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Employing sensory, visual, and poetic modes of inquiry, this piece explores relationships between pirate lore of Newfoundland, settler colonialism, and embodied experience. Situated in coastal communities known in history and folklore for harboring pirates, I use memory, fieldwork, and autoethnography to articulate fluid and unsettled aspects of the colonial project. Geographer and sociologist James Overton writing about the invention and commodification of Newfoundland culture two decades ago noted Memorial University of Newfoundland's role in the region's "cultural revival" while researchers engaged in community development initiatives. Such revived circuits of tangible or intangible heritage were often the product of (displaced or deterritorialized) intelligentsia. Portrayed as oppositional to dominant political forces, these contemporary pirates, plundered local culture through academic theories, and reconnected local identity with settler history and knowledge. The subsequent revived constructions of place in the work of tourist-oriented theater initiatives, literature, music, or restorations of the built environment reproduce the origins of settler culture for tourist consumption. While offering class-based critiques of the economic experience of settler life, they do not often interrogate the premises, mechanisms, and consequences of settler culture. The creative research underlying this poetic inquiry allows for critical associations to be made between settler tropes, their continued performance and re-performance, and the displacement and erasure of the region's original peoples.

Contemporary discussions of the Canadian West tend to differentiate it as a geographic space from American practices south of the border, or from Hollywood imaginaries. Such discussions are often developed through comparison: in terms of demography, representation, class, and political economy, or they conclude that national boundaries do not reflect cultural differences. Increasingly, research on the Canadian West troubles geographic understandings of place and imposed settler classifications and categories. The articles in this issue advance this arc to engage sensory, embodied, and more-than-representational features that reiterate multiple Wests. Through critically engaged methods of writing about archival ephemera, narratives and song, festive and tourist experiences, and popular media and illustration, these articles contribute to understanding the Canadian West as practiced and performed.

Released in 1954 by the National Film Board of Canada, Corral was Colin Low's debut as a director. Low later became identified with the landmark Challenge for Change films using documentary film as a catalyst for community organizing. Although local folk knowledge is frequent in discussions of documentaries made by the French branch of the NFB, it has been more common to treat the English projects of NFB as romantic evocations of place. Corral is often the exemplary case. This article uses paradigms of performance and practice to consider the embodied knowledge and traditional skills depicted in Corral. The place that Corral performs is characterized by the popular diffusion of traditional vaquero skills from California mixed with embodied practices of ranching in southwestern Alberta.