[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto street signs a reminder of First Nations heritage"

[rfmcdonald]

The Toronto Star's Eric Andrew-Gee describes an interesting local implementation of a national initiative to remind people of their streets' First Nations origins.

The intersection of Ishpadinaa and Gete-Onigaming will be unfamiliar to most Torontonians. That’s because it’s only a day old. And it doesn’t officially exist.

On Tuesday afternoon, it stood where Spadina and Davenport Rds. once met. The new street signs, camouflaged in official blue and white, were put up by a pair of aboriginal scholars and activists who have been pasting Ojibwe words across the city for more than two years in an attempt to bring the city’s indigenous heritage to public attention.

The project is run by Hayden King, director of the Centre for Indigenous Governance at Ryerson, and Susan Blight, student life co-ordinator at the University of Toronto’s First Nations House.

Inspired by the Idle No More movement in December 2012, they set out to remind the city that it stood on aboriginal land, and that it still has a vibrant aboriginal community, often overlooked in discussions of Toronto’s past and modern identity, they thought.

“The message is that indigenous people were here — are here now,” said Blight, a member of the Couchiching First Nation.