Holiday Native Land

In a split-screen diptych, this montage experiment revisits a collection of tourism films from the 1920s to the 1970s that advertised holidays in the Canadian outdoors, exposing the underlying violence towards land and Indigenous people, and the colonial myths inscribed in idyllic representations of nature and leisure.

Brian Virostek and Nicolas Renaud: ‘As we worked with this archival footage, we found a tension in the expression of settler-colonial violence towards nature in films that aimed to celebrate it. The tropes that the films constantly revert to in representing nature and Indigenous peoples speak of the deep fears and desires of that society; of the need to dominate nature and to conceive of Indigenous peoples as a remnant of the past. Our attempt is to make visible the subliminal work of the colonial psyche, as it creates a mythology in order to legitimise the taking of the land for the“manifest destiny”of a“superior culture”.’