Almost Paradise on Treaty 6: Karaoke Geographies, Settler Inheritances, and the Working-Class Spectacle

Almost Paradise on Treaty 6 is a three-part, web-based YouTube video project that threads together central Saskatchewan footage—farm labour, carnival midway, demolition derby—with the affective familiarity of karaoke tracks and lyrics. The work stages a collision between the everyday and the mythic: ordinary sites of rural livelihood and leisure become cinematic sets, while well-known pop ballads (The Carpenters’ “We’ve Only Just Begun,” Spandau Ballet’s “True,” and the Footloose love theme “Almost Paradise”) supply a ready-made emotional script. In doing so, the project does not merely “illustrate” rural life; it asks how romance, aspiration, and nostalgia are produced in place—and how those feelings are bound up with the histories of settlement, land, labour, and belonging.

The project’s title is a hinge. “Almost Paradise” names a yearning for arrival, for a promised fullness, yet the phrase is deliberately incomplete: paradise is always nearly attained, continually deferred. Situated “on Treaty 6,” the title also refuses the fantasy of empty land. It locates the work within treaty territory—traditional territories of the Cree, Dene, Nakota, Saulteaux, and Ojibwe, and the homeland of the Métis Nation—where settler futures have been built through ongoing colonial occupation. That framing is not a background acknowledgement; it is a curatorial condition. The work unfolds as a meditation on what it means to film settler infrastructures and pleasures while refusing to neutralize the ground they stand on.

Karaoke as Method: Borrowed Lyrics, Public Feeling, and the Voice of Place

Karaoke is a form of public intimacy. It offers the structure of a “shared” song while asking the performer (and here, the videomaker) to inhabit it—sometimes sincerely, sometimes ironically, often both at once. In Almost Paradise on Treaty 6, karaoke operates as a curatorial strategy: it is a way to place popular music’s emotional certainty beside images that are ethically and historically unstable. The lyrics become captions, prompts, and provocations; they “name” what is seen even when what is seen resists that naming. Karaoke is also a technology of identification. It invites viewers into recognition—I know this song—and then uses that recognition to hold attention through discomfort: I know this feeling, but do I know the land and labour that support it?

This strategy matters because rural settler life is often represented through two dominant lenses: pastoral innocence (the wholesome farm, the local fair) or hard-edged authenticity (tough work, tough fun). Karaoke complicates both. It brings a soft-focus romance to hard machinery, and it brings sentimental devotion to the noisy churn of rides and collisions. The project thus exposes how cultural fantasy—love songs, wedding-dance classics, radio staples—can act as an emotional infrastructure that smooths over the histories and economies embedded in “ordinary” spaces.

Part 1: The Farm — Inheritance, Labour, and the Romance of Beginning

Part 1’s pairing is instantly generative: an active, multi-generational grain farm—old and new equipment used by two generations of the same white settler family—set to “We’ve Only Just Begun.” The song is an anthem of commencement, a promise of shared future, a declaration of forward motion. As karaoke, its lyrics read like an ideology of progress: we begin, we build, we grow. When placed against farm imagery, those lyrics can appear to affirm a settler narrative of continuity: the family line persists, tools improve, seasons turn, the farm endures.

Yet the treaty context insists that the “beginning” celebrated in the soundtrack is also a colonial beginning—an ongoing one. The farm is not only a site of work; it is a site of settlement and property. The work thereby invites viewers to feel the friction between the emotional grammar of the song and the political grammar of the land. What does it mean to sing “we’ve only just begun” on territory where the beginning of settler agriculture depended on dispossession and continues to be enabled by colonial governance? The karaoke track becomes a kind of accomplice and a witness: it amplifies the seductions of futurity at the very moment the image makes futurity ethically complicated.

Haley Sheppard’s critical place inquiry—explicitly “from a white settler perspective”—offers a crucial lens here. Such an approach does not claim innocence through acknowledgement; it insists on examining how settler subjectivity is produced through place-making practices, including art. In that spirit, The Farm can be read as a self-implicating portrait: a camera lingering on equipment and processes that are simultaneously mundane and politically charged. The generational continuity of machinery use becomes more than heritage; it becomes an index of how settler belonging is reproduced materially—through property, labour routines, and the visual normalization of “working land.”

