Manaajitoon Aki Apane: An Ogimaa Mikana Walking Tour

Formerly Queen St. West and McCaul St., Toronto

In late 2012, Hayden King (Anishinaabe, Gchi’mnissing) and I co-founded Ogimaa Mikana, an arts collective focused on intervening in public space with Anishinaabemowin. Our first intervention, and the project more broadly, is a tribute to the women leaders of the Idle No More movement, one of the most visible Indigenous resistance movements of my adulthood. Idle No More is a movement where Indigenous folks and allies took to streets, shopping malls, highways, and bridges and not only protested, but round-danced — the round dance being an open ceremony, a dance of healing and remembering, a dance of sociality and connection.

Formerly Indian Rd. and Bloor St. West, Toronto

Ogimaa Mikana works from a number of objectives. The first is to remind non-Indigenous people that they are on Indigenous land and that Indigenous people are still here. The second objective of the project is to reach out to and communicate with other Anishinaabeg and to make them feel at home in the city. We seek to reaffirm the movement of Indigenous peoples through cities both historically and in a contemporary context. We seek to reassert the freedom of Indigenous people to move through cities, and to reclaim space for our Anishinaabeg nationhood — because we have the right to be on the land in whatever capacity we choose, whether it’s the bush or the city.

Formerly Queen’s Park, Toronto

There is no revitalization of Anishinaabemowin without active engagement with each other, without talking to each other. So, within the Ogimaa Mikana project, we work as a collective, and not as just as individual artists. In this way, when working together, we are learning together and forming a community of learners.

You will notice in this plaque the word nitashiike. Nitashiike can be translated to “community.” It was taught to me by the late Alex McKay (Anishinaabe from Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug), who, along with Connor Pion, helped us with the language on this sign. Nitashiike comes from the verb dazhiike, which means “s/he/singular they who takes time, spends time, stays in a certain place.” So, for Anishinaabeg, community isn’t a noun, but a verb. It doesn’t only mean a group of people living in the same place or experiencing a feeling of fellowship with others, but that you have spent time in a certain place.

In solidarity with Honour the Apology, Toronto

On July 25, 2013, Idle No More supported the Honour the Apology Day of Action, which called on the Federal Government to honour its 2008 apology to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit survivors of the residential school system. This action was in response to the published research by historian Ian Mosby, which found that First Nations children in residential schools were unknowing and nonconsensual subjects to medical experiments in malnourishment and hunger by government officials.1 Anishinaabemowin revitalization is always connected to the immeasurable harms of the residential school system and its effect on intergenerational transmission of language. And so we offered this prompt, this call: Gwayakochigeg! Make it right!

Don’t be shy to speak Anishinaabemowin when it’s time, Barrie

While the diminishment of Indigenous languages is nearly universal, research indicates it is accelerated in urban areas. With the increased movement of Indigenous people into urban areas we see the decrease of Indigenous languages spoken daily in the home. The intersection of these two challenges — intergenerational transmission of language and the decrease of Indigenous languages spoken in urban areas — is something that Ogimaa Mikana cares deeply about. This is a billboard we installed in August of 2015 in Barrie, Ontario. This was our first piece that utilized this kind of commercial space. It reads: “Gego ghaazagwenmishkin pii wii Anishinaabeyin,” meaning “Don’t be shy to speak Anishinaabemowin.” This was a reference to the residential school system and its effect on us as survivors and intergenerational survivors. And a call to action to start speaking.

Animikii-waajiw, Thunder Bay

There is a continuity of Anishinaabe life on this land. Which is not to say that the land isn’t changed. Animikii-waajiw is a place where the thunderbirds land, so it is a very special place.

In the late 19th century it was renamed Mount McKay after a Scottish free trader who lived in the area. This billboard was installed next to a Tim Hortons within sight of the mountain, down the street from a high school with a large population of Indigenous students. Brock Pitawanakwut writes that our sacred stories “exemplify” our adaptability and resilience as a people to recreate ourselves in new spaces while remaining rooted in Anishinaabe tradition and values.”2 I see this work as a reclamation of the Anishinaabe name for the mountain, an affirmation of the spiritual relationship the Anishinaabeg have to the thunderbirds, and the refusal of our extingushment through revitalization.

Anishinaabe manoomin inaakonigewin gosha, Peterborough

Long before a state called Canada and long before that state enacted an extraction-based economy on our lands that made settlers rich enough to have cottages and recreational boating, the Anishinaabeg made lives along the water. Manoomin was planted, harvested, danced, and feasted and was and still is connected to our health, spirituality, governance, sociality, and education. Dams were built, lands stolen and sold, cottages built, and waters polluted, but as the billboard states, Wild rice is Anishinaabe law and this has not changed.

Besho Omaa Daawag Igo Anishinaabeg, all over the world

Far from a benign form of greeting, the history of the postcard in Canada is both historically and contemporarily problematic. The ubiquity of the postcard accompanied the evolution of Canadian colonial expansion, first through the railroad and the deployment of treaty commissioners with a newly created national police force. All of which contributed to the alienation of Indigenous peoples from their lands. Meanwhile, the postcard in Canada invited settlers to populate that newly emptied “natural” landscape. Still today, the visual imagery depicted on a typical Canadian travel postcard preserves a mythology of a country free of the violence it perpetuates. Kim Ennis notes in “Postcards from the Prairie: A Settlement Discourse” that, “from their earliest proliferation, postcards were in the service of national fantasies,”3 fantasies that are predicated on Indigenous possession. We created these postcards for Grow Op 2017, the annual exhibition that engages conceptual responses to art, ecology, and the environment. Viewers were invited to take the postcards and mail them out. The Ogimaa Mikana postcards allude to both a past and a future: a past/future in which Anishinaabe people had/have the capital, mobility, and freedom to make and reimagine the world in our own language, to reclaim our narrative, and to reinsert ourselves in the landscape.

Weweni Bizindan, Toronto

Holding up the Gardiner Expressway, one of the busiest pieces of transportation infrastructure in Toronto, bents provide a surface for an Anishinaabe poem in the form of a large-scale public art installation. Weweni Bizindan is a poem and a dialogue with eight of the bents under the Gardiner Expressway that prompts viewers to listen with care as an action of deep reciprocity and learning.

“The street” has been the home of the practice of Ogimaa Mikana since we began. From our initial interventionist actions replacing street signs and historical plaques to banner drops from Gardiner overpasses and billboards in Tim Hortons parking lots, our work has been performed and enacted on and with the street. Each of these examples speaks to the heart of our practice: reclaiming urban space for Anishinaabe language and life. How can we use these connective, transitional, and highly public spaces to forge new relationships, make necessary noise, and collectively enact change? What do we borrow from these spaces, and what do we offer back to them?

All photographs taken by Susan Blight and appear courtesy of the artists, Ogimaa Mikana.


  1. Ian Mosby, “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952,” Histoire sociale / Social History 46, no. 1 (2013): 145-172. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/his.2013.0015. ↩︎
  2. Brock Pitawanakwat, “Anishinaabemodaa Pane Oodenang—A Qualitative Study Of Anishinaabe Language Revitalization As Self-Determination In Manitoba And Ontario,” PhD diss., (University of Victoria, 2009). ↩︎
  3. Kim Ennis, “Postcards from the Prairie: A Settlement Discourse”, Wish You Were Here: Saskatchewan Postcard Collections, https://digital.scaa.sk.ca/postcards/settlement. ↩︎

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