In 2017, artists Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Camille Turner collaborated to stage Freedom Tours , two performative interventions in Canadian National Parks. The work was commissioned by Partners in Art for LandMarks2017/Repères2017 , a nationwide public arts project across twenty national parks, featuring seven curators and twelve artists. The occasion was the 150th anniversary of Canadian confederation, though, as the LandMarks curators made clear, “a hundred and fifty years is not a long time,” if you consider that there are “marked mammoth bones […which] suggest that the first humans inhabited Turtle Island over 28,000 years ago.” Freedom Tours took the form of two participatory interventions emphasizing Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe, and Black histories in the territory: a guided boat tour at Thousand Islands National Parks and an intergenerational walking tour or procession at Rouge National Urban Park. In 2024, we met with curator Tania Willard and artists Cheryl L’Hirondelle and Camille Turner over zoom to discuss the frictions and the sparks that arose from this project. What follows is a distilled version of that conversation.
This article focuses on the short-film Holiday Native Land (2023), a collaborative work between Wendat visual artist Nicolas Renaud and Ontarian visual artist Brian Virostek, through the intersection of Indigenous Studies, sociology, and the history of national parks. The split-screen short movie is composed of archival national parks advertisements and reads—through our contemporary eyes—as an eerie testament to the imperialist ambitions of both private economic interests and Canadian government bodies. This article concentrates primarily on the linguistic and visual deployment of this official promotional rhetoric through a close analysis of Holiday Native Land , examining the intimate link that exists between this rhetoric and the emergence of a distinctly Canadian imperialism. Finally, it demonstrates how this same rhetoric is indissociable from an insatiable imperial appetite, one that translates into an unquenchable desire to neutralize the Other by metaphorically consuming them.
Men-only gay campgrounds in Quebec function as contested landscapes, resisting dominant ideological narratives surrounding queerness and its relation to nature. While operating as utopian refuges that challenge metronormativity, these sites reveal profound ambivalence. This article analyzes their visual and spatial cultures—from camp landscaping to pornographic archetypes—as practices of disidentification and world-making that redefine the figure of the camper and its environment. Situated within broader imaginaries of wilderness and national belonging, these enclaves deploy aesthetics of classical pastoralism and pornified hypermasculinity that both subvert heteronormativity and reproduce dominant colonial structures. By mobilizing the myth of terra nullius and homonationalist tropes such as the fetishized Mountie, these spaces materialize the enduring entanglement of desire, landscape, and ideology, ultimately exposing a critical tension between queer emancipation and colonial reproduction within Canadian visual and spatial narratives.
As a performance duo, Winnipeg’s Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan have received international accolades for Lesbian National Parks and Services , a multifarious, multi-year performance piece begun in 1997. “In full uniform as Lesbian Rangers,” they travel to various locales such as festivals and parks to “challenge the general public’s ideas of tourism, recreation, and the ‘natural environment.’” While in Banff, Alberta, the duo created a map of the townsite with fictional heritage landmarks to assert a queer presence through humour, satire and play. Dempsey and Millan also create installations, publications and videos, including several components of Lesbian National Parks and Services, such as their 2002 PSAs, Endangered Species , featuring lesbians in decline. In 2018, the Rangers participated in an exhibition by Young Joon Kwak at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity entitled The Cave . In an interview with both artists in the fall of 2023 over Zoom, we discussed Canada’s national parks as contested landscapes through the lens of queer ecologies, homosexuality, nature, and visibility while also featuring the evolution of their collaborative performance practice as Lesbian Rangers, and thirty-eight years creating a range of other live, video, and book works.
