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Moosemeat & Marmalade season opener takes sparring co-hosts up north to Site C territory

ON SCREEN What: Moosemeat & Marmalade Where: Aboriginal Peoples Television Network When: Thursday Feb. 11, 8 p.m.
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The new season of Moosemeat & Marmalade, with Victoria co-hosts Dan Hayes, left, and Art Napoleon, premieres Feb. 11 on APTN. MOOSWA FILMS

ON SCREEN

What: Moosemeat & Marmalade
Where: Aboriginal Peoples Television Network
When: Thursday Feb. 11, 8 p.m.

New episodes of Moosemeat & Marmalade are ready to air, which means more comedic interplay between Victoria co-hosts Art Napoleon and Dan Hayes.

The two hosts’ dynamic relationship is at the heart of the hybrid food-and-culture docuseries, whose new season premieres Feb. 11 on Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. The latter is the British co-owner of The London Chef, a Victoria-based cooking school and catering company, while the former is an award-winning Cree singer-songwriter and Victoria favourite originally from remote Moberly Lake, B.C.

“He’s an atheist — probably a little right-leaning, if anything,” Napoleon said. “And I’m a non-conformist, non-partisan, socialist-leaning and left-leaning person. Not everything jives. But we’ve got enough there to maintain a friendship.”

The serve-and-volley relationship between the two very different men has made the half-hour show one of the top draws on APTN during its four-year run. It’s expected to remain a fan favourite through its upcoming fifth season, which airs weekly on the Winnipeg-based network through May 6. Plans to dub the new episodes in Cree and French are in the works, which will further expand the show’s footprint in coming weeks. Filming for a sixth season is also underway, Napoleon said.

Napoleon and Hayes have equal input when it comes to content. Napoleon favours hunting and fishing, staples of his First Nations background, while Hayes’s focus is on cooking methods both Canadian and European.

Both are proponents of the farm-to-table, head-to-tail, zero-waste movements, which drives each episode. But their on-screen chemistry is rooted in what they don’t have in common, rather than what bonds them.

“People tend to like our mix of harassment and oddball ways with each other,” Napoleon said. “If Dan is cooking at the Oak Bay Beach Hotel, and they are having high tea, that’s definitely not my world. And when I’m cooking something like skunk’s ass in the deep woods, he’s supposed to be the fish out of water. But we’re starting to meld a little more. We’ve grown, and picked up some of each others’ habits.”

The show is produced by Mooswa Films, a partnership between Napoleon and Hilary Pryor of Victoria’s May Street Productions. Though their production budget is modest, what ends up on the screen is impressive.

Episodes from previous seasons were shot in a range of faraway locales, from Spain to Nunavut. Shoots during Season 5 took the hosts and crew to the United Kingdom and around Canada, including stops in Haida Gwaii and the Peace River region of B.C., near where Napoleon was born and lived until he was 17.

The show doesn’t hold back when it comes to source material that would be off-limits to its competitors. They hunt beaver and eat seal, but in a way that honours Indigenous traditions, Napoleon said.

“We’re not a couple of macho guys out there trophy hunting. We’re trying to go about it in a very respectful manner. We let the [First Nations] communities tell their stories. On the show, we’re hitting cultural elements, too. It’s not just food. It’s about some of the spirit-world teachings or philosophies around land use, and sometimes even into cosmology. We cover a lot of ground.”

Politics enters the fray on occasion, too. Tonight’s season opener sees Napoleon and Hayes travel to northeastern B.C. and Treaty 8 territory to cook with locals directly affected by the proposed Site C hydroelectric dam.

Napoleon — who was made chief of Calgary’s Saulteaux First Nation in 1993, when he was 32 — is the more politically minded of the two. He’s opposed to sermonizing, however. The pedestal Moosemeat & Marmalade provides allows him to address important issues in a light-hearted way.

“I’m not hitting anyone over the head with anything,” he said. “I’m just being myself. Some people are going to like it, some people are not. But even the ones who don’t might see something they like. It’s always good to use a bit of humour. It’s a softer, more fun approach.”

How two strangers from different cultures, with wildly different upbringings, can come together and make good television remains a surprise to everyone involved, Napoleon said with a laugh. That they managed to become friends off-screen is even more surprising.

“Without saying it, I think it touches on reconciliation,” he said. “One of the things Dan has done on his own is study the issues in First Nations history. He probably knows more than your average Canadian about Indigenous people and Indigenous issues and history in Canada. That has brought us closer together.”

mdevlin@timescolonist.com