An award-winning documentary film about the yearslong struggle of the Tahltan First Nation to protect their sacred headwaters in British Columbia will be shown at 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 17, at the Nolan Center.
The event is free. Several Tahltan elders from the region across the Coast Mountains from Southeast Alaska will be at the screening to answer questions and talk with audience members after the showing of “Klabona Keepers.”
The movie, which was released in 2022, covers about 15 years of the Tahltans’ opposition to industrial development in the headwaters of the Nass, Stikine, Iskut and Skeena rivers. Proposals included coal-bed methane production and an open-pit coal mine.
“Spanning 15 years of matriarch-led resistance, the film follows a small group of determined elders in the village of Iskut,” according to the documentary’s promotional materials.
“A group of Indigenous women, mainly aunties and grandchildren, decided to protest this mining development on their lands,” said Guy Archibald, executive director of the Southeast Alaska Indigenous Transboundary Commission, which is active in the same battle against mining development in the watershed.
“The community of Wrangell faces a lot of upstream mining issues,” similar to the Klabona, he said, citing the proposed Galore Creek copper mine, about halfway between Wrangell and the Upper Stikine River community of Telegraph Creek, British Columbia.
Archibald plans to attend the showing of the film, along with a group of about 14 First Nation youth and elders from the Klabona area, though he said their attendance is dependent on flying weather from Prince Rupert, British Columbia, to Ketchikan and then to Wrangell.
“Klabona Keepers,” named for the Tahltan word for their sacred headwaters, “is a funny movie, it’s a sad movie,” he said.
The scene where officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police try to arrest elders is comical, Archibald explained.
“The film ended with a win” when the developers gave up and pulled their proposals, he said. The provincial government has since taken steps toward creating a protected area for the Klabona, which includes the small communities of Telegraph Creek, Iskut and Dease Lake.
The 69-minute movie tells the story of such a long struggle that some of the 5- and 7-year-olds seen at the start of the documentary are now in their 20s, Archibald added.
The film premiered in 2022 at the Toronto edition of the Human Rights Watch Film Festival. It won the Insight Audience Choice Award at the 2022 Vancouver International Film Festival.
The two non-Indigenous filmmakers who made the documentary “happened to stop at the Iskut gas station in 2013. What was meant to be a pit stop turned into a conversation, then an invitation and finally being asked by the community to film their actions,” according to a 2023 report by the Yukon Territory Film Society.
The free showing in Wrangell is sponsored by the Southeast Alaska Indigenous Transboundary Commission, the SkeenaWild Conservation Trust and Story Money Impact, a Canadian nonprofit.
The film also is scheduled for showings in Craig, Kasaan and Ketchikan, Archibald said.
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