The camera’s attention to “old and new” equipment is also an attention to time. Farm tools are artifacts of changing economies: mechanization, debt, agribusiness pressures, and the shifting status of rural work. Even when the footage centres family and continuity, the machines speak of wider capitalist arrangements—inputs, markets, logistics, and land value. Here Billy Williams’ analysis of working-class identity and capitalist geographies becomes resonant: the farm is both a lived environment and a node in larger spatial economies. The karaoke love song’s optimism does not cancel these forces; instead it throws them into relief, highlighting how aspirations for stability and “a good life” are entangled with systems that are not fully visible in the frame.

Part 2: The Midway (True) — Portable Spectacle, Temporary Community

Part 2 shifts from production to pleasure: West Coast Amusements’ midway at the Humboldt Summer Sizzler agricultural fair (2011), set to Spandau Ballet’s “True.” The fair is a classic rural institution—a gathering that mixes agricultural display, local pride, commerce, and entertainment. The midway, however, is a travelling architecture. It arrives, assembles, lights up, and disappears. Its “place” is always provisional. In this sense, it operates as a literal capitalist geography: a mobile economy of sensation that sells risk, speed, sugar, and awe.

“True” is a confession of feeling, a song about sincerity and the desire to be believed. As karaoke, it turns the midway into an emotional theatre: neon and motion become the setting for vows, crushes, and memories. But the midway also complicates the notion of “truth.” Its pleasures are manufactured; its risks are engineered; its aesthetics are designed to seduce. The work’s brilliance is not to expose this as “fake,” but to show how sincerity can be built from artifice—how people sincerely attach to places that are, structurally, temporary.

Within a settler-colonial frame, the midway’s portability echoes another unsettling portability: the ease with which settler society treats land as a platform for events rather than as a relation. A fairground becomes a stage, and the stage can be moved, rebranded, re-lit. Sheppard’s emphasis on place-making becomes a prompt: whose place-making is happening here, and what is being made invisible? The fair is a community ritual, but it is also a spatial claim—an enactment of belonging through gathering. The work does not resolve this tension; it holds it, letting “True” hover as both promise and question: true to what, and true for whom?

Part 3: The Derby — Collision as Entertainment, Class Identity, and Managed Violence

Part 3, “The Derby,” brings the project’s themes into loud focus: demolition derby footage at the Humboldt Summer Sizzler (2011) set to “Almost Paradise,” the romantic love theme from Footloose. The juxtaposition is immediately provocative—tender devotion over mechanical violence. This is where Williams’ engagement with demolition derby, working-class identity, and capitalist geographies becomes especially fertile. The derby is a working-class spectacle often narrated as authentic, rough, and communal: people who know machines, who repair and repurpose them, who take pride in toughness and improvisation. It is also a controlled destruction staged for consumption—violence made safe-ish, contained within rules, fences, announcer patter, and the logic of tickets and concessions.

“Almost Paradise” is an ecstatic duet about being saved by love, about arriving somewhere better because someone else is there. In the derby, that longing is uncanny. The cars are battered bodies; the arena is a ritual ground; the crowd’s pleasure is collective. Romance overlays ruin, suggesting that “paradise” might be less a destination than a feeling produced in the moment—by noise, proximity, and shared attention. The karaoke structure makes this even more pointed: lyrics that typically accompany slow dancing now accompany impact and smoke. The result is not a joke; it is an exposure of how cultural forms can reframe violence as intimacy, and how intimacy can coexist with—and even depend on—damage.

The derby also stages a particular relationship to capitalism: the cars are often older, cheaper, already devalued; they are used up again for entertainment. There is a class politics in that reuse. The event can read as defiance of polished consumer culture—an embrace of scrap, grit, and repair knowledge. Yet it is also an economy: a paid event that converts wreckage into value, adrenaline into revenue, community identity into a commodity. Williams’ “capitalist geographies” lens helps articulate this double movement: the derby is both a local expression of identity and a spatialized circuit of consumption, embedded in fairgrounds, rural calendars, and cultural economies.

