Trustees get the name right for new school

Local public school board trustees have jumped from a failing grade to gold star status by changing the name of the city’s newest school to honour Indigenous heritage.

Seven months ago, trustees rejected a recommendation from their own committee to name the Hunter Street East school Shining Waters Public School. Instead it chose East City Public School.

“Shining Waters” would have been a compromise — not a clearly identifiable Indigenous name, but one that reflected the entwined history of First Nation and settler communities in the Kawartha region.

Kawartha is an anglicized version of the Anishinaabe root words ka (water) and wasa (shining). Hence Shining Waters, which was praised as an inspired choice by representatives of Hiawatha First Nation.

A submission from Curve Lake First Nation favoured using an actual Anishinaabe word in the name, Kaa-Waa-Tee Public School.

East City Public School was the single most popular choice among 52 suggestions received from the public, but those 12 votes represented less than 25 per cent of the total.

It was highly disappointing, as we said at the time, that trustees chose to reject any attempt to recognize the Indigenous community in the school’s name. While the board can rightly point to work it has done inside schools to introduce Indigenous history and literature, naming a school is a bolder step and a strong public statement.

There was also considerable community criticism of the name, most of it directed at the lost opportunity to make good in a meaningful way on the board’s commitment to diversity and reconciliation.

Fortunately, trustees have listened. Discussion of the name did not end with that wrong-headed decision last April.

Two months later, representatives of the Kawartha Truth and Reconciliation Support Group and the Community Race Relations Committee of Peterborough came to the board with a compromise suggestion: Kaawaate East City Public School.

That request dropped back into the board’s committee system and what eventually popped out was this week’s vote to adopt that cross-cultural name.

We had agreed that Shining Waters was an inspired name, combining the two histories in a metaphorical way as described by the Knowledge Keepers from Hiawatha First Nation: “The name provides an opportunity for depth in terms of life force, the necessity of life as in water is to the Kawarthas as education is to KPR — essential and important (like the Trent Severn waterway). The beam of light in the eye of a student who has just understood course or unit material is as shining as the morning sun cascading over the waters in the Kawarthas!”

There was no explicit recognition of Indigenous language or culture, but it was better than East City Public School.

Kaawaate East City Public School is a much better and stronger compromise. In the end it was reached at least in part because the Reconciliation Support Group called on the board to honour its own diversity and reconciliation policies.

“True reconciliation comes with a price and naming a place, street, or building such as this new school, would be a beginning of the healing process. In Peterborough, this means making visible the Indigenous communities where currently there are no acknowledgments of them in the public physical sphere.”

The price is small in this case, and the benefit big. Congratulations to school board trustees for agreeing.