‘Today is not a good day’: Calgary ring road opening carries mixed emotions

CALGARY (660 NEWS) — An event commemorating the opening of a portion of the southwest Calgary Ring Road took on a sharply different tone when an Indigenous man went to the microphone and said the project has destroyed his family’s land.

“I am going to speak, and you are going to listen,” said Seth Cardinal Dodginghorse as he took the podium after Mayor Naheed Nenshi completed his statements.

“Today is not a good day. I woke up this morning to see my mother crying when she heard the news that this road was going to be opening.”

WATCH: Seth Cardinal Dodginghorse’s full speech

Dodginghorse said he grew up on the land where the road now sits, and he has lamented the construction over the past several years.

“The ring road is built on my family’s land,” he continued. “People are going to be driving on my family’s home.”

He read a letter from his mother, as she wrote she grew up in the Weaselhead area, the same land where her great-grandmother and other ancestors grew up on. Dodginghorse said he also intended to hold on to the land and preserve it for future generations.

He said there was a lack of proper consultation and they were removed from their homes in 2014.

“We lived here, we grew up here, we touched that land. The way this land was taken was not healthy nor well done. Again, it was hard to read your development plans. You left us out of Tsuut’ina Nation history,” he added from the letter written by his mother.

He said there used to be a grove of trees in the area that were now torn down, and trails he used to have memorized were now completely erased. Taking aim directly at Chief Roy Whitney, Dodginghorse said there was not enough discussion and there was no room for them in the negotiation.

“I did not see you walk with me anywhere for the past six years. I did not see anyone talk about the people that had to be moved.”

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He also held up a pouch full of dirt that he said he collected from the land years ago, and continues to carry it with him as a reminder.

“After I saw the trees knocked down and I saw my home moved, I did not look at (the land). I did not talk about it. I was silenced,” he said. “What I carry in here is dirt from my family’s land. Shards of trees. This is something that I have carried for protection and strength to endure and survive this. This is something I will continue to survive and endure. This is something my family has had to survive and endure.”

He encouraged people to be open for conversations to hear a bit more about these concerns, and the history about the land needs to be shared.

Jesse Salus, a historian who has written extensively about the process that has taken the project to this point of near-completion said this has been an extremely complex situation and understands some of the frustration that came through in the speech.

“I’m certainly sympathetic about the idea of the loss of your home, the loss of your land and your connection to that land,” he said.

It has been almost seventy years since the ring road concept was first publicly mentioned, even though the scale of it back them would be far different than what people drive on today.

“One of the reasons it was as drawn out as it has been, is because at the time — in the 1970s — the City of Calgary wanted to buy the land from the Tsuut’ina Nation but they did not want to extend any kind of access points or the utilities that could feed into the potential nation economic development.”

After years of consultation and negotiations, there was more common ground reached and that helped lead up to a better relationship between the parties involved.

Salus himself has had a long personal history with the project, because he and his family live in Lakeview and has been surrounded by the construction and worried about what it means for his quality of life as well.

“It’s a very complex issue, I’m never going to view it as a black and white issue”

“The impacts that it’s going to have on especially noise and wildlife and some of those things, I regret that some of that has come to a pass, to a degree. But when I look at it in a sort of more broad perspective, when I understand the history of the city’s relationship with the Tsuut’ina Nation and how fractured it has been in the past,” Salus said. “When I see that this is going to hopefully be the foundation of both communities kind of coming together and being able to see each other more and to experience what each other has to offer, I am very hopeful for that.”

Back to the event on the roadway, after Dodginghorse completed his speech, he made one last display of his personal sense of loss. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of scissors. Raising them to his head, he cut off his braids and tossed them on to the pavement.

“With this, I leave a piece of me with the road.”

Immediately following the speech, a clearly shaken Whitney Issik, MLA for Calgary-Glenmore, read a prepared statement issued by federal infrastructure minister, Catherine McKenna. There were questions from the press afterwards and the first two were focused on the announcement itself. But then a freelance reporter stepped up to challenge Chief Whitney about what everyone just heard.

Whitney said there was proper consultation done through the course of the project and they did compensate families affected, such as through the construction of 25 homes. He disputed any claims that negotiations were done in private or that people like Dodginghorse were held out of the negotiations.

“There’s a time and place for everything. This is not the time or place. So, all of those who lived along the corridor had an opportunity at several, several nation meetings that we had.”

The press conference was then abruptly called off even though more reporters were waiting to ask questions.