Gender Without a Theory? Reading Norms Across the Project

Paisley Currah’s question—transgender rights without a theory of gender?—offers a conceptual tool for this project even when transgender identity is not explicitly “represented” on screen. Currah’s provocation is that rights claims often rely on thin, unstable understandings of gender—understandings that can reproduce norms even as they seek inclusion. Applied curatorially, this raises a broader question: what unspoken theories of gender are operating in the cultural spaces depicted here?

Farm labour, fair midways, and demolition derbies are heavily coded in gendered ways in North American cultural imagination: the masculine farmer and mechanic, the feminine romance song, the heteronormative couplehood implied by duet love themes, the “family” as the default unit of inheritance and belonging. Karaoke intensifies these codes because pop songs often trade in standardized romantic narratives. The project’s soundtrack choices therefore become not only emotional but political: they summon a conventional grammar of love, partnership, and future—precisely the grammar through which settler family continuity and working-class respectability are often narrated.

Currah’s frame encourages viewers to notice how gender operates as an invisible infrastructure across these spaces: who is presumed to belong, whose bodies are legible, whose desire is normalized, whose labour is valued. This is not to demand that the work provide a representative roster of identities; rather, it is to invite a critical listening to the songs as gendering devices. What kinds of love are being imagined when “we’ve only just begun” plays over inherited land? What kinds of sincerity are being promised in “True” amid the orchestrated seductions of the midway? What kinds of salvation are being offered in “Almost Paradise” while bodies and machines collide?

In this sense, Almost Paradise on Treaty 6 can be read as an inquiry into normativity: how settlement, class, and gender are braided into the everyday through repeated cultural forms. Karaoke is the mechanism of repetition, and repetition is how norms become natural.

The Ethics of Looking: Settler Self-Location and the Refusal of Innocence

Because the project is grounded in treaty territory and filmed within settler communities and institutions, it carries an ethical demand: to avoid turning acknowledgement into absolution. Sheppard’s emphasis on critical inquiry “from a white settler perspective” is useful here as a curatorial ethic—one that foregrounds implication rather than distance. The camera does not pretend to be outside the worlds it films. It is close enough to love what it sees: the elegance of machinery, the glow of midway lights, the drama of impact. That closeness is precisely what gives the work its critical power, because it does not critique from contempt. It critiques from attachment.

The project’s web-based YouTube form also matters. YouTube is a platform where rural life is frequently aestheticized and commodified—farm channels, fair highlights, derby compilations, nostalgia edits. By entering that ecosystem with an explicitly framed, three-part artwork, Almost Paradise on Treaty 6 performs a subtle intervention: it adopts the language of popular video culture (music, montage, familiar songs) while injecting a counter-reading through its title, context, and sequencing. The work asks viewers to consider how easily images of “community” and “tradition” circulate without the histories that make them possible.

Conclusion: Almost—Not Yet, Not Settled

Across its three parts, Almost Paradise on Treaty 6 traces a choreography of settler life: work that claims futurity, leisure that manufactures sincerity, and spectacle that monetizes destruction. The karaoke tracks do not simply decorate these images; they argue with them. They reveal how longing, romance, and nostalgia can function as a soft power that stabilizes land claims and class identities—how a love song can become an alibi for settlement, and how a community ritual can become a mechanism of forgetting.

And yet the project is not a condemnation. It is a careful holding of contradictions: affection and critique, beauty and harm, belonging and dispossession, sincerity and performance. “Almost paradise” remains unresolved, which is the point. Paradise is not a place one arrives at; it is a story one tells. On Treaty 6, that story cannot be innocent. The work’s curatorial proposition is that we listen anyway—closely, critically, and with the willingness to hear the dissonance between what the songs promise and what the land remembers.

T.E. Watson

Work cited: 

Currah, Paisley, Transgender Rights without a Theory of Gender?, 52 Tulsa L. Rev. 441 (2017).

Sheppard, Haley,  Art/Place Making in a Settler Colonial Context: A Critical Place Inquiry on the Haldimand Tract/Kitchener-Waterloo From a White Settler Perspective (2025). Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive). 2750. Open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. 

Williams, Billy, Demolition Derby, Working-Class Identity, and Capitalist Geographies (2023). Journal of Working-Class Studies, Vol 8 Issue 1, June 2023.