The Ego of the Orange Arch
For nearly ninety years, we have been staring at that orange arch over the Fraser River and calling it the Pattullo Bridge. It opened back in 1937, right in the thick of the Great Depression, and was named after Thomas Dufferin "Duff" Pattullo, the sitting Premier of British Columbia at the time. Sticking your own surname on a massive public works project is the ultimate flex of political ego. It was the classic colonial way of doing things. You build a bridge, you completely ignore the thousands of years of human history that happened on that exact spot before you arrived, and you permanently name the steel after a guy in a suit.
Calling a Crossing a Crossing
Now we have the shiny new cable-stayed replacement, and thankfully, it abandons the politician's vanity project entirely. The new name is stal̕əw̓asəm (pronounced stah-luw-ah-sum), which comes directly from hən̓q̓əmín̓əm̓, the traditional language of the Coast Salish peoples who have been navigating these exact waters for millennia. It is a beautiful and highly literal compound word. "stal̕əw̓" means the Fraser River, and "asəm" refers to a crossing or facing across. Instead of naming a vital piece of geography after an administrator, we are finally just calling it what it actually is: the river crossing.
Correcting the Colonial Typo
This switch is about a lot more than just updating the highway signs to confuse the local traffic reporters. The old colonial habit of plastering European surnames over ancient geography was a very deliberate form of historical erasure, operating on the arrogant assumption that nothing of value existed here until the British showed up. By ditching the political branding and embracing the original hən̓q̓əmín̓əm̓ name, we are actually correcting a massive geographical typo. It is a tangible bit of reconciliation that forces every single commuter crossing between Surrey and New West to acknowledge the real history of the land, proving that occasionally, we actually do learn from our past mistakes.