Ojibways of Onigaming First Nation

• His election is a break with recent Manitoba political history and a continuation of long history of Indigenous involvement in electoral politics in Manitoba.
• A 2019 Act passed by the Manitoba legislature did just that when it named Riel Manitoba’s first premier.
• The title of first Indigenous premier might also go to John Norquay, Manitoba’s elected premier from 1878 to 1887.

Settler colonial order

• Apart from outgoing Conservative Premier Heather Stefanson, all of them have been men.
• This tells us a great deal about the settler colonial order that unfolded in Manitoba in the wake of the Manitoba Act of 1870 (which included the qualification that women could not vote), the dispersal and dispossession of Métis people, the Indian Act of 1876, the development of a reserve system and the creation of a federal system of Indian residential schools in the middle of the 1880s.
• They were in force for part of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.

Change in Manitoba

• He is an Annishinaabeg, a citizen of Onigaming First Nation in the Treaty Three region of northwestern Ontario and the son of a residential school survivor.
• This represents a significant change, but one that has been in the works for some time.
• In government, Kinew will sit alongside seasoned and talented Indigenous legislators, most of them women.

Timbits and hockey

• In a campaign managed by NDP veteran Brian Topp, Manitobans saw a genial, blue-suited Kinew offering Timbits and talking hockey.
• When Kinew took the microphone at the Orange Shirt Day Survivors Walk and Pow Wow in Winnipeg’s downtown hockey arena three days before the election, he was in an orange Blue Bombers shirt.
• The high-octane anti-Indigenous racism represented by the Conservative governments of Stefanson and Pallister appears to be no longer sustainable in Manitoba.