Dr. Erin Millions. Photo provided.
University of Winnipeg Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Erin Millions will be helping the City of Winnipeg reconsider the names of historical places and monuments.
She has been appointed to the newly formed Welcoming Winnipeg Committee of Community Members, which has been set up to review applications and make recommendations to Council on the creation, removal, or renaming of place names and historical markers.
By taking part in this committee, Millions hopes she’ll be able to help increase awareness and understanding of the city’s Indigenous histories.
Both of these projects provide me understandings of landscape, place, and history that underwrite my contributions to the Welcoming Winnipeg Committee
Dr. Erin Millions
“Winnipeg is, and has always been, an Indigenous space,” she said. “These histories are already inscribed on our cityscape in names like Pembina Highway, Bunn’s Creek Park, Chief Peguis Trail, John Pritchard School, and Bannatyne Avenue, but most Winnipeggers don’t understand the connections between those names and our shared histories.”
Millions is a historian whose research focuses on Indigenous histories and histories of colonialism.
She is currently working with Dr. Mary Jane Logan McCallum on the CIHR-funded project, Indigenous Histories of Tuberculosis in Manitoba, 1930s-1970s, as the Project Leader of the Manitoba Indigenous Histories Tuberculosis Photo Project (@tbphotoproject). She is also working on a separate research project focusing on Métis families and their history in Red River and Western Canada in the mid-nineteenth century.
“Both of these projects provide me understandings of landscape, place, and history that underwrite my contributions to the Welcoming Winnipeg Committee,” she said.
Millions is looking forward to putting her background in Canadian and Indigenous histories to use for the community, taking her cues from Indigenous scholars, leaders, Elders, and Knowledge Keepers.
“My work as a historian has always included educating the general public about Indigenous peoples and histories through public talks, teaching, social media, public history, and community engagement,” she said. “I would like to help Indigenous Peoples in Winnipeg see their histories reflected in street names, green spaces, and monuments and plaques in all parts of the city, and to help the non-Indigenous community better understand Winnipeg’s Indigenous past and present.”
