Regina - geography.

« other welfare agencies, especially in the inner city where indigenous residents are concentrated.

Rates of drug and alcohol addiction and violent crime are high.

Theseproblems are serious everywhere in western Canada, but the situation has also worsened as a result of government cutbacks: The federal government, which hasjurisdiction over Canada’s indigenous population, no longer gives aid to those who have left their reserves to live in cities. VI HISTORY Southern Saskatchewan was once populated by great herds of bison (often called buffalo) and the indigenous nations who hunted them.

By the 1800s these were mainly theCree and Assiniboine nations.

Wascana Creek, which gets its name from the Cree term for “bones” and was originally called Pile O’ Bones Creek in English, was a favoritehunting area.

The name came from the mounds of bones of slaughtered bison on the creek bank.

According to the local story, the Cree built the mounds in the belief thatthe bison would not abandon the remains of their dead. In 1882, as the country’s first transcontinental railway, the Canadian Pacific, was being built across western Canada, the railway company laid out the site of a town nearthe Wascana Creek crossing.

Almost immediately the Canadian government decided to move the headquarters of the North-West Mounted Police (now the Royal CanadianMounted Police) to this new settlement, which was named Regina in honor of Queen Victoria of Britain.

Regina became the capital of the Northwest Territories in 1883, wasincorporated as a city in 1903, and was made the capital of Saskatchewan when the province was created in 1905.

The headquarters of the police force were moved in 1920to Ottawa, the nation’s capital, but the force’s training facility remained in Regina. Regina has been associated with a number of important historical events.

In 1885 Louis Riel, leader of the Northwest Rebellion, was tried for treason and executed there.

In1933 Canada’s newly formed socialist party, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), convened in Regina and issued the Regina Manifesto, a statement of rights for working-class Canadians.

This was followed two years later by the Regina Riot of 1935, which erupted when police tried to arrest the leaders of a group of workers.Traveling through Regina on their way to Ottawa, the workers were protesting the government’s failure to end unemployment during the Great Depression (the worldwideeconomic slump of the 1930s).

In 1961 Saskatchewan’s New Democratic Party, successor to the CCF, adopted the first provincial health plan, marking the beginning ofstate-funded health insurance in Canada. In the 1950s and 1960s Regina’s economy was strengthened by abundant wheat crops, the building of oil refineries and pipelines, and the discovery of large deposits ofpotash at various locations in southern Saskatchewan.

The city grew quickly: areas surrounding Regina were annexed, many large buildings were constructed, and thecentral section was redeveloped.

After a lull caused by a recession, another construction boom began in Regina in the mid-1970s and continued into the early 1980s.

Someof the buildings constructed during this period were the new City Hall, the Saskatchewan Government Insurance Tower, the Bank of Montréal Building, the Ramada Hotel,and the giant Cornwall Centre shopping mall. Contributed By:Peter J.

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