This montage experiment dissects the settler-colonial view of the land through a collection of tourism films from the 1920s to 1970s, advertising holidays in the Canadian outdoors. In a split screen that multiplies connections among fragments of those films, the footage of natural beauty and happy vacations begins to disclose its underlying violence, revealing a subliminal will of power over the land and Indigenous people. By exposing the myth of “Vanishing Indians” and the desire to dominate nature as the structure of colonial imagination, Holiday Native Land compels the archive to speak about today.

WARNING: The archival footage sampled in this film contains outdated language and problematic representations related to Indigenous people.