in British Columbia. I was involved in some of these, including Delgamuukw, and continued to be involved in cases, right through to the Blueberry First Nation versus the Crown in British Columbia, which was  decided in 2021. So legal cases came to be in the foreground of what I found myself working on, and where I could be an under-labourer to actions that came from the people themselves. Delgamuukw was led by the Gitxsan, Wet’suwet’en and Blueberry First Nation case was led by the Blueberry elders’ view of the world.  In both those examples, grievances were theirs and not coming from outside them. That’s a very different kind of intellectual and research territory. Which means that the Inquiry Berger was not so much in my mind. 

Also, I moved  towards filmmaking. I realised that film is an excellent way of capturing oral culture.  Although oral culture is of course centred on speaking, it is also performance. And you capture performance on film. You can’t reveal oral culture in story-telling  that you can’t see, and still less in a transcribed tape recording. So if my role in life was to give voice to or be a medium, as it were, for Indigenous voices, then film was the way I wanted to do it. I had a strong sense of what I was doing with film: listening and then sharing the listening, not interpreting. Not analyzing. I’m not saying let’s look at the debate between two visions of development; I’m not saying let’s see where this fits into Marxist understandings of history. I’m saying, instead: Listen, just listen.

You’ve seen how the North is imagined in Canada. You’ve experienced the North intimately. You’ve lived there. You’ve learned to speak two dialects of Inuktitut. You’ve written extensively about your experiences. Do you think this idea of North and the way it was popularly imagined and accepted in the 1970s holds true for Canada today?

Yes. I think that is still the case across a wide range of Canadians. The North is still a place of potential and magic, and this includes Indigenous life and hence the kind of relationship to land and resources that is of increasing value to many, many people. This idea of North is still very strong. Whenever I was giving lectures or talks or showing films about the North in southern British Columbia, there was a distinctive sort of excitement in the room. Excitement that I am sure came from students going somewhere in their imaginations that’s very special, beyond what they know but integral to something they feel a very strong need to know. The North, the magic of the idea of North, is part of what Canada is and who many Canadians aspire to be. It has all kinds of value and importance. We probably can’t even quite put words on. But I think if we could find the words, they would include space, healthy environment, strong Indigenous cultures.  These are things that I am sure Canadians feel are hugely important to Canada – for all that some of these ideas and ideals have come under attack, and however much the North may have become compromised by aggressive development and modernities of various kinds.

Thank you very much for talking.

Thank you. Thank you for all your work on this.  It is very good for my soul – perhaps my mind too! – to revisit the North and all that the Berger Inquiry has meant.

Notes

  1. Freeman, Milton. Inuit Land Use and Occupancy Project. Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1976; Brody, Hugh. The People’s Land. Toronto: Penguin, 1975; Brody, Hugh. Maps and Dreams. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1981; Brody, Hugh. The Other Side of Eden. New York: North Point Press, 2001. ↩︎
  2. Brody, Hugh. Landscapes of Silence: From Childhood to the Arctic. London: Faber and Faber, 2022. ↩︎
  3. Stoller, Mark. “What Is to Become of the Native Peoples of the North?”: Social Science and the Politics of Northern Development, 1954–73,” Canadian Historical Review vol. 106, no. 2. doi.org/10.3138/chr-2024-00  ↩︎
  4. Brody, Hugh. Indians on Skid Row. Ottawa: Northern Science Research Group, 1970. ↩︎
  5. Hawthorn, H. B., Belshaw, C. S. and S. M. Jamieson. The Indians of British Columbia: a study of contemporary social adjustment. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1958. The study was a precursor to what became known as the Hawthorne Report of 1967. H. B. Hawthorn, ed. A Survey of Contemporary Indians of Canada: Economic, Political, Educational Needs and Policies (Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development), 1967. ↩︎
  6. Usher, Peter. The Bankslanders: Ecology and Economy of A Frontier Trapping Community. Ottawa: Northern Science Research Group, 1971. The report was delivered in three volumes between 1970 and 1971. Volume III: The Community, elicited the most pushback from the Department and directly led to Usher’s departure from the Northern Science Research Group. Derek G. Smith, an anthropology student then at Harvard, conducted similarly critical studies as part of the NSRG’s Mackenzie Delta Research Project. See Smith, Derek G. Natives and Outsiders: Pluralism in the Mackenzie River Delta, Northwest Territories. Ottawa : Northern Research Division, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1975; Smith, Derek G. The Mackenzie Delta: Domestic Economy of the Native Peoples. Ottawa: Northern Co-ordination Research Centre, 1967. ↩︎
  7. Briggs, Jean. Never in Anger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970. ↩︎
  8. Rowley, Graham. Cold Comfort: My Love Affair with the Arctic. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007. ↩︎
  9. Brody, Hugh. The People’s Land. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1975. ↩︎
  10. Freeman, Milton. Inuit Land Use and Occupancy Project. Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1976. *Freeman, Milton. Inuit Land Use and Occupancy Project. Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1976. ↩︎
  11. Thomas Berger, “The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry,” Corry Lecture, Queen’s University, November 1975. ↩︎
  12. Gamble, D.J. “The Berger Inquiry: An Impact Assessment Process,” Science, Vol. 199, No. 4332 (Mar. 3, 1978), pp. 946-952. ↩︎
  13. Lysyk, Kenneth M. [Chairman], Bohmer, Edith E. and Willard L. Phelps. Alaska Highway Pipeline Inquiry. Ottawa: Privy Council Office 1977. The Mair Inquiry was appointed by the NPA in 1979 to study potential socio-economic impacts in British Columbia. Mr. Mair held hearings in 15 communities and issued a report recommending several specific mitigating measures. See https://northern-pipeline.canada.ca/about-the-agency/knowledge-circle ↩︎
  14. For a comparative discussion of the Mackenzie Gas Project with the original pipeline proposal, see Dokis, Carly. Where the Rivers Meet: Pipelines, Participatory Resource Management, and Aboriginal-State Relations in the Northwest Territories. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2015. ↩︎
  15. Brody, Hugh. Maps and Dreams. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1981. ↩︎
Featured image: Photos and collage created by Mark Stoller.
The following two tabs change content below.

Mark Stoller

I am assistant professor in the Department of Geography & Planning at Queen’s University. My research focuses on Arctic Canada, with emphases on historical and political geography of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. Currently, I work with Inuit youth in Uqsuqtuuq/Gjoa Haven to document and share oral histories from the Nattilik region in central Nunavut.

NiCHE encourages comments and constructive discussion of our articles. We reserve the right to delete comments that fail to meet our guidelines including comments under aliases, or that contain spam, harassment, or attacks on an individual.