Parking settlers: Laura McKinley, ‘Commemorating Contested National Park Landscapes: The Canada 150 Discovery Pass and White Scopic Disremembering’, in Lourdes López-Ropero, Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż (eds), Literary and Cultural Responses to Mnemonic Landscapes, Springer, 2025, pp. 55-72 | settler colonial studies blog

Parking settlers: Laura McKinley, ‘Commemorating Contested National Park Landscapes: The Canada 150 Discovery Pass and White Scopic Disremembering’, in Lourdes López-Ropero, Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż (eds), Literary and Cultural Responses to Mnemonic Landscapes, Springer, 2025, pp. 55-72

26Jul25

Abstract: This chapter explores the intricate relationship between memory, space, and white settler colonialism within Canada’s National Parks, using the Canada 150 Discovery Pass—a state-led commemorative program for Canada’s sesquicentennial—as a case study. It argues that these national parks, celebrated as iconic Canadian landscapes, are pivotal to a white settler national identity that necessitates the disremembering of colonial violence and dispossession for their very existence. The Canada 150 Discovery Parks Pass encouraged Canadians to reflect on, project, and imagine what it means to be Canadian through the viewing and spatial transit of these places purported to represent the best of Canada and its citizen-subjects. However, these parks are also sites of forced removals of Indigenous nations, marked by the dispossessive violence of white settler colonialism, which relies on the attempted erasure and forgetting of Indigenous presence. This chapter contends that these parks, while celebrated as iconic Canadian landscapes, are crucial sites for the production and maintenance of a white settler national identity. Drawing on the work of Critical Race scholars and Indigenous artist Rebecca Belmore’s aesthetic intervention, Wave Sound, the chapter demonstrates how the pass consolidates a white possessive subjectivity that justifies ongoing colonial land appropriation and elides colonial history. In contrast, Belmore’s sculptural objects, installed in four National Parks, invited visitors to listen to the land rather than merely view and transit through it, thereby offering an opportunity to challenge official memory and foster alternative forms of remembering.

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