There's a new drive to rename MacDonald Hall at the University of Windsor.
It is not the first time. A petition circulated last year but did not get a lot of traction. However, the Black Lives Matter movement going full steam in Canada and the U.S., and June is National Indigenous History Month.
Hale launched the petition on June 12 and more than 300 people have signed it since.
Ferrer graduated from the University of Windsor in 2001. He is getting help on campus from third-year student Sophie Morrow, an Indigenous woman who lived in MacDonald Hall in 2018.
"I was accepted kind of late, so I didn't get to choose my residence and MacDonald Hall was my last choice, just because of the name," she explained.
The residence is named after Canada's first Prime Minister, Sir John A. MacDonald. MacDonald, lauded for the birth of the nation and completing the cross-country railroad, has his critics. He also enacted the Chinese Head Tax and is a founding architect of the residential school system.
"My grandmother went to residential school as a young child. She was only there a year, but she was abused, and it changed her life," said Morrow. "My family, we have lost our language. We don't know how to speak the Ojibway language."
Since the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died while a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on his neck for almost nine minutes, racism has become a widely debated topic once again.
"It's happening everywhere. People are taking down statues all over the country," Morrow said. "It's been brought up before and just pushed under the rug. Just kind of ignored and so, we're just angry now. We want it to change."
In 2017, the Canadian Historical Association removed MacDonald's name from its prize for the best scholarly book about Canadian history, acknowledging his role in the oppression of Canada's Indigenous Peoples. In 2018, a statue of MacDonald was also removed from outside Victoria City Hall.
Soon after the petition was launched, Morrow said the University's Indigenous Student Alliance offered its support, but so far, the administration has not contacted Morrow or Ferrer.