BRIDGE OF MANY NAMES
Nearly a year ago, council voted to rename Langevin Bridge to Reconciliation Bridge. But many are wondering why signs on the span still haven’t been changed.
The name of a 108-year-old bridge in the heart of downtown Calgary depends on who you ask.
Google Maps calls the span Reconciliation Bridge. So does the City of Calgary and Wikipedia.
But for the 13,000 drivers who cross the truss bridge daily, it is Langevin Bridge, according to two prominent green signs at the structure’s entrance.
Others have dubbed the connection between 4th Avenue and Memorial Drive the “Langevin (soonto-be-Reconciliation) Bridge.”
The confusion started nearly a year ago after municipal politicians made national news when they voted to immediately strip Hector-Louis Langevin’s surname from the span over the Bow River and replace it with the word Reconciliation.
But 344 days later, the bridge’s official signs remain unchanged.
“It’s a disappointment because of how big the movement was to change the name,” said Tsuut’ina Nation spokesman Kevin Littlelight. “It’s like, OK, we’ve asked, they said they were going to do it and it hasn’t been done.”
Littlelight was one of many people who used social media to urge municipal politicians to remove Langevin’s name from the bridge in the wake of the 2015 national Truth and Reconciliation Report.
Langevin was a Father of Confederation whose ministry funded the bridge’s initial construction, and an architect of the residential school system, which the report called an act of “cultural genocide.”
“You have to right a wrong,” said Cathleen Foster, who was outraged when the Truth and Reconciliation Report came out and soon started a petition in 2015 calling on Calgary’s city council to rename the bridge.
Like Littlelight, Foster expressed disappointment that signs on the bridge still say Langevin after so much time has passed.
“(Council) changed the name of the bridge, now commit and put up the sign. That’s not an unreasonable request,” she said.
“Did (council) do it to look good before the election? Follow through with it.”
In a 14-1 vote on Jan. 23, 2017, municipal politicians endorsed renaming the span Reconciliation Bridge after meetings with Treaty 7 elders spurred a notice of motion signed by all but one elected official.
After the vote, the city said the Langevin signs would be replaced “at a later date,” an official rededication ceremony would be held “in the coming months” and a new plaque on the bridge would explain its history, the story of Langevin and the reasoning behind the new name.
However, almost a year later, the old signs remains, there’s no plaque and no firm details on when the rededication will occur.
A request to speak with a city spokesperson about the bridge was forwarded to the mayor’s office.
Daorcey Le Bray, communications adviser to Mayor Naheed Nenshi, said in an email a “small team” is working on planning a formal naming ceremony, after which time the bridge’s signs will be changed and a plaque added.
“Scheduling for an event like this can be a challenge and we’re working on that now so we can have a formal, public event sometime this year,” Le Bray said Tuesday.
Wearing a traditional jacket and moccasins, Nenshi rose in council chambers, immediately before council approved the new name last January, and delivered a lengthy speech in favour of the change.
“And then I hope, to mark the 140th anniversary of the signing of Treaty 7 and the 150th birthday of this great nation, that in 2017 we’ll have a proper rededication ceremony,” Nenshi said at the end of his 16-minute address.
“It’ll be, I guarantee you, the most moving thing you’ve ever seen.”
Littlelight said the sooner the signs can be replaced, the better.
“It bothers us because people really made the effort from both sides — Aboriginal awareness people, conscientious Calgarians and the city themselves,” he said.
“Getting it done is going to push the reconciliation forward.”
For 10 months, the East Village used the moniker “Langevin (soon-to-be Reconciliation) Bridge” in regular tweets about the bridge’s lights before shifting to Reconciliation Bridge in its neardaily messaging at the beginning of December.
Council’s 2017 decision to rename the bridge came as other cities across the country faced mounting pressure to remove names associated with past injustices.
On National Aboriginal Day in June, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced the federal government would rename Langevin Block, across from Parliament Hill.
In Calgary, there’s also been a push to rename Langevin School in Bridgeland and Sir John A. Macdonald School in Huntington Hills.