Human harmony: new school to receive Indigenous name

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This article was published 21/07/2023 (815 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The namesake for north Winnipeg’s newest elementary school is an Anishinaabemowin phrase that celebrates what it means to be human and live in harmony in an interconnected world.

École Mino Pimatisiwin School is slated to open in Aurora at North Point, an up-and-coming suburb near the intersection of McPhillips Street and Murray Avenue, in September 2025.

Trustees voted unanimously in support of the Indigenous title — the first of its kind in the Seven Oaks School Division, and one of only a handful of public schools in the province named in a language other than English — at a spring meeting.

“When I was asked to name it, no other phrase came to mind but that; for me, this is the greatest honour,” said Mary Courchene, a longtime elder-in-residence for the division in which nearly 12,000 students learn in classrooms located everywhere from Garden City to West St. Paul.

Mino Pimatisiwin is a sacred concept that translates to “the good life” in Algonquian languages including Ojibwa and Cree.

For Courchene, it means living in a holistic way that prioritizes respectful relationships with other human beings and living forms of all kinds.

The career educator from Sagkeeng First Nation called the namesake “an excellent fit,” citing the division’s growing Indigenous student population and its commitment to both Indigenizing programming and putting a spotlight on First Nations, Métis and Inuit perspectives.

City school boards have historically labelled facilities after landmarks and famous figures — many of whom held views not in line with modern-day values and, as a result, have sparked renaming debates in recent years.

Community members packed the Seven Oaks boardroom in January 2020 to call on trustees to give the then-yet-to-be-opened École Templeton an Indigenous name, in the spirit of reconciliation.

Leaders stuck with their original proposal. At the time, elected officials indicated a longstanding tradition of naming buildings after the street they are on or surrounding area, and deferred naming practices to a policy committee.

Chairwoman Maria Santos said the board’s newest addition is a dual-track kindergarten-to-Grade 8 building at 140 Mira Gate, and said her hope is Mino Pimatisiwin will be more than just a name and shape the culture of the community it serves.

“That’s what we want for all students — we want them to live a good life,” Santos said. “It fits everyone. Everyone can relate to it, no matter what culture you are, what ethnic group you belong to.”

A 2017 analysis of titles across the Winnipeg School Division found the overwhelming majority of inner-city buildings honoured people and more often than not, men who were missionaries, political leaders, war heroes or a combination of the above.

Katya Adamov Ferguson, who undertook the research as part of her graduate thesis at the University of Manitoba, concluded three of 80 schools made connections to Indigenous peoples or concepts.

The North End’s Niji Mahkwa School is among them. The alternative public N-8 school was named after the Anishinaabemowin phrase, “my friend the bear,” or “brother, sister bear,” in the mid-1990s.

Reflecting on the early days of her career, Courchene said she never would have imagined public school students and staff proudly learning and working in a school labelled after an Ojibwa concept when she took her first teaching job in 1974.

The elder-in-residence was barred from speaking her mother tongue when she was taken to residential school. The overt racism she was subject to as a child did not disappear once she entered the workforce, Courchene said.

Decades later, the prospect of a school title celebrating Anishinaabemowin is symbolic, emotional and brings about a sense of peace, she said.

“It means the beginning of acceptance, of acknowledgement of the first peoples that were here in this part of the planet,” Courchene added. “We are being accepted, and we’ve waited a heck of a long time for that acceptance.”

About 17 per cent of Seven Oaks student population, and roughly 12 per cent of staff members, self-identify as Indigenous.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @macintoshmaggie