Racism in province goes way back

I am originally from the province of Saskatchewan. I am an Aboriginal person, a Dene from northern Saskatchewan. My first experience with racism in Saskatoon was in 1954 when I was refused a room at a Saskatoon hotel. I was 14 years old. I became a teacher trained in Saskatoon and spent 32 years in classrooms, eight years as direc- tor of education with the Meadow Lake Tribal Council and served two terms as an elected chief of the English River First Nations Band. I am 79 years old today.

Racism is still going on in Saskatchewan. In one of my courses at the University of Manitoba, on the History of the United States, we studied a killing of a black person in the Deep South in the early part of the 1950s.

Emmett Till was 14 years old from the city of Chicago, visiting friends and family in the hamlet of Money, Mississippi. He and a friend went into a store to buy candies. He spoke to the white woman behind the counter, brashly, as a youth would. This offended the woman, who reported the incident to her husband. Later this white man, a member of the local chapter of the KKK, and another friend, kidnapped Emmett, murdered him and threw his body into the river. His body later surfaced. The murderers were well known and even admitted to the killings. At the trial, in front of an all white male jury, they were acquitted.

Sound familiar?

Ralph Paul, Winnipeg, Manitoba