Canada’s identity as a nation is tied to fantasies of nature and wilderness that are historically bound and hegemonically produced while simultaneously experienced on individual levels. This thesis puts forth two case studies for analysis, Riding Mountain National Park and the Columbia Project to argue that within the nation-building project, nature has been staged as both playground and resource. The author examines how this is produced discursively and ideologically on the side of hegemonic production as well as how a sense of place is constructed from close, proximal, relational experiences between individual and place. She takes up affect theory to unsettle the presumably settled. Using an experimental tourism-as-method, the author gathers fragments of experience by drawing from a number of methodologies including discourse analysis, archival work, oral history, and ethnography. Moving experientially through the landscape on an investigative road trip, the author moves concomitantly between a synoptic view and an on-the-ground positionality to unsettle the settled, that is, to reveal the frail ideological, historical, and colonial compositions of these national sites. At stake in this project are themes of resilience, resistance, and reciprocity.