Clearwater-based videographer Ken Matheson recently travelled to Australia to enter one of his productions in the Canberra Short Film Festival.
The film, “Little Moccasins,” was one of seven short-listed out of the more than 40 in the documentary 
category, but it did not win first prize.
“It was weird the way it all started,” said Matheson. “It was a phone call from a friend in Calgary. A group of children in a school there were going to give names back to another group of children who had died while attending an Indian residential school. I was asked if I wanted to do a film about it – but there were only five days to prepare.”
Despite the short time frame, he managed to put a crew together, research the story, and shoot the film.
Dunbow Indian Industrial School operated near Calgary from 1889 to 1924. During that time, 74 of its students died.
Of those, 34 were still interred on the site.
A few years ago, a flood exposed several of their bones and caskets.
The government reinterred the remains, but there were no names to connect with them.
The students in Tweedsmuir-Strathcona School were surprised to learn what had happened to children in a school just 15 minutes from their own.
A group of them went on a quest to find their names and eventually found them in old records (these were the English names given to them when they came to the school. Their native names appear to be lost forever).
For the re-naming ceremony a group of 34 youngsters travelled to the former industrial school site. Each
carried a small box with the name of one of the deceased children on it.
Inside the box was a butterfly.
At the site the children said the name out loud, and then released the butterfly.
“It was hard to believe those kids were in Grade 6,” Matheson said. “They all seemed very mature and well-spoken.”
After the event there were a few more days of filming, followed by four or five months of editing.
Matheson credited Laurie Sommerville of the Triangle Youth Foundation for helping set up the film project.
The foundation also helped him with the trip to Canberra to participate in the film festival.
Australia had similar experiences to Canada with its residential schools for Aboriginals, he pointed out.
“It struck a bit of chord with them,” he said.
A retired RCMP officer, Matheson has lived in Clearwater for about 10 years.
He worked as an outdoor guide for many years, but wanted to get into story-telling.
He took a film program at Capilano University in North Vancouver, graduating three years ago.
Since then he has put together a number of film productions, including “Little Moccasins” and several for BC Parks.
Salvaging the Tiger Moth
Matheson's next big project likely will be to document the salvaging of a Tiger Moth biplane that has been at the bottom of Azure Lake since 1947.
The plane had flown up there to rescue one of the Hogue brothers, who had become ill while trapping.
The other brother walked out, taken the train to Kamloops, and called for help.
The pilot, Harry Bray, was a decorated World War II veteran who had never flown that type of aircraft before and never flown an aircraft with skis, said Matheson.
All he had was some quick instructions from the mechanic before he took off.
Apparently one of the tricks to landing on an unknown lake is to partially touch down first, then circle around and see if the tracks show as dark streaks. If they're dark, then there is water on top of the ice and it is impossible to land.
This the pilot did. The tracks showed as white and so they landed.
Unfortunately, they hit a soft spot and went through the ice.
They tried to rescue the plane but it sank.
In 2009 another plane sank in Azure Lake. The crew that came to salvage it learned about the earlier sinking from local residents.
Since then there have been plans to raise the old plane but, so far, without success.
The Canadian Air Museum in Langley has agreed to restore Tiger Moth if it can be salvaged, Matheson said.
