In ‘Wînipêk,’ an Affirming Indigenous Vision for the Future

• Wînipêk: Visions of Canada from an Indigenous Centre
• Niigaan Sinclair
• McClelland & Stewart (2024)

Some years ago, the British fantasy writer China Miéville published a novel, The City & the City, about two cities that somehow occupy the same space. The people in each city have been trained from childhood to ignore or “unsee” the people in the other. Recognizing the existence of the others and their city can have dire consequences.

Niigaan Sinclair writes about two very real cities, Winnipeg and Wînipêk, that also occupy the same space. Sinclair is Anishinaabe (St. Peter’s/Little Peguis) and a professor and the graduate chair of Indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba. In his 2024 book Wînipêk: Visions of Canada from an Indigenous Centre, Sinclair shows how Winnipeg has often tried to unsee Wînipêk, and he is determined to break it of that habit. With good reason: in the real world, dire consequences result from failure to see the other city and its people.

“Wînipêk is an ethic,” Sinclair writes, “a term that gestures to the creation of delicate and intricate collaborations between all things; a process where forces — good and bad — come together to form relationships that flow into the world. Wînipêk is the culmination of the connections Earth, water, air and people and a reminder how each must be in balance for life to thrive.”

Sinclair has been writing a column for the Winnipeg Free Press since 2018, and this book is a selection of those columns. In addition to his work as a University of Manitoba professor, the former high school teacher frequently appears on CBC as a political commentator. As a columnist he draws on his other roles, with sharp political analysis and a good teacher’s ability to explain complex and unfamiliar information.

Two different visions

Each column is both a comment on the news and a mini-lesson on the interactions of Winnipeg and Wînipêk. We learn about individuals and groups, successes and failures. But they’re not seen just from the Winnipeg point of view; the people of Wînipêk have their own take, and readers must consider both.

Often the take involves subtle meanings of Anishinaabe terms, which Sinclair uses and explains with lived-in expertise. So we learn that Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew’s first name, Wabanakwut, means “early morning grey cloud,” a particular colour “that cries with it a sense of wisdom, dignity and honour — like the colour hair becomes when turning old.” And his last name means “golden eagle”; Sinclair explains that “wearing an eagle feather means trying to see as eagles do; from the highest, viewing a territory without divisions like race, gender or class and trying to envision a place where humans, animals, birds, fish, Earth, water and sky can all work together.”

I have collegial admiration for Sinclair’s skill at setting up a situation, exploring it and wrapping it up with a conclusion I was not expecting.

Like any good teacher, Sinclair knows the value of surprise: we learn best when we learn something completely new and unexpected. So when he turns to history, he surprises me with an account of a major Indigenous meeting of 10,000 people that established peace across a region including what are now Ontario, Manitoba, North Dakota, South Dakota, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Sinclair describes how two Elders told an archeologist about it in 1988; they explained that it was a very old story, going back about 700 years. The archeologist was able to confirm that at least nine different cultures had met at the Forks, in what’s now downtown Winnipeg, and left pottery shards that identified them. The shards all dated to about the year 1285, when King Edward I ruled England.

Sinclair is too good a teacher to impose his own conclusions on this finding. He leaves it to his readers to think through the implications. In 1285, King Edward was waging wars in Wales and Scotland. Meanwhile, at least nine nations in central North America were conducting high-level diplomacy affecting a larger area than western Europe.

They had good reason: a megadrought had reduced food production and aggravated conflict over dwindling resources. It must have been an extraordinary feat of long-distance communications (and logistics) to bring thousands of people together long enough to frame and agree to a peace treaty. And the event was remembered through seven centuries of storytelling.

But settler culture defines history as written, and prehistory as preliterate and therefore backward. So we know far more about a medieval chieftain named Edward I than we do about a conclave of Indigenous diplomats and soldiers working for years through multiple languages to reach a peace agreement.

Sinclair’s historical vision sees the Europeans as just another group: “Canada wasn’t built by England and France but hundreds, even thousands of communities, with Europeans arriving at an already bustling feast. English and French communities are just two new groups who entered Kanata. They aren’t the entire village. Canada is a place of fantasy, a place we have been taught to see, an illusion that distracts from what lies underneath. Kanata is a place of reality.”

The power of Indigenous science

Settler culture prides itself on its scientific knowledge and dismisses the very idea of Indigenous science. But Sinclair is absolutely right to argue for an Indigenous science. Early European settlers recognized the value of Indigenous knowledge, but their descendants preferred to describe it as mere folklore and legend, a sentimental spirituality rather than a coherent body of knowledge.

Yet all over the Americas, Indigenous Peoples rigorously studied their environments — after all, their lives depended on it. Without a scientific attitude, without experimentation and careful analysis, teosinte would still be a family of Mexican grasses and not corn. Comparable expertise developed the potato and the highly nutritious combination of corn, squash and beans as a staple diet.

So Indigenous scientists became master agronomists and horticulturalists, observers of the life cycles of bison, salmon and forests. Indigenous people were skilled seafarers: the first European contacts with the Maya, Inca and Haida were all at sea. Indigenous urban planners designed huge cities, and Indigenous engineers built them. They could keep track of time and calculate calendars far into the future.

And with the exception of a very few cultures like the Maya, these scientific achievements were made without reading or writing. Indigenous engineers built irrigation systems and cities while doing the math in their heads. Elders taught children without benefit of blackboards, calculators or textbooks. Instead, Indigenous teachers and students must have had prodigious powers of expression, listening, comprehension and memorization. Otherwise, hard-won knowledge would have been lost in a generation or two — as much of it was indeed lost in the pandemics that swept the Americas after the arrival of the Europeans.

It took centuries of “unseeing” for settler cultures to relegate Indigenous cultures to the status of “savages.” European nations signed treaties with Indigenous nations, but the very concept of an Indigenous nation was soon unseen and the treaties forgotten.

Wînipêk is an introduction to Indigenous culture that should make Winipeggers (and everyone else) realize how much they’ve lost, and how much they can still gain, by actually seeing and engaging with the peoples they once dismissed. Once that happens, Wînipêk can never be unseen again.