We are on the land of a nation that has traditionally been agricultural, the Kanien’kehá:ka. Now many different Indigenous peoples live in Montreal. How can the peoples who lived with the land be without sufficient homes? The land remains, but is now etched with the settlers’ borders, and ruled by the settlers’ law. The Indigenous inhabitants have been removed, disenfranchised, and relocated. A culture has been driven to near-obliteration. This is what happens when you take away the land. Indigenous homelessness is a gallows-dark irony, a phrase that should ring as an oxymoron, one of the myriad living legacies of colonialism. 

Our group explores this legacy and its everyday human implications through a site-responsive performance, based in both academic and emotive/ physical research. Through our forays into Concordia’s public space, we observed the social and behavioural barriers segregating the university and metro spaces. In fact, geographically speaking, there is no difference between them. Those who have suffered the deepest losses do not recognize these boundaries, they are simply surviving wherever they can. The land that lays beneath the spaces is the same.

Text by: Jen Cressey