About Some Lilies

Streaming Life: Storying the 94 is a land-based truth activation devised and performed on the grounds of the home occupied by Sir John A. Macdonald in the year the Indian Act (of which he was the key architect) was signed into Canadian legislation. This performative intervention was planned as the first of a series of site-specific truth activations on the St. George campus of the University of Toronto. These interventions are intended to re-presence a seemingly neutral plot of terra nullius on which an institutional edifice has been erected, marking it as a place where destructive power was exerted—a force that continues to reverberate through Indigenous blood, bone, and memory today. This brief reflection explores the grounds of an erstwhile home of Sir John A. Macdonald (one site of violation and violent eviction) and positions the land—this other-than-human collaborator—as a purveyor of truth and an agent of activation.