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In this article, I trace the tangled relationships between law, nature, and empire as they figure in Canadian national geographies, imagined and real. While the nature-culture dichotomy has long been contested by cultural geographers, anthropologists, and historians, to date, socio-legal scholars and legal theorists have spent less time problematizing the law-nature distinction. With the exception of natural law, law and nature are commonly perceived to be opposing and ontologically distinct. In this article, I argue that law, nature, and empire have overlapping genealogies that demand critical attention. Law and nature, I contend, are ontologically related categories that shape the Canadian nation by working in and through each other. While both are prominent symbols in the national imaginary, real spaces of nature - wilderness landscapes, including parks - are also legal constructs that normalize nature as law's constitutive exterior and as the nation's myth of (empty) origins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]