Peter Morin, This is what happens when you perform the memory of the land (parts 1 and 2), 2013

The project’s originating intention emerged publicly at the Reconciliation: Works in Progress gathering at Algoma University in 2012, where Morin committed to creating regalia for the children who did not survive residential schools and then burning that regalia so that those children would have something to dance in. This vow transformed the performances into offerings structured around care, mourning, and continuation. Rather than stage trauma as spectacle, Morin activated an Indigenous practice of transfer. Fire received the regalia, remade it, and delivered it across relational realms. Loss was addressed through responsibility as opposed to representation.

At the centre of the cycle lay a refusal to separate artistic production from Indigenous knowledge systems. Morin recalled a teaching that the tree calls back to the carver, emphasizing reciprocity as a condition of making. The performances unfolded within a cosmology where materials, tools, ancestors, and land acted as co-creators. Audiences were asked to come closer and to recognize performance as an intersubjective field shaped by breath, rhythm, and presence, not as an object for detached viewing.

The burning of the regalia in This is not a Simple Movement became the project’s defining gesture. It was not an act of destruction but one of renewal and continuity. Song, fire, and movement functioned as Indigenous tools for transformation, operating outside of the extractive logics of the institutions that have historically framed Indigenous art and history. Through these gestures, Morin asserted Indigenous visual sovereignty by locating authority within ceremony, relational accountability, and lived Indigenous law.

The performance cycle demonstrated how Indigenous performance can function simultaneously as ceremony, testimony, and futurity. Memory is activated as relation, and those who never returned home are honoured through movement, song, and the promise of ongoing presence.