Settler Frames is a curatorial intervention that offers a critical framework to consider the representation and construction of settler identities, settler logic and settler society in cinema.
This Canada Council for the Arts supported project consists of curatorial essays and selections of clips and film texts that support the theory of the five settler archetypes as well as the role of film and media in identity-building and maintenance.
To read all of Part 1 download the 37-page PDF here.
THE NORMATIVE SETTLER PLAYLIST
My methodology in selecting examples for the playlists involved the inclusion of instances in settler societies of settler characters or subjects who are directly or indirectly placed in relation (discursively or physically) to Indigenous characters, territories or subjects. The normative settler representation cannot be normal or natural without deviances to the norm also featured in the work – such are other archetypes, as well as their typic kin, stereotypes. To get to a small handful of representative depictions for each archetype playlist, I had to put aside many examples that do not exactly fit the bill, that I hope to discuss in future stages of this project.
1. I Am Canadian
I am Canadian (Kevin Donovan, 1990), TV commercial – Featuring the most normal everyday Canadian, “Joe Canada,” played by Jeff Douglas.
2. We Are Canadian
We are Canadian (Jeff Douglas, 2025), internet video – The remake of the 1995 sensation recycles mythic arsenal in the semiotic warfare against Canada becoming part of America, featuring the Douglas’s “Joe Canada” character once again at centre stage. At the time of writing the video had clocked over 650,000 views on YouTube (popular, but much less than the original’s broadcasting and own YouTube numbers, which number in the millions).
3. Two Lovers and a Bear
Two Lovers and a Bear (Kim Nguyen, 2016), romantic comedy – This Canadian feature-length fiction film features the two non-Inuk characters Lucy (played by Tatiana Masiany) and Roman (played by Dane DeHaan) improbably sorting through their life traumas and love troubles in Inuit territory (complete with settler spirit visions of polar bears). Despite the lack of any meaningful connection with the people and place, they are situated as belonging in this region, two white Southern settlers who drive the narrative. Everything else is backdrop. Writing about why “Canadian films are pretending to be American again,” film critic Kevin Teirney said of Two Lovers and other Canadian titles at Cannes in 2016: “There is something profoundly sad about a country that after 50 years hasn’t figured out a way to show Canadian films to Canadians, and something colonial about one that seems to think that in order for its cinema to survive, it has to pretend to be someone else’s.”[1] Fifty-first cinema perhaps?
[1] Full article here: https://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment-life/movies-tv/article543115.html
4. Evangeline and Back to God’s Country
Evangeline (Edward P. Sullivan and William Cavanaugh,1914) and Back to God’s Country (David Hartford,1919) – To the beginning! Early cinema—Evangeline is considered Canada’s first feature film—established the Normative Settler in Indigenous, er, God’s country. In these two Northwesterns there is much frolicking by adventurous characters in nature and communing with local wildlife. In good, clean entertainment fashion, indicators of colonization are nowhere to be found; instead “Back to God’s Country is constructed as an Anglo-Celtic, white, homosocial nation by its others.”[2]
[2] Gittings 1996.
5. Never Cry Wolf
Never Cry Wolf (Carroll Ballard, 1983), American adventure/drama – The Farley Mowat “subjective non-fiction” literary classic made for the big screen by Disney is an example of the Normative Settler identity being challenged by the makers: Tyler (played by Charles Martin Smith) is a Canadian biologist sent on a research expedition to study wolves, who feels he’ll be right at home in the isolated North where he is unceremoniously left by a bush pilot and soon encounters all manner of danger. While he manages to escape the hero trope, Tyler still manages to “fit in” with his scientific devices, survival skills and various place-based innovations. He also makes friends with Inuit (who also save him more than once in the film) who, while playing second fiddle to the settler protagonist are at least not written as stereotypes. I loved this film when I saw it at age 12. Marketed as a true story based on Mowat’s own account of his adventures, Never Cry Wolf is an interesting vehicle for the Normative Settler in the case that there is nuance and vulnerability in the character’s depiction. Most interesting is perhaps the fact that Mowat and the filmmakers were challenged on numerous truth claims, proving once again that settler stories are the stuff of myth, including as relates to the well-honed Man vs. Nature plot line.