More than a year after first approving the renaming of Winnipeg’s Bishop Grandin Boulevard to Abinojii Mikanah, the city says the signs are finally going to go up.
Council voted unanimously to approve the new name — which means “children’s way” in Anishinaabemowin — on March 23, 2023. But it still required administration to prepare bylaws for the renaming of that thoroughfare as well as Grandin Street in St. Boniface, which is becoming Taapweewin Way, meaning “truth” in Michif, the ancestral language of the Red River Métis.
On Thursday, those bylaws received second and third readings at council, which now allows the city to register them with the land titles office so they legally take effect.
Businesses and property owners will be notified and all signs will begin to change through May and June. Overhead signs will be first, followed by street name signs.
Winnipeg Transit’s schedule and route map will reflect the new names when it releases its summer schedule on June 16.
Bishop Grandin Trail, which is the active transportation path adjacent to the roadway, was officially renamed to Awasisak Mēskanôw, which means “children’s road” in Cree, back in March 2023.
The Indigenous relations division of the city is now working with elders to create new interpretive panels and signs.
The renaming honours the experiences of Indigenous residential and day school survivors, and the children who didn’t make it home, the city said in a news release.
The change will be formally marked by ceremonies guided by elders in June, the release states.
The changes were sparked in 2021 in the wake of unmarked graves being discovered on the grounds of former residential schools across Canada.
In the late 1800s, Bishop Vital-Justin Grandin lobbied the federal government to fund the construction of these schools, which resulted in children being torn from their families and stripped of their identities in what has been decried as a cultural genocide.
The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation has documented the deaths of at least 4,100 Indigenous children at residential schools from the date the first ones opened in the 1870s until the last one closed in 1996.