Stirring oratorio pays homage to Indigenous veterans

‘My war wasn’t in Europe. My war was when I came back to Canada and I couldn’t vote until 1962,” says composer Andrew Balfour. He’s paraphrasing a quote by an Indigenous veteran and the inspiration for his oratorio notinikew (i went to war).

Winnipeg to host three-day World Indigenous Business Forum in late October, delegates can expect ‘Manitoba experience’

After playing host to the World Indigenous Business Forum around the world, founder Rosa Walker is bringing the annual conference to her home city for the first time.

Winnipeg will host this year’s event Oct. 26-28. The conference will bring together Indigenous entrepreneurs, leaders, innovators and allies from across the globe to share knowledge, build relationships and explore opportunities for economic growth and collaboration.

Since launching the conference in 2010 in New York City, Walker has held the event in places such as Namibia, Guatemala and New Zealand. This year marks the third time a Canadian city has hosted.

Indigenous Leadership Development Institute, Inc., Walker’s non-profit company, is hosting the conference in collaboration with Winnipeg Economic Development & Tourism.

Shortage of housing for Indigenous seniors in city raising concerns ahead of northern flood, fire evacuations

A small group of women elders is expressing concerns about a lack of urban housing for Indigenous seniors, warning the crisis will only worsen as flood and wildfire evacuations uproot more from their communities.

Decorated footy veterans Scott, Gale spearheading push for NSL club

Three months into her official — and final — retirement, Winnipeg’s own Desiree Scott has a new mission: bringing a Northern Super League team to Winnipeg.

“To continue to grow the game, especially for women and girls, and create those opportunities to inspire them to stick with sports and put Winnipeg on the map,” Scott said in an exclusive interview with the Free Press. “Remind people that we are here, we are the heart of Canada, and we deserve similar opportunities that other provinces are getting.”

The Northern Super League kicks off its second season Friday. The first Canadian women’s pro soccer league marked its inaugural season with off-the-charts success, drawing over 275,000 fans and generating nearly $30 million in league-wide revenue despite its small six-team size. And the league is looking to expand for the first time in 2027.

But while the league itself turns two years old, Scott enlisted veteran footy coach Rob Gale two years prior about the idea of bringing the league to the Keystone province.

‘We finished the foundation’: Northern Soccer League looks to build on first season

For those at the forefront of Canada's first women's professional soccer league, the goalposts are shifting heading into the second season.

Season one was all about launching the Northern Super League, said Diana Matheson, the league's founder and chief growth officer.

Now, on the cusp of season two, the focus shifts from making history to creating a legacy.

“From our perspective at the league and all the clubs, it just feels really, really stable," Matheson said.

Family donates 636 acres of peatlands near Elma to nature conservancy

A Manitoba family is doing their part to support the ecosystem by making a deal with the Nature Conservancy of Canada to protect 636 acres of peatlands in perpetuity.

City failed to read the room before ditching Sals

If ever there were a moment to rethink how governments award contracts, this would be it.

Syrup season in swing

Louise May has been tapping the trees at the St. Norbert Arts Centre for 37 years, extracting the nectar that becomes maple syrup.

May began making syrup as a way to connect with the trees and continue in the footsteps of the Trappist monks who originally planted the maple trees more than a century ago.

Recently, the endeavour has taken a more spiritual turn as May began collaborating with kookum Christine Cyr and sharing the syrup for a strawberry heart medicine used during Sundance ceremonies, which include a four-day fast.

“This is a really powerful medicine,” says Cyr. “It physically and spiritually helps people to get through” the ceremony when it is typically taken on the third day of the fast. At the beginning of the season, community members drummed, sang, and offered tobacco to each tree as May put the taps in.

Report on state of rural Manitoba’s economy ‘exciting work’

Declining municipal populations and workforce-bound immigrants are highlighted in a first-of-its-kind report detailing Manitoba’s rural communities.

After facing the death of its dominant newspaper, Pittsburgh’s media has a surprising turnaround

PITTSBURGH (AP) — In the space of a couple of weeks this spring, Pittsburgh media has lived through a near-death experience and a resurrection.

Owners of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last week announced the newspaper's sale to a nonprofit foundation that said it was committed to keeping it open. A news outlet that predates the U.S. Constitution was due to close on May 3, which would have made the Steel City the nation's largest community without a city-based paper.

Weeks earlier, the alternative Pittsburgh City Paper, whose staff learned on New Year's Day that it was closing after 34 years, roared back to life under new ownership.

