The first time I spoke to Boyce Richardson was in 2008. I had cold-called to ask if he could write an op-ed about the Algonquins of Barriere Lake, a First Nation in northern Quebec whose long-running battle against clear cut logging he had filmed a documentary about.
He guffawed loudly over the phone. No corporate rag would publish him, he said.
When I called back a few days later to report the Ottawa Citizen had agreed to publish something, he replied, in a Kiwi accent that he had never lost, “wot the hell, wot the hell?” (In pitching the Citizen I had played up his recent induction into the Order of Canada, an establishment honour I’d later learn he was so indifferent to that when he received the news he didn't bother to tell anyone.)
Like all of his writing, the article he wrote was elegant, humane, and unequivocally sided with the underdog, lambasting the Canadian government for its double-dealing with the First Nation.
Richardson, who passed away last month at 91 years of age, was a rare figure among Canada’s timid and narrow-minded journalist class: an avowed socialist and a self-described “worker with words” who had no time for newspaper bosses and the self-flattering myths of the mainstream media. In his books and films, he was an early, trenchant chronicler of all the crises — spiralling inequality, environmental breakdown, unaccountable corporate power, the irrational organization of agriculture and urban life — that today are even more pressing.
An insider in the newsroom by dint of his being a white man from New Zealand, he was an outsider by politics and temperament, which he drew on to savvily smuggle alternate perspectives into the media for several decades. From the 1960s onward, he was unique among mainstream non-native journalists for writing honestly about colonial dispossession and for using his platform to let Indigenous peoples speak in their own voices.
When his patience with the media industry ran out, he embarked on a second career of independent writing and film-making that should be an inspiration and model for Canadian journalists to come.
Boyce’s politics were formed early, by reading Nehru and Gandhi and the New Statesmen in his local library as a teenager, which fed his “growing belief that ordinary working people were the fodder used by the rich to accumulate their wealth and fight their wars,” he recalled in his Memoirs of a Media Maverick.
He began his apprenticeship as a reporter in a small New Zealand paper after high school, and “within months I had figured out that newspapers serve before anything else, the interests of their owners.” He would go on to work for eight newspapers on three continents but “never had any reason to doubt my original conclusion.”
His longest stint, from the mid 1950s to 1971, was at the largest circulation newspaper in the country, the Montreal Star, owned by J.W. McConnell, an “old style capitalist robber baron” who had made his money in sugar and prohibited any mention of the word in the paper (that included reigning world boxing champion Sugar Ray Robinson).
Boyce was among the first to write about explosive suburban growth, as well as the proposed destruction of Montreal’s old quarter, reporting that helped save parts of the city from the wrecking ball (some of these themes later formed the basis of his first book, on Canadian cities, in which he advocated for a programme of public housing modelled on democratic socialist models in Europe).
Boyce had no use for the journalistic posture of disinterested aloofness, so often a cover for reporting that shores up the status quo. In Montreal, he built bridges across stubborn english-french divides, walking the picket lines (unbeknownst to his bosses) of striking journalists at La Presse and Radio-Canada. As nationalism smouldered in Quebec under the dictatorial Duplessis era, he spoke out against the chauvinistic attitudes of elite English newspapermen. When street demonstrations were banned, he wasn’t surprised that the Montreal Star backed the move, abandoning their supposedly principled support for free association. “Liberalism, after all, was only skin deep,” he wrote.
He spent six year as the Star’s foreign correspondent in England. He hated the profound class divisions of British life, but loved its theatre and the distance from any oversight by his Montreal editors. He demonstrated in Trafalgar square against nuclear weapons, mingled with activists like Stuart Hall, cultivated ties with journalists and diplomats from Communist bloc countries (MI5 agents called him in for at least one grilling), and still managed to file four pieces a week.
When the great Labour politician Aneurin Bevan passed away, Boyce wrote a “panegyric disguised as a straight news report.” Bevan’s greatest memorial were “healthy babies in good homes,” a recognition of how he had helped create Britain’s NHS, its universal healthcare program.
Boyce also developed close friendships with anti-apartheid movement leaders exiled from South Africa. Robert Resha, a representative of the ANC in London, would occasionally call on Boyce to ghost-write for them. In his self-effacing way, Boyce said he was embarrassed to be doing so little, but Resha reassured him. “Everybody serves in his own way,” he told him. It became one of Boyce’s favourite expressions, summing up his life-long orientation to the many causes he would join.
Boyce Richardson served by writing.
No service was greater than his decades of journalism on Indigenous struggles for self-determination, starting in the late 1960s, when he was asked by a CBC editor to look into the situation of an impoverished community in northern Ontario.
“Indian stories are too often taken up for a month or two and then suddenly dropped,” the editor told him. “Let’s not do that. Let’s follow it up.” Boyce would always joke that the editor of course hadn’t meant for thirty years.
A few years later, having by then quit the Montreal Star, Boyce threw himself into the Cree Nation’s struggle against the James Bay mega hydro-dam project, which threatened to flood their lands in northern Quebec.
His first effort at film-making came about when he was recruited to make a documentary by a group of scientists opposed to the project. “Nobody is going to be interested in a film about scientists counting fish gonads or whatever it is they count,” he told them. “Maybe we should try to get the Crees to tell their story.”
The result, Cree Hunters of Mistissini, was a remarkable film by the standards of the time, animated by deep respect for Indigenous peoples living off the land. He was never able to get it aired on CBC (“grey little executives,” he wrote, made endless excuses). Radio-Canada finally agreed, but then dropped it after pressure from the Quebec government. Boyce’s home was soon broken into, his papers rifled through. The original materials of the film then disappeared from a film lab.
When he embarked on another documentary about Indigenous rights, its funder, the National Film Board, received a message on behalf of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau asking to put a stop to it. Boyce of course paid it no heed.
Over the next decades, several books and films followed – my favourites being Strangers Devour the Land, The People of Terra Nullius, and the edited anthology Drumbeat: Anger and Renewal in Indian Country. These were formative books for me as a young journalist and activist in my early twenties, a model of journalism that was crusading and committed, crackling with outrage against injustice, but which never sacrificed vivid story-telling and beautiful prose.
Boyce spared no criticisms of the callous officials of the Department of Indian Affairs, or the arrogant academics and editorialists given generous airtime and columns to propose newfangled solutions – which always turned out to be the same old polices of assimilation the government had been pursuing for more than a century.
He was also unafraid to critique an emerging Indigenous establishment, as when the Cree’s leadership agreed, under duress, to sign away their Aboriginal title and allow the damming of their lands. At a banquet in Montreal in 1975, Grand Chief Billy Diamond began a speech by thanking “our friends in the Quebec government.” Boyce, by that point drunk, shouted from the back of the hall: “you have no friends in the Quebec government!”
Boyce was the embodiment of one of my journalistic axioms: the more clear-eyed a reporter is about the mainstream media’s profound institutional biases, the more effective they can be. Many of his colleagues suffered from what he called a “massive occupational delusion,” believing they had far more freedom to write what they wanted. “The so-called objectivity of journalists,” he wrote, “is really just set up to disguise the fact, well-known to them in their hearts, that they can only work within the limits established by their bosses.” His media criticisms are worth reading at greater length.
He saw through ritual media circuses, the political events where “masses of journalists normally stand around waiting to be fed anodyne information,” inevitably confusing access for insight. His disdain for the usual deference shown to establishment figures ensured he did his journalism differently. When he made a NFB film in the late 1970s about the Inco mines in Sudbury, many of whose workers had died miserable, early deaths, he assured the company’s managers he would be politically neutral and was thus granted permission to film throughout the town. The eventual film, of course, was anything but neutral, based largely on interviews with the town’s widows. It closed with that famous passage of Engels describing how avoidable deaths caused by the ownership class's indifference amounted to nothing less than social murder.
After the mid 1990s, with the exception of that surprising Ottawa Citizen op-ed, he never did write again for the mainstream media. But he kept up up a steady, almost daily blog – Boyce’s Paper. He was no optimist, but the older he grew, the more certain he became that socialism, entailing the eradication of obscene wealth and the guarantee of a dignified life for all, was the highest goal of human organization.
The last time we emailed he was closely following Canada’s pipeline politics. “Even though I know what they are like, I am astounded by the arrogance of the people who support the establishment view of the matter, and their blind adherence to the money-motive,” he wrote. “The subject is fascinating me, mainly because of the way it has dragged all the establishment spokespersons, of whatever ilk they may be, out into the open as naked defenders of the policy of poisoning the Earth.”
His final blog posts, in the early months of this year, were written in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en land defenders. “Militarized police are being mobilized to uphold developments that ignore ancient rights and enforce injunctions airily granted by various courts,” he wrote. “Bulldozers have smashed into unceded Wet’suwet’en lands, making an unholy mess of them.”
“All I can say, looking back 52 years to when I first looked into the lives of Canada’s Indigenous people, is that although the publicity accorded them today is immensely greater than then (when they were hardly ever mentioned in the press), in many essential ways things have not changed that much.”
Boyce served, in his way and magnificently, till the end.
The story of how Boyce's best known movie 'Cree Hunters of Mistassini' came to be made is interesting. While working on the Cree opposition to the James Bay project Boyce got to know the Ronnie Jolly, a Mistassini hunter, and especially the younger members of the family. He took them as symptomatic of the stresses and exploitation that northern hunters had undergone over a very short period. The family had one son who was a draftsman working for Indian Affairs in Ottawa, a daughter who was a hippie in Vancouver, and another son, Eddie, who had dropped out of school to live in the bush with his parents, intending to be a hunter like his father. Boyce first planned a movie that would span this family's whole experience, with the working title 'Cree Family'. For what was intended to be only a few minutes in total in the final production, the film crew flew into Ronnie's camp just as they were preparing for the winter season and constructing their winter lodge. They filmed everything - the lodge construction, hunting by canoe, Ronnnie teaching Eddie beaver trapping, etc - and they also really captured the warm hospitality that is in all Cree winter camps. Back in Montreal he showed me some of the footage, and we all realized he had some amazing footage. He therefore put the Cree Family project on the back burner, and the film crew flew back to Ronnie's camp in mid winter, and the rest is history ... But he did not abandon the original film idea. It eventually emerged as the NFB film 'Our Land is Our Life', taking the original idea in many new directions to bring in issues from other parts of Canada, a much more overtly political film. Adrian Tanner
Martin, thank you. Boyce's voice came through so well. I had such a chuckle and insight with "famous passage of Engels describing how avoidable deaths caused by the ownership class's indifference amounted to nothing less than murder." And thought of the pandemic, and well things just don't change.