B.C.-based documentary maker goes inside Burnt Church

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A documentary film shot during a month-long stay on the Burnt Church First Nation territory last fall will air on the Aboriginal People's Television Network on March 26 and 27.

Burnt Church: Obstruction of Justice is the work of Maliseet journalist Jeff Bear and his producer wife Marianne Jones.

Bear, 46, was born and raised on the Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick. He and Jones, a Haida woman from Skidegate, now work together on independent video and film documentary projects in their home on the urban Vancouver Musqueam First Nation. Bear began his career with the Aboriginal Multi-Media Society, this newspaper's parent organization. After several years on staff with CBC-TV's The Journal, where he worked closely with the late Barbara Frum until her death, he helped launch Vancouver television station VTV before deciding to take a chance as a self-employed documentary maker.

Raven's Eye was invited to view a rough cut of the Burnt Church piece on March 3. It's a highly polished TV production, showing the top-level skills and experience of its creators, but it's the content of the production that you'll remember, dotted with footage you won't see anywhere else.

Bear and Jones were granted unprecedented access to the people and events that shaped the dramatic confrontation over the lobster fishery in Atlantic Canada. They were able to tell the story from the Native point of view with exclusive footage of private negotiations and dozens of interviews with the key Native leaders on the scene.

Footage shot by Bear and his wife is mingled with videotape from the cameras of members of the Christian Peacekeeping Team and the Aboriginal Rights Coalition to show the action and the words of the tense days of last autumn.

The show begins with shots of authorities swamping and ramming Mi'kmaq fishing boats. From there, you get to meet the people and see the events that received Canada-wide attention. But it's not the typical mainstream view of events.

Bear makes no apologies for the subjective approach he takes. Since none of the mainstream coverage ever attempted to see things from the Mi'kmaq point of view, he felt no need to balance his piece. Actually, his work seems to balance, and add depth to, all the other mainstream media coverage of Burnt Church.

Bear deals with, and quickly discards as less-than-persuasive, the federal government claims that conservation was the main reason why enforcement action was used against the Mi'kmaq people in New Brunswick.

"It became clear to me, early on, that the trap count was just a ploy for the federal government to justify their allegations that the Mi'kmaq were over-fishing. But the biologists that I've spoken to-all off-camera -said that if they're measuring the lobster and throwing back the females, then that's as good as you can get in conservation," he said.

"I interviewed an Elder, Leo Paul, and Leo told us over the years that he's been fishing -and he's been fishing since he was 12-there have been years when the lobster count was really low; there have been years when the lobster count was really high. It balances out. In a 10-year period, you can make an average amount of money. If the Mi'kmaq have been fishing all their lives in the spring and in the fall all their lives, the only thing that brought attention to them was the Marshall decision."

Burnt Church band councillor Brian Bartibogue told Bear the Marshall decision posed some problems for his community.

"Brian said he used to make a good living before the Marshall decision and it was only after the decision that he didn't. It was like a double-edged sword, you know? On one side it sliced off a really nice niche for Mi'kmaq people and on the other hand it focused attention, it shone the spotlight on Burnt Church. The reason why it shone the spotlight so prominently on Burnt Church was because anywhere else you go in the Atlantic region, there's very few [First Nation] people that are actually on the waterfront."

As n most places of the country, reserves in Atlantic Canada are located on land that nobody else wanted at the time the reserves were created. Most reserves in the region, Bear discovered as he researched the story, are landlocked. He believes Burnt Church has become a national flash point because, ironically, it is on the water and its people actually had access to the resource in the days before Marshall. Now that the Supreme Court decision has highlighted the fact that most Atlantic First Nations were denied access to the resource despite the fact that they had a treaty which should have allowed them access for all those years, the one band that was exercising its treaty right all along is being targeted by those who resent the court decision.

Bear used his understanding of traditional ways to get access to places other journalists had no hope of getting. A most remarkable segment of the documentary -which he decided to show in black and white to illustrate just how far apart the parties were -is a segment where the chief and council and AFN advisor Ovide Mercredi met with Bob Rae, the former Ontario premier who acted as a mediator between the federal government and the band. Bear said he cleared it with an influential clan mother first. With her approval in place, the chief and his advisors did not object to Bear's presence.

"So that was it. I set my camera up and all of a sudden, Ovide Mercredi shows up, just before Bob Rae. I have a long-standing relationship with Ovide from my time in network journalism and I've always felt that Ovide didn't trust me because of the kind of work I did when I was at The Journal. Back then, he used to kick me out of meetings. But that day, he had absolutely no say."

Bear said he was ready to argue it was his treaty right, too."

"And if push came to shove," he added. "I was prepared to say, 'You can't ask me to leave my traditional territory. Fortunately, it didn't have to get that far."

Viewers will find the footage of the meetng very interesting.

"My intention was to show, indeed, how hard Bob Rae's hands were tied together. During the Charlottetown Accord, Bob Rae was a big supporter of Ovide Mercredi's agenda. It was the closest, I think, Aboriginal people will ever come in our collective history to equality under the law while I'm alive," Bear said.

Eventually, Bear shows that James Ward concluded that Rae was culturally biased and unable to deal with the Mi'kmaq point of view.

The music in the video helps create a mood that invites the viewer into the show. Bear said it's no co-incidence. He recruited world renowned Mi'kmaq jazz guitarist Don Ross from Shubenacadie (Indian Brook) First Nation to provide most of the sound track. Ross was excited by the project and composed music especially for the show.

Darrell Bernard from Membertou First Nation in Nova Scotia also contributed.

The show ends with an honor song, composed by Mi'kmaq George Paul. Bear met Paul in Western Canada. He said Paul had come to the West looking for his spiritual side and the song came to him after a sweatlodge.

Bear first heard the song on the beach at Burnt Church when it was sung on the day of prayer as the Mi'kmaq people waited for the RCMP and the DFO agents to renew the conflict.

"When they started to sing the song, the emcee said, 'We want everybody to turn their camera off, everyone except Jeff Bear.' I was honored. I rolled on the whole thing but I decided I can't use this in the body of the piece. I don't want to use it for background music because I don't want to be patronizing to my people's culture," he said. "So where do I use it? It's six-and-a-half-minutes long. So I decided - and I phoned George and got his permission to use it this way-to use it in the back end credit roll."

Bear left Burnt Church with a renewed sense that his people's culture is getting stronger.