Put up a plaque

On Friday evening, the annual Mayworks parade took place, a traditional event that opens the month-long Mayworks labour festival. In an historic change, the march tracked a new route that broke from its traditional downtown path and commenced in Joe Zuken Park in Point Douglas, within the long shadow cast by the Vulcan Iron Works buildings across the street.

Decades earlier, within the coal-fired Vulcan Iron Works foundries next to Joe Zuken Park of today, exhausted and impoverished workers walked off the job in demand for the conditions of a better life -- an incident that began the longest and largest general strike to that date in North American history: the Winnipeg General Strike.

Today, the Vulcan Iron Works structures sit silent and derelict. Nothing can be found there yet to indicate this watershed event. As a city steeped in history, including ancient aboriginal meeting spaces and as the centre that opened the West, Winnipeg has an untold wealth of heritage spaces.

We might ask why, so far, we have not long recognized and used them to tell the many tales of who we are.

SHIRLEY KOWALCHUK

Winnipeg