Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. council grants $600K to Algoma University project

The Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. city council voted unanimously this week to support a new $43.4 million project at Algoma University called Makwa Waakaa'igan.

The city will contribute $600,000 to the project over three years.

"This makes total economic sense in my view, it makes total community building sense, and a healthy and prosperous Algoma U translates to a healthy and prosperous Sault Ste. Marie," said Sault Ste. Marie Mayor Matthew Shoemaker during a council meeting on Tuesday, Oct. 10.

Joel Syrette, the Makwa Waakaa'igan project's director, said that while the city's financial support is a small percentage of the money required to complete the project, it was good to have unanimous support from council.

The project, said Syrette, will have its own building on campus, and will have three components.

The first will be to preserve the history and stories of residential school survivors, working closely with the Children of Shingwauk Alumni Association, which represents former students of the Shingwauk and Wawanosh Indian Residential Schools.

Syrette said his grandmother was a former student at the Shingwauk Residential School in Sault Ste. Marie.

"It will also be a state-of-the-art archive that will house many different things in relation to the local history, obviously history from the survivor group," he said about the project.

The second component, said Syrette, will be a focus on cross-cultural learning.

"Culturally focused learning spaces are also going to be forming connections with other culturally focused lifeways and indigenous communities from around the world," he said.

"And it'll really provide a transformative learning experience for our students and the larger community."

Collaboration with NOSM

The third component is a partnership with NOSM University, the northern Ontario medical school with campuses in Sudbury and Thunder Bay.

Through that partnership NOSM will take over the third floor of the new Makwa Waakaa'igan building, where students and researchers will work on mental health and addictions training and research.

Syrette said Algoma originally budgeted $18 million for the project, but costs ballooned after the pandemic.

The university has committed just under $20 million to fund the project, and it has secured $13 million from the federal government's Investing in Canada Infrastructure Program.

Around $10 million from other funding sources are in the final approval stage.

Construction is expected to start in 2024, after a search at the former Shingwauk Indian Residential School, which is located on the Algoma campus, has concluded.