Say the name.
Win — muddy. Nippee — water. Say it again. Let the syllables do what they have always done, which is to describe a thing exactly: muddy water, turbid water, the kind of water that holds its secrets.
The Peg. The 4. Winterpeg. Winnerpeg. Chicago of the North. Gateway to the West. Slurpee Capital of the World. Heart of the Continent. Each name a sediment layer in the riverbed — colonial, commercial, ironic, proud — and beneath all of them.
the Cree name and the Anishinaabe name and the Dakota name for a place that was always already here. The traditional lands of the Anishinabe, the Ininew, the Oji-Cree, the Dene, the Dakota — and the Birthplace of the Métis Nation, the Heart of the Métis Homeland. The city has been named by its conquerors and its survivors alike. It answers to all of them. It belongs to none.
The Red and the Assiniboine converge here, carrying everything they've touched upstream.
I sing of you, Win-Nippe. I sing of your mud.
For thousands of years, [the Forks was a meeting place]. Camps, fishing, trade, prayer—where the Red River linked ancient northern and southern peoples all the way down to the Missouri and the Mississippi. Long before the first fort was raised, before the first surveyor's chain was stretched across the prairie, people gathered here.
Then the forts came. Fort Rouge. Fort Gibraltar. Fort Douglas. Fort Garry. The Europeans naming and re-naming, staking claims like flags in a body which already had a name and body. The Hudson's Bay Company. The North West Company. Rival empires fighting over pemmican and fur with territorial fury.
In 1816, the conflict peaked at the Battle of Seven Oaks, the Victory at Frog Plain, where Cuthbert Grant and his Métis horsemen successfully defended Métis rights. The Métis, my people, were always both things at once. French and Cree, Catholic and Indigenous, les gens libres, the free people, unbounded by the categories Europe had brought with it. At Seven Oaks we said we are here. We are a people. This river is ours too.
I sing of you, muddy water. I sing of your persistence.
By 1905, Winnipeg was the fastest-growing city of its size in North America. The Canadian Pacific Railway arrived, and the prairies were split open by tracks like a wound and a promise. More than half of the world's wheat sales were completed at Winnipeg's Grain Exchange by the 1920s. Half the world's bread, weighed and measured and traded at a corner of Main Street, in a city built on a floodplain, in a province whose name means the narrows where the spirit walks. The narrows. The spirit.
Winnipeg is called the Chicago of the North because of its railway connections and its role in the economy of the West. But Chicago had Carl Sandburg and Winnipeg had winter. They say the corner of Portage and Main is the windiest corner in North America.
In 1919, 35,000 workers walked off the job. The streets went quiet. No milk. No bread. No streetcars running. The hello girls who worked the telephone switchboards went silent. Workers were fighting for union recognition, collective bargaining, and "a more equitable share of the wealth of the world." One historian called it the greatest rupture between workers and the upper classes in the history of commercial society, second only to the Paris Commune. The state responded, and the Royal North-West Mounted Police rode into the crowd and fired, killing two, injuring dozens. Bloody Saturday.
But four of the strike's leaders were elected to the provincial legislature in 1920, including men who were still in prison. Their comrades helped found the CCF, forerunner of the NDP. The left did not die in Winnipeg. It went underground, the way rivers do sometimes, and surfaced somewhere else still running.
I sing of you, Heart of the Continent. I sing of your stubbornness.
In 1914, a soldier named Captain Harry Colebourn took a black bear with him to England as his regiment's mascot. He named her Winnie, after his hometown. When he was sent to France, he donated her to the London Zoo, where A.A. Milne's son fell in love with her. She became Winnie the Pooh. One of our most famous exports is a bear and a boy in a Hundred Acre Wood.
My city keeps the cold. The wind. The floodwater rising in spring like a reckoning. The North End, is where women in bright pink vests move through those streets at night handing out food and water, smudging themselves with sage before they go. Women have been preyed upon here, in the epicenter of the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women.
For over a century, Indigenous women's identities have been washed away—deaths normalized, their absence silenced. Memory, remembrance, and placemaking have been essential to reconciling Indigenous women's presence not only in this city, but throughout Canada. The Red River holds the names we haven't said. The muddy water holds what we refuse to see. This is what win-nippe means if you say it long enough, if you sit with it: the water is murky because it carries everything. Loss. Ceremony. Defiance. The Red River Jig and the sound of a throat-song traveling across the Prairies at 3 a.m.
Many Indigenous people consider this place the heart of Turtle Island. Not a gateway. Not a threshold. The heart. The place where blood goes back to and comes out from. The place that doesn't get to leave, that has to keep pumping. That's not a metaphor. That's geography. That's physiology. That is what it means to be the center of a continent that has never agreed on what it owes itself.
I sing of you, Winterpeg. Slurpee Capital of the World. Most sunshine of any city in Canada. I sing of your magnificent, absurd contradictions — colder than most of Siberia and yet you stand there, eating a blue raspberry 7-Eleven Slurpee in February, refusing to be anywhere else.
You were built on a floodplain and you flood. You were built on treaty land and the treaties were broken. You were built on Métis blood and that blood runs in the streets still — in the fiddle music, in the gens libres, in my own veins, which go back to the Red River settlements and the Lamirandes and the Berthelets and the names the land gave to the people before any country existed to record them.
There are cities that announce themselves. Chicago announces. New York announces. Winnipeg does not announce. Winnipeg simply is, in the center of everything, holding the meridian, cracking in the cold, flooding in the spring — named for its muddy water, which is to say: named for its honesty, which is to say: named for the truth that beauty and ruin are the same water, same river, moving in the same direction, toward a lake so vast it has its own weather.
Win-nippe.
Say it like a prayer. Say it like a wound. Say it like the name of someone you love who lives very far away, in a city made of everything that ever happened to this land, which is to say: in a city made of you.
