NiCHE has just posted a terrific interview with Hugh Brody. Originally a British anthropology student, Brody made himself into an embedded observer and recorder of how Indigenous and Arctic Canada dealt with government and industry interventions into the north from the 1960s to the recent past. He wrote much of the crucial volume of the Berger Report that helped stop pipeline development in the Mackenzie Valley fifty years ago. Very early among scholars and bureaucrats, he realized that the essential voices that had to be hear were not those of people like him but the people of the north. To capture some of that he became a filmmaker. Altogether an amazing career.
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 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. [...] where I could be an under-labourer to actions that came from the people themselves.
His book Maps and Dreams remains part of my essential Canadian books collection.