Canada's Heart — where the Red and Assiniboine Rivers meet, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights rises in glass and alabaster, and Winnipeg's brutal winters and brilliant summers forge a fiercely creative city with the country's most vibrant Indigenous arts scene
Winnipeg is the capital of Manitoba and the geographic centre of Canada — a prairie city at the confluence of the Red River and Assiniboine River that was the hub of the 19th-century fur trade and the proving ground of the Hudson's Bay Company. The Forks, where the two rivers meet, has been a gathering place for Indigenous peoples for 6,000 years and is now a historic market, museum hub, and winter skating river trail. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights (opened 2014), designed by Antoine Predock in translucent alabaster and glass, is North America's only museum dedicated to the evolution of…
The confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers was the most important meeting point in the northern Great Plains — Anishinaabe, Cree, Dakota, and Assiniboine peoples gathered here for trade and diplomacy for millennia before European contact. The fur trade post of Fort Gibraltar (1807) and Fort Douglas (1812) made the site a flashpoint for the Pemmican War between the North West Company and Hudson's Bay Company, culminating in the Seven Oaks Incident (1816). Louis Riel, the Métis leader, led two resistances (1869–70, 1885) from Winnipeg that forced the Canadian government to create the prov…