They were rare positive developments for a local news industry that has seen its share of the opposite over the past two decades — newsrooms shuttered or thinned out, journalists thrown out of work, consumers drifting away. No one is pretending that a true turnaround will be easy in Pittsburgh. One thing that may help is that the city faced a news abyss and was forced to prepare for it.

Most fashion mannequins are about a size 2. The Met Gala exhibit is making room for diverse bodies

NEW YORK (AP) — On a sultry summer day in Brooklyn last year, artist and couture designer Michaela Stark found herself in a studio surrounded by 175 cameras, for a photo shoot unlike any she’d done before.

Clad only in her signature corsetry that binds the flesh, Stark stood in the midst of a circle as the cameras captured all angles of her body, simultaneously — part of an intricate process known as photogrammetry. The goal: to scan her body and build a mannequin — three, actually — for display in one of the world’s top museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And at the Met Gala, no less.

“It was definitely a bit nerve-wracking,” recalls Stark of the “intimate and vulnerable” experience. But, she quips, “something about being naked on a 40-degree (Celsius) day in a corset that isn’t hiding anything kind of takes the awkwardness away from the situation, actually.”

The mannequins, and others based on real-life models like Stark, will be featured in “Costume Art,” the upcoming spring exhibit at the museum’s Costume Institute that's launched by the starry May 4 gala. It’s part of an effort to add an element of body positivity to a show that examines the dressed body in art over the centuries, says curator Andrew Bolton.

North End vocational school opens ‘cultural learning lab’ creative design studio

A North End warehouse has been converted into a multi-purpose design studio where students can sew ribbon skirts, print 3D models and launch businesses.

The Winnipeg School Division celebrated the grand opening of its Waabishkaa-Makwa Lab last week.

The first-of-its-kind “cultural learning lab” embeds Indigenous teachings into project-based learning activities.

For more than a decade, the 4,500-square-foot space inside R.B. Russell Vocational School had been collecting dust and housing broken equipment.

Rural communities team up to court doctors

A close call that would have seen the Russell emergency department temporarily close has leaders in the area joining forces to entice more doctors to practise in the town.

“At this point in time, it’s becoming a crisis,” said Louise Perreault, who manages both the Lions Manor and Park Manor, home to approximately 40 seniors.

The ER at the Russell Health Centre was set to close for a weekend earlier this month, but the shutdown was avoided at the last minute when a doctor was found.

Currently, only two doctors work in the community, one at the medical centre and another at a local clinic, but the low numbers are creating concern for many in the area, located roughly 350 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg.

Long-term data lacking about the religiosity of Gen Z

There’s been lots of media attention recently about the idea of youth religious revival — that young people, especially those from Gen Z, are flocking to church.

It all started in April last year, when the Bible Society in the United Kingdom shared the results of a poll it commissioned from YouGov, a prominent online marketing organization. That poll showed a 16 per cent increase in church attendance in the U.K. by young people ages 18-24.

This was, the Bible Society contended, “dramatic” proof of a “quiet revival” among youth in that country.

Skeptics quickly pushed back. The reason it was “quiet,” they said, was because there was no other poll, including those done by the U.K. Anglican and Catholic churches themselves, that had found anything like the Bible Society’s results. Not only that, they pointed out that anyone who visited most any church on a Sunday morning could see for themselves how few young people were in attendance.

Ritual of remembrance: Saying names aloud keeps memories of Holocaust victims alive

On a designated spring morning for more than three decades, members of Winnipeg’s Jewish community, representatives of other faith communities, high school students and local government officials have met near the Holocaust Memorial on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislature to take turns reading aloud the names of men, women and children whose lives ended more than 80 years ago.

The reading of the names is the main component of Unto Every Person There is a Name, a program organized and hosted by the League for Human Rights of B’nai Brith Canada for Holocaust Remembrance Day. That day, which commemorates the six million Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide, fell this year on April 14.

“Six million is a staggering number,” says Ruth Ashrafi, B’nai Brith Canada’s regional director for Manitoba. “It is hard to fully comprehend the scale of the killings. Reading the names of the individuals out loud, together with the location of their murder — and in the case of children their age of death — puts a human face on this number. ”

This year’s event was chaired by Winnipegger Rob Berkowits, a second-generation Holocaust survivor who has been one of the name readers since the program’s inception in 1990.

Flora Luna: entre confidences musicales et rayonnement vers l’Est

Dans l’ordre, à la fin du mois de mars, Geneviève Freynet, connue sous le nom d’artiste de Flora Luna, avait annoncé sa signature avec Indica Records, un label indépendant basé à Montréal.

