Bill Mason's Waterwalker: The Best Documentary Ever?

About fifteen years ago, a canoeing friend of mine introduced me to Bill Mason's extraordinary (1984) film, Waterwalker. I'm sure that Mason is best known as a canoeist, and he was a very good one, but, as the film shows, he was also a very gifted artist: he painted with knives instead of brushes.



Maybe I am pushing the envelope of my subject matter with this blogpost, but something I didn't remember until I watched Waterwalker again last night, is that Bill Mason sprinkled some religion into his films. (He quoted a passage from Job in Waterwalker.) But let me emphasize this is a documentary film, it doesn't get "preachy." All the verbal material is only fully understood in the context of the spectacular visuals of Lake Superior's coast and the rivers that feed into it (the footage includes canoeing action, the turbulence of rapids and falls, and a fair amount of wildlife).

Mason says that, at one point in his life, he glamorized the voyaguers (the French canoe fiends that transported furs and trade goods). But he stopped being a fan of the voyaguers when he realized how harmful the fur trade was to Native peoples - often known as "First Nations" in Canada.

With that said, even I, a big fan of Waterwalker, had to suspect that Bill Mason didn't quite "get" Indians. If he was aware of the issues and controversies important to the Native people of his time, it isn't in the film. In Inheriting a Canoe Paddle, Masao Dean criticizes Waterwalker and Bill Mason for a lack of awareness about the First Nations.

American Indians are not a vanished race of environmentalists. That point is well taken. Maybe it is the one flaw of what could otherwise be known as "by far the BEST documentary of its kind EVER," as one YouTube commenter put it recently.

[caption id="attachment_7162" align="aligncenter" width="607"] These pictographs from the rocky shore of Lake Superior's Agawa Bay appear in Waterwalker.[/caption]

That's right, Waterwalker can be freely viewed from your computer screen and I think you'll find it is more than worth the 86 minutes of your time.

However, since Waterwalker was co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada, you may want to use their site to access the film.