The intersection of Ishpadinaa and Gete-Onigaming will be unfamiliar to most Torontonians. That’s because it’s only a day old. And it doesn’t officially exist.

On Tuesday afternoon, it stood where Spadina and Davenport Rds. once met. The new street signs, camouflaged in official blue and white, were put up by a pair of aboriginal scholars and activists who have been pasting Ojibwe words across the city for more than two years in an attempt to bring the city’s indigenous heritage to public attention.

The project is run by Hayden King, director of the Centre for Indigenous Governance at Ryerson, and Susan Blight, student life co-ordinator at the University of Toronto’s First Nations House.

Inspired by the Idle No More movement in December 2012, they set out to remind the city that it stood on aboriginal land, and that it still has a vibrant aboriginal community, often overlooked in discussions of Toronto’s past and modern identity, they thought.

“The message is that indigenous people were here — are here now,” said Blight, a member of the Couchiching First Nation.

Tuesday’s signs, still posted at press time, were inspired by the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report summary, which found that Canada’s residential school system amounted to cultural genocide.

Blight and King say that by giving prominence to Ojibwe words, they hope to heal some of the damage caused by educational policies that long discouraged the learning of aboriginal language, sometimes violently.

“Ishpadinaa,” for example, is the word on which “Spadina” is based — it means “a place on a hill,” said King, who is from the Beausoleil First Nation.

“Gete-Onigaming” means “at the old portage,” a reference to Davenport Rd.’s history as a trail between the Don and Humber rivers.

“Toronto” itself comes from a Mohawk word, according to aboriginal language scholar John Stackley — “tkaronto,” meaning “where there are trees standing in the water.” The phrase refers to stakes that members of the Huron tribe installed to make fishing weirs where Lake Simcoe meets Lake Couchiching.

Still, King and Blight believe the city “erases” its aboriginal history, which goes back thousands of years and contains its share of abuse and betrayal.

In 1787, the British government bought the land between Etobicoke Creek and Ashbridges Bay from a group of Mississauga chiefs for 10 shillings —$60 in today’s money. Historians now agree that the chiefs believed they were leasing the land, not selling it. In 2010, the Mississauga of New Credit won a $145-million land claim related to the territory.

In 2013, King and Blight pasted a sign onto a plaque outside Queen’s Park that summed up the goal of their project: “We all live on Native territory,” it read. “Welcome to our community. How do you recognize it?”

In an interview Tuesday, Blight said she was fighting the “erasure” of aboriginal language and culture in a city that celebrates its diversity while ignoring the land’s original inhabitants.

“Oftentimes what we see — and these plaques are a good indication of this — is that indigenous people are seen as a blip, a line in a longer colonial history,” she said. “There’s a kind of erasure that happens, and a kind of alienation that happens.”

Asked if she had other locations in mind for future signs, Blight demurred.

“We kind of like the element of surprise,” she said.

Ojibwe street names

Davenport Rd., June 2: Gete-Onigaming (Ge-de-oh-ni-guh-ming), meaning “at the old portage.” Thousands of years ago, Davenport was the shoreline of Lake Ontario, and what is now Davenport Rd. was a trail connecting the Humber and the Don rivers.

Spadina Rd., June 2: Ishpadinaa (ish-pah-di-naw), meaning “a place on a hill.” The Toronto street name is a “bastardization” of this Ojibwe word, King says.

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College St. at Bathurst St., May 2013: Gikinoo‘amaagegaming (gi-gi-no – uh-maw-gay-guh ming), meaning “place of learning.” Intended as a direct translation of “college,” and put up to coincide with the “reclaiming” of Greater Victoria’s Mount Douglas, which the Coast Salish people renamed Pkols, their traditional name for the peak.

Indian Road at Bloor St. W., March 2013: Mikana Anishinaabe (mi-gi-nuh uh-ni-shi-naw-bay), meaning “trail of the Anishinaabe,” the collective name of the Ojibwe, Algonquin and Ottawa peoples. King and Blight wanted to criticize the umbrella term “Indian,” which many find offensive. “We just wanted to say, there’s so such thing as an Indian. There are Anishinaabe people and there are Mohawk people,” King said.

Queen St. at Spadina Ave., January 2013: Ogimaa Mikana (oh-gi-maw mi-gi-nuh), meaning “Leader’s Trail,” in honor of the female leaders of Idle No More, the aboriginal protest movement that began in December 2012. The sign was posted as a tribute to the end of Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence’s six-week hunger strike.