TRI News

Nawapon. Ishkodewan. Pìdàban.

The Algonquin words are, no doubt, unfamiliar to many in the Algonquin College community. That will soon change following Monday’s grand opening and official naming of the DARE District courtyard and Indigenous spaces.

“The opening of our Indigenous courtyard is the beginning of a new way here at Algonquin College,” President Cheryl Jensen told more than 200 people – students, faculty, employees, visiting dignitaries, contractors, donors, and community leaders – who turned out to watch Indigenous elders perform fire and water ceremonies and learn the new names.
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The founder of Wawatay Catering spent her childhood as a prep cook, though she didn’t realize it at the time.

“When I was young I helped prepare our seasonal feast which is about two to three times a year,” says Marie-Cécile Nottaway, whose Indigenous catering company is based in the Kitigan Zibi Algonquin First Nation near Maniwaki, Quebec.

That was the way of things in her community, Nottaway says — women prepared the meal, children helped: peeling potatoes and carrots, cutting up meat and onions, making the tea, setting up the tables. “That was your job, you had no choice,” she says.

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Two of Algonquin College’s recent Media and Communications graduates have joined Ottawa’s new Indigenous radio station, ELMNT FM.

Aiden Wolf will hold down the early morning weekday wake-up slot 5:30 a.m., while Kayla Whiteduck, handles the mid-day shift with music and news from noon to 3 p.m.

Whiteduck, a First Nations Algonquin woman from Kitigan-Zibi in Quebec, graduated from Algonquin’s one-year Music Business and Arts program in 2014 and our Broadcasting-Radio program in 2018. She describes herself as a lover of classic rock.
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*For the video interview, click here*

The Algonquin College Marc Maracle attended in 1979 was in many ways the same college that presented him with an honorary degree four decades later. But in at least one way, today’s Algonquin has profoundly changed, he says.

Algonquin remains as great a place to learn as it was when he studied Architecture Technology and Mechanical Systems from 1979 to 1983, says Maracle, Executive Director of the Gignul Non-Profit Housing Corporation. But now it is also a welcoming place for students of diverse backgrounds, and an institution conscious of the values inherent in its name.

When Maracle arrived on the Ottawa campus in 1979, he saw it as an opportunity to experience a bigger world than the Tyendinaga Mohawk reserve community outside Kingston where he grew up.

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There’s a dark-eyed moose. A soaring eagle. Sweetgrass and strawberries. And, not to be ignored, the giant turtle on whose back rides a cluster of birch-bark lodging and a great pine tree – the tree of life.

Welcome to Algonquin College’s latest showcase of Indigenous artwork. Nearly seven months in making, the three storey-high painting depicting Indigenous cosmological symbols is now on display outside the Indigenous Commons in the first floor of the DARE District.

“This (mural) acknowledges the creation story of many Indigenous peoples,” says Ron Deganadus McLester, the College’s Executive Director of Truth, Reconciliation & Indigenization. “It’s definitely a piece that links our shared cosmology.”
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