Stanley Mission sits on the banks of the Churchill River in northern Saskatchewan's boreal forest, about 80 kilometres northeast of La Ronge. People have lived in the area for thousands of years, and the community's Woods Cree name, âmaciwîspimowinihk, means "at the place for shooting arrows up a cliff."
The settlement was founded in 1851. Its English name comes from Stanley Park, a manor house in Selsley, Gloucestershire, England, which had been the home of the wife of Rev. Robert Hunt, an Anglican missionary. Across the river from the original site stands Holy Trinity Anglican Church, built between 1854 and 1860. It is the oldest standing building in Saskatchewan.
Today the community is home to the northern settlement of Stanley Mission and the Stanley 157 reserve of the Lac La Ronge Indian Band. It has stores, a band office, a health office, schools, a post-secondary learning centre, a community hall and an arena. It is an access point to the northern parts of Lac La Ronge Provincial Park, tourist fishing camps and a major recreational canoe route that was once part of the voyageurs' trade routes used by the Hudson's Bay Company and North West Company. It is also the closest road access to Nistowiak Falls, one of the tallest in the province, and ancient pictograph sites lie nearby.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “Stanley Mission” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.