RE: Campbell River Tyee Club wants to celebrate 100th anniversary with new clubhouse
I read this article with trepidation about accepting the Tyee Club’s and Campbell River’s past without accepting that it was rife with racism and injustices.
I am an Indigenous man, 63 years old, from the We Wai Kai Nation at Cape Mudge. I grew up here and lived through it. Your article reflects how the Tyee Club is trying to paint a