In October, 2024, LWF’s executive director Alexis Kanu sat down with columnist and author Niigaan Sinclair, to discuss his new collection of essays published by McClelland and Stewart.

AK: You open the book by defining Wînipêk as “a term that gestures to the creation of delicate and intricate collaborations between all things.”

NS: The first thing is that Wînipêk is not about the city – it’s about the ecological system of Lake Winnipeg. Wînipêk teaches us that everything that falls in the watershed, everything that we do – all the good, the bad, the great, the ugly – flows into Lake Winnipeg. So the challenge is: how do we talk about Wînipêk as an ethic, not a place – a verb, rather than a noun?

AK: You also share lessons about algae, or ataagib, using it as a metaphor for relationships in this place.

NS: Ataagib, of course, are the first inhabitants of this place after the Great Lake Agassiz formed from the glacier. The first real life of this place – our first ancestor – is the ataagib, who then welcomed everybody else in.

Think of it like a chain. The ataagib welcomed in the fish, which welcomed in the other beings that fed on the fish, and eventually you get to humans way over here. And then Indigenous peoples welcomed the newcomers – Europeans, eventually Canadians. And so we've gained all of this knowledge of kinship. And humans get to be the inheritors of all of these different relations. And the Europeans, Canadians, committed to the teachings of Wînipêk, according to the Selkirk treaties. Indigenous peoples are told all the time that we have to recognize colonial law, even if we don't understand it or respect it or agree with it. It’s the same with Canadians: if Canadians signed the Selkirk Treaty, meaning Lord Selkirk signed on behalf of the newcomers, that means that Indigenous law applies in this place. And the Indigenous law is that everything is supposed to work in a reciprocal, mutually beneficial series of relationships.

AK: Now some of these relationships are out of balance. We see more algae on the lake than we have in the past.

NS: Yes. All the relationships are out of balance. Name me a relationship that's in balance. Maybe the ones between non-humans and non-humans – they might be somewhat in balance. But even those ones are messed up because of climate change and because of the violence that we've performed.

AK: How do we get back to balance?

NS: Well, the good news is we don't have to reinvent anything. We just have to follow what we already have. And it's embodied in the term Wînipêk. So if we lived up to that name, if we said, ‘Okay, we're going to commit to that name and we're going to drive our policies and laws based on that idea’, then... We've already maxed out our fracking. We've already maxed out our pig fertilizer. We've already maxed out our dumping sewage into the river system in the City of Winnipeg…

I actually heard someone the other day say that it's illegal for cities to release sewage into the river system in their areas: that would never happen. I was like, ‘come to Winnipeg for 10 minutes.’ There seems to be a leak every single year. And only now are First Nations finally suing the city because they are so irresponsible and let that happen all the time.

AK: Do you have hope that Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous teachings will somehow inform colonial law?

NS: I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever. In fact, I can give you a hundred examples where Indigenous law is ruling the day in our community. Most of them are so normal that we don't even realize they're Indigenous. Here's an example: we all vote, right? We all vote in elections. We all probably have seen a doctor in the past couple of years, especially with COVID. We all have the ability to say whatever we want or put it in the newspaper or just say it online. And we don't have to worry about being punished or killed. And we also have the ability to wear our cultural context in our hair, in our language, in our dress. All of those things that I just named you are Indigenous ideas.

It's very clear that something interesting is happening in Manitoba. There's something unique happening, not in Ontario. Not in Montreal, not in Vancouver or Calgary. These places that are remarkably blasé and status quo, they are thought of as the center of the country. But the fact is that the center of the country isn't in any of those places. The center of the country is in Winnipeg because we are doing something unique here, and it is the vision of Canada. It's what Canada purports itself to be.

And I'm not telling you that we're getting it right all the time. I'm not even telling you that we are consistent on it. What I'm telling you is that it happens more often here than anywhere else, where Canadians and Indigenous peoples look at each other and go, “Oh, I guess we're all in this thing together.”

AK: I really liked the opening words of the book, the Territorial Acknowledgment, where you talk about the statue of the Queen at the legislature and how it was edited by citizens in 2021.

NS: Yes, edited for free. Unfortunately then taken away, though, because it was a remarkable monument as edited.

AK: I want to ask you about generational shifts in thinking, because I noticed in 2021 that your perspective and your dad's perspective were very, very different. And then the perspective of even younger people was different again. But it's those shifts over time that help us imagine better worlds, I think. What are your thoughts on the way that your perspective, your dad's, those of other generations are changing?

NS: The way that I think about it is my dad's generation was the first in every room they went to – boardroom, courtroom, classroom. Every single room they ever went to, they were the first. And so that meant that they encountered all the reasons that Indigenous people were never supposed to be there. My generation, we were first in other ways – we were the first critical mass – the first group of Indigenous teachers, the first group of Indigenous politicians, the first group of Indigenous columnists.

But my daughter's generation, that's where I think things really start to happen. They are the first to create. They’re not going to ask permission. They’re certainly not going to be waiting for approval. They're like ‘we're just going to make it ourselves then. And we're going to do it without anyone getting harmed. We're not going to do it with no violence. We're just going to do it peacefully and make something beautiful.’

I think it just tells you that reconciliation is going to look different every generation. It’s going to involve lots of people with different opinions on how it goes, and all of them are correct.

AK: How do you think young Indigenous people are going to change the face of Canada over the next decade?

NS: The piece that I invite you to read is the piece about the Manitoba Indigenous Youth Award winners. If you look at that group of people, they are a perfect example of what happens when a very educated, very invested, and extremely bright and energetic group of people decide they're going to change things – change the world.

And we have not just those 12 people who are on stage. We have 20,000 of those people in Manitoba, who all turned 18 in 2023. And look what happened. Manitoba chose love.

We have this huge burgeoning class of Indigenous young people who are all reaching working age. And those are the people my father has mentored. My father has mentored all of us to be ready.

When young people become invested, engaged, and educated – especially Indigenous young people – the world changes radically.