Drivers going along the recently renamed Abinojii Mikanah got a glimpse of the first official signs bearing the new name.
City of Winnipeg crews were at the intersection with St. Mary’s Road, installing the first overhead sign, more than a year after city council voted to change the name of the former Bishop Grandin Boulevard, along with Grandin Street and Bishop Grandin Trail.
All three bear the name of Bishop Vital-Justin Grandin, one of the early advocates for Canada’s residential school system.
Council voted for the change in March 2023 as an act of reconciliation with Indigenous people. The name Abinojii Mikanah means “children’s way” in Anishinaabemowin.
Public works crews are starting with changing overhead signs, then moving on to the street name signs. The work is expected to take until next month.
Grandin Street in St. Boniface was changed to Tapweewin Way, meaning “truth” in Michif, the ancestral language of the Red River Métis.
Bishop Grandin Trail, the active transportation path adjacent to Abinojii Mikanah, was officially renamed to Awasisak Mēskanôw, which means “children’s road” in Cree.
A formal renaming ceremony with Indigenous elders will be held in June.
Winnipeg Transit’s schedule and route map will reflect the new names when it releases its summer schedule on June 16.
In the late 1800s, Bishop Vital-Justin Grandin lobbied the federal government to fund the construction of residential schools, which resulted in Indigenous children being torn from their families and stripped of their identities in what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission declared as a cultural genocide in its final report in 2015.
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.