Prairie Fire: A Personal View

Prairie Fire, a documentary for History Television by Audrey Mehler, was my idea from the very start. With the approach of the 80th anniversary of the Winnipeg General Strike, I went to Ms. Mehler of David Paperny Films of Vancouver with the idea for a 90 minute documentary telling the story of the strike. I knew that there would be very few survivors of the strike to interview, but I also knew from earlier work I had done that there were hundreds of very effective still photographs, including pictures taken by two different photographers, unaware of each other, of the "Bloody Saturday" riot from two different vantage points! These photographs, plus mountains of newspaper and documentary material would, I thought, be enough to produce a visually exciting documentary. I want to add some words here on ideological perspective in the treatment of the strike's legacy to Canadian history as depicted in Prairie Fire. First, when I suggested names of people Ms. Mehler might interview on screen, I gave her the names of two scholars living in Winnipeg, both experts on the subject, whose views on the strike are diametrically opposed to my own. They chose not to participate in the project. This certainly caused some problems for Ms. Mehler who was well aware from what I myself had told her, and from her own readings on the Strike, of the ideological chasm that separates me from others who have written on those events. It was important to have that point of view not only for balance, but to show the viewers that the strike remains controversial even over eighty years later. In the absence of those experts, she did what she could using the views gained in interviews with surviving strikers or people openly sympathetic to the legacy of the strike.