Streets Named After Us

A HERITAGE MISSISSAUGA PROFILE ON LORI OUIMETTE 

WRITTEN BY: MEGHAN MACKINTOSH

Lori Ouimette grew up on Seneca Avenue in Port Credit, walking to school past streets named Cayuga and Mohawk. As a child, she noticed the Indigenous names without fully understanding them. They suggested a presence she could feel but not yet place.

“It was like there was a hint of who was here,” she says. “But not the full understanding.”

She was raised in Mississauga. She went to local schools, rode city buses, and spent her summers at neighbourhood parks and festivals. She belonged to the city in all the ordinary ways. What she did not have, growing up, was visible Indigenous community around her. She knew she was Indigenous, but she did not yet know what that meant in practice.

The Chippewas of Nawash First Nation is the reserve where her family is from. Her parents left their home communities young, met in Toronto, and settled in Mississauga before she was born. She did not grow up on a reserve. Like many Indigenous families who moved into cities in the decades after the Second World War, hers was shaped by work, movement, and assimilation.

“I always joke that I was a perfectly assimilated Indian,” she says. “Growing up here, there was nobody like me.”

Lori at Adamson Estate in Mississauga on the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, September 30, 2021.

Growing Up in the City

Lori attended Forest Avenue Public School, where her class was small and her teacher left a lasting impression.

“Every time the teacher travelled somewhere, she brought that culture back to the classroom,” Lori remembers. “Music, food, stories. I was really fortunate to have her.”

Outside of school, her childhood was rooted in Port Credit. She remembers playing near the water on hot days, walking along the marsh boardwalk, and spending time at Jack Darling Park and Brueckner Rhododendron Gardens. These were not landmarks to her then. They were simply places she knew.

Her family moved several times within Mississauga, from Port Credit to Cooksville, to Meadowvale, and back again.

When her family moved to Meadowvale during high school, she was told she would have to transfer schools. She asked to stay, was allowed to finish, and took city buses across Mississauga each day to remain at Cawthra Park Secondary School. It felt like home.

Knowing, Without Being Taught

Lori always knew she was Indigenous. What she lacked was context.

In school, she learned about Indigenous peoples in ways that felt distant from her own family story. The books focused on Nations that were not hers. The language was simplified. The details did not quite fit.

In 1985, changes to federal legislation restored Indian status to many women who had lost it through marriage. Lori was ten years old when her parents explained that she and her sister would be registered under different reserves, based on their parents’ affiliations.

“That’s when I started asking questions,” she says. “What does this really mean? What changes does it make, with who I am”

Answers came slowly, over years rather than months. Visits to family and powwows had always been part of her life, but understanding took time. Like many people raised away from their home communities, Lori would not fully step into Indigenous community until adulthood.

2012 First Nation and Métis Relations Team, Hydro One, with Tina Keeper.

Finding Community Later

It was through work that Lori found her way back.

In 2010, as a newly licensed paralegal, she reached out to the Peel Aboriginal Network, now known as the Peel Indigenous Network, to offer her support. Through that connection, she applied for a position at Hydro One and began working in First Nation and Métis Relations.

“It was the first time in my life I was immersed with Indigenous people,” she says. “That’s kind of late in life to be engaged every day with people in the city who are just like you.”

From there, her career unfolded in ways she had not planned. She moved into security and compliance, working in cybersecurity and critical infrastructure protection. The work suited her.

It also connected back to questions she had carried since childhood.

2023 Hydro One – Little NHL, hosted in Mississauga at Iceland Arena (The Indigenous Network Circle is an employee resource group at Hydro One).

When the City Changed Everything

Two events stand out in Lori’s memory as moments when Mississauga revealed something deeper about itself.

The first was the 1979 train derailment, which forced the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of residents. Lori was a child at the time, but the memory stayed with her.
“I remember thinking, how did they know what to do?” she says. “How did they organize all of that?”

Years later, those questions led her back to school to study emergency management. They also shaped her admiration for Hazel McCallion, who served as Mississauga’s mayor for decades and whose leadership during the evacuation left a lasting impression.“When I met her years later, I told her she inspired me,” Lori recalls. “I could see the smile on her face.”

The second was the 2003 blackout. Lori remembers climbing dark stairwells to their apartment with her children, holding their hands as they went.
“I was telling them not to be scared,” she says. “We just kept going.”

November 10, 2019 — The Grange, Mississauga Miracle 40th Anniversary Event (Lori Ouimette and the late Hazel McCallion).

Passing It Forward

As Lori came into her own understanding of identity and community, her children grew up alongside that journey.

Her daughter Alexandra now works in heritage, helping rewrite historical plaques to address colonial language and working directly with First Nations communities.

“She probably knows more than I do,” Lori says. “We’re learning together.”

Her son Daniel walks his own path. He joins family gatherings and ceremonies when they come, grounded in belonging rather than instruction.

A few years ago, Lori gathered more than eighty relatives for a family Christmas celebration. Before dinner, she invited everyone to stand in a circle and take part in a simple smudging ceremony.

“It was my way of bringing everyone together,” she says. “Of teaching what I had learned.”

2020 Family photo at Adamson Estate — National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

Learning Where She Comes From

Lori’s understanding of her family history deepened in unexpected ways. While volunteering on a housing project in her home community, she came across a book documenting the history of Chippewas of Nawash. Through it, she learned about her grandfather’s Potawatomi roots and the journey that brought her maternal family to Canada generations earlier.

“It helped me understand where my grandfather came from,” she says. “It filled in pieces I didn’t know.”

Her learning continues at its own pace.

“It’s taken me a long time to get here,” she says. “But I’m learning.”

2018 Hydro One volunteers — Habitat for Humanity in Neyaashiinigmiing (Chippewas of Nawash).

Leaving, Without Letting Go

After a lifetime in Mississauga, Lori is preparing to leave the city she knows so well. Rising housing costs made staying impossible.

“I fought to be here as a kid,” she says. “And now I can’t afford to live here anymore.”

She is moving to Hanover, closer to family and to her traditional territory. The transition carries both grief and relief. Her mother’s declining health has made proximity to loved ones essential.

“It’s good and bad,” Lori says. “Happy and sad.”

She will still return to Mississauga for work and family. The city is not something she is leaving behind so much as something she carries with her.

In memory. In knowledge. In lived experience.

Mississauga shaped Lori Ouimette, even when it did not fully see her. She knows its streets, its emergencies, its everyday rhythms. She knows where she belongs, and where she comes from.

Those things, she has learned, can exist together.

Mary and her daughter, Lori Ouimette, planting trees in Cooksville Park, 2023.