subjectAbstract
This article examines how heritage festivals function as sites of banal settler colonialism through the cultural reproduction of sanitized national history. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork at an annual festival in Québec that recreates life in 17 th CE La Nouvelle France, the study analyzes how volunteers—many of whom are seniors—reproduce a settler nation through culture work. Building on scholarship of banal nationalism and extending it to a framework of banal settler colonialism, the article shows how seemingly apolitical practices such as costuming, historical role-play, and war reenactments normalize colonial histories and obscure ongoing relations of dispossession. The findings identify three key mechanisms through which this process operates: the embodied performance of colonial life through dress and play; genealogical practices and celebrations of the seigneurial land system that enact a form of rapprochement with France; and the portrayal of “friendly” French–Indigenous relations that remove violence and enable white claims to indigeneity. By situating the festival as a site of everyday settler cultural production, this article argues that heritage festivals are not merely commemorative but actively sustain settler colonial logics by rendering them fun, comforting, and seemingly normative.
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