Editor:
ANBT has made the right choice in sending out a letter that they are to enforce no politics at this years basketball tournament.
I wrote this to help shed light on the frenzy the environmental organizations have stirred up with many First Nations.
In the south, the environmental organizations care not of Aboriginal unemployment, but they only care of their organizations’ agenda. In the south, on Vancouver Island, kids were getting bullied at school because their parents or parent worked in the fish-farming industry.
This is insane when we turn on our own because someone just wants to have a job. Please, don’t repeat the mistakes some have made no matter what choice they went with when it concerned jobs, income and feeding a family.
When I was part of the 2010 Winter Olympics — when it was just beginning — as chairman of Aboriginal Tourism British Columbia, we were told that the games and politics were separate.
It is good advice and the children must see we are united in the right to compete without political interference.
Let us not repeat the failures of the non-natives when it comes to sport.
Think of Hitler and how he was so upset an African-American won a race at the Olympics that Germany was hosting.
Think of the countries in modern times suppressing their athletes and not allowing them to compete due to Olympic boycotts, all because of a war or the making of a political statement that is forgotten a few years down the road by the masses.
Think of two black men who raised the right hand in fist to show support of the Black Panther movement and in their jest, they had many on the planet turn against them and set equal rights back decades.
Sport and politics does not need to be mixed. Lord knows we know well of the failures of this mixture.
There’s a time and place for everything, but the children must see a sporting event — not a political event in sport.
Tom Sewid
Prince Rupert
