Winnipeg, Provincial capital of Manitoba.

The Canadian Museum For Human Rights.

Winnipeg is very much a mixture of the old and the new, for thousands of years the native Indians have met here to Pow-wow and to trade between tribes. Nowadays it is the capital of Manitoba, set in the plains, a rather more agricultural area than we have seen before.

The Forks is the old and the new meeting place, so called because it is th e junction of the Red and the Assiniboine rivers, where the tribes met and both the Hudson Bay Company and the North West Company had their trading posts on either side of the rivers.

In the middle of the 19th century the railway took over the area, but, while they still have a lesser presence here most of their old buildings have been taken over by shops and restaurants in a revival of the open spaces.

The is a large French population here, indeed almost everyone we heard was speaking French. Just across the river is the French Quarter, and we visited the Cathedral there.There are two Dioceses in Winnipeg, this one is French. and the stone building above was the fifth to have been built here since 1818. Unfortunately it was burnt down in 1968, leaving just a shell, and the new smaller Cathedral was  erected inside, in a very modern style.

Indian Pow-wows still take place in this arena once a year, and was the centrepiece for the National Aboriginal day that took place here just a few days before we arrived.

The Red River

Part of the garden at the Cathedral

A model of the 1905 Cathedral

The altar, very plain and simple.

Winnipeg's skyline, and the ultra modern footbridge across Red River.