On August 19th, 1907, just after 5:30 p.m., a bell rang to let a crew of construction workers know it was time to pack up their belongings and finish for the day. They were building a bridge that would connect Quebec City with the City of Levis across the St. Lawrence River. But just minutes after the bell rang, there was a loud crack, and the 400-foot structure fell to the bottom of the St. Lawrence river. 

“It was Canada’s greatest workplace disaster [at the time],” says Connie Meloche, a historian and key organizer of the Quebec bridge memorial.

Seventy six lives were lost that day; 33 of them were Mohawk men from Kahnawake First Nation, a small community of roughly 2,000 people about 300 kilometres from Quebec City. Meloche, who is also from Kahnawake, said the impact on her community was “disastrous.”

For the anniversary, a concrete memorial displaying the names of all the victims was unveiled on the Levis side, and in Kahnawake First Nation, a steel replica of the ill-fated bridge.

The event is notorious among engineers. It is studied as a failure in design. The site of the rebuilt bridge has become a pilgrimage for engineers to confront the deadly consequences of human error. The wreckage emphasizes the risk of engineers putting ego and ambition above safety.

Less written or talked about is the human cost of this event, particularly for the small community of Kahnawake.

But choreographer Barbara Kaneratonni is changing that with her multidisciplinary theatre production Sky Dancers, recently performed at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre. In it she explores the lasting impact of the 1907 Quebec Bridge disaster from a Mohawk perspective. 

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