Fondé en 1997, Indica Records présente une variété de genres musicaux allant du rock/punk/alternative sur laquelle le label a été fondé, incluant le folk, mais aussi la pop, l’indie, la musique du monde et l’électro/rock.

Indica Records s’occupera spécifiquement du booking pour Flora Luna. Cela veut dire notamment la réservation et l’organisation des spectacles de l’artiste.

“L’idée, c’est qu’ils me réservent des spectacles et des tournées, surtout au Québec, et potentiellement en Europe, et un peu en Ontario aussi. Leur centre d’attention, c’est vraiment le Québec, alors oui, j’ai hâte,” précise Geneviève Freynet.

Manitoba puts up $4 million to protect Seal River watershed

Six years after a coalition of four northern Manitoba First Nations banded together to conserve the province’s last major undammed river, the Seal River watershed is “on the cusp” of permanent protection.

On Friday, the Seal River Watershed Alliance and the provincial and federal governments released a joint proposal to designate the 50,000-square-kilometre ecosystem — one of the world’s largest intact watersheds — as an Indigenous Protected and Conserved Area.

“This announcement is an absolutely historic moment in time where we have all different levels of government (and) … the nations coming together to preserve some of the most beautiful areas in the world,” Manitoba Environment Minister Mike Moyes said Friday.

“I am so proud to be part of a government that is moving forward on this historic agreement that is going to protect seven per cent of Manitoba.”

Wooden elevator reduced to rubble after towering over Austin for 75 years

With the demolition of the wooden grain elevator in Austin, a community about 130 kilometres west of Winnipeg, the Manitoba Historical Society estimates there are only 114 such structures remaining in the province.

Supervised drug consumption site will be grounded in culture, compassion: facility’s leader

Winnipeg’s first supervised consumption site is being designed as a culturally grounded health space where people struggling with addiction will be met with familiarity, dignity and support from the moment they enter.

Indigenous Winnipeggers undercounted, underserved: report

Winnipeg’s First Nations and Métis population may be vastly undercounted, raising questions about how governments fund services for Indigenous communities, a new report says.

The new estimate, contained in the “Our Health Counts First Nations & Métis Winnipeg” report, says the population could be four times larger than what was recorded by the 2021 census. The report pegs the population of First Nations and Métis people in Winnipeg at between 248,000 and 379,000 people based on its survey of 1,090 adults and 306 children, most of whom identified as First Nations or Métis.

In contrast, the 2021 census recorded 90,000 Indigenous people in the city.

The study was produced by a partnership of the Aboriginal Health and Wellness Centre of Winnipeg, the Well Living House Action Research Centre, and Indigenous health organizations.

False information, misleading images rife in Manitoba-based AI-driven 'news' service

In a rapidly evolving media landscape, the rise of Boring News, an AI-generated news outlet, highlights the growing tension between technology and journalism. While it aims to fill local news gaps across Canada, the outlet is plagued by inaccuracies and ethical concerns, prompting debate on the future of credible reporting.

First Nations chiefs call for inquiry into RCMP after CBC report on surveillance

OTTAWA - First Nations leaders called on the RCMP to apologize and demanded a federal inquiry Thursday after CBC reported the police service spied on Indigenous political leaders in the 1960s and beyond.

CBC Indigenous uncovered some 6,000 pages of internal RCMP documents that indicate the RCMP was monitoring Indigenous political activity as early as 1968.

The CBC report said police targeted future national chiefs Noel Starblanket, David Ahenakew, Georges Erasmus and Phil Fontaine. CBC Indigenous reported that Ovide Mercredi, who also went on to serve as national chief, was mentioned in the files.

Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs Grand Chief Kyra Wilson said the RCMP should apologize directly to community members, on their own territories, by the end of the year for the "Native extremism" program.

U.S. leads spike in applications for Canadian citizenship by descent

OTTAWA - Interest in Canadian citizenship by descent among citizens in a handful of countries — especially the United States — surged after the federal government passed a new law clarifying the rules.

C-3, which took effect on Dec. 15, 2025, allows someone born outside Canada before that date to a Canadian parent who also was born outside Canada to file a citizenship claim. Anyone born or adopted on or after Dec. 15, 2025 can make a claim as long as the parent, who was also born or adopted abroad, spent at least three years in Canada before their child's birth or adoption.

The law was drafted and passed in response to a 2023 Ontario Superior Court order that found a law on citizenship by descent passed by Stephen Harper's government was unconstitutional.

That Harper-era law said Canadians who were born abroad could only pass down their citizenship if their children were born in Canada.