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Short abstract:

This paper interrogates the “Canadian cabin” as a colonial infrastructure, embedded in resource extraction, that has contributed to the settler-colonial state of Canada. Focusing on anticolonial methods, I discuss how documentary film may be used to unmake and undo sites of leisure in Canada.

Long abstract:

This paper is a continuation of my ongoing research that works to unsettle sites of leisure in the settler-colonial nation state of Canada. My work positions the cabin as a form of media and traces its historical development in a localized Canadian context. Once facilitating colonial expansion across the country, the cabin now contributes to settler-colonial logics that naturalize processes of settling. Deploying research-creation methodologies, my upcoming work will produce a collaborative auto-ethnographic and ethnographic documentary film that will be structured as a land acknowledgment to intervene in the standardized and passive form they have taken in educational institutions today (Robinson et al. 2019).

This paper will extend my previous research by discussing how cabins are tied to the logging industry of the 19th and 20th centuries—resource extraction that was fueled by British merchants. During this time, logs were shipped from eastern Canada to Europe across the Atlantic on large rafts. I will discuss my ancestor’s involvement in this industry, our shifting relationship to cabins over time in relation to logging, and documentary film’s potential in producing anticolonial methods for unmaking. Specifically, I will discuss how documentary film may intervene in rote “decolonial” rituals that offer a promise of undoing colonial harms, but often fail to produce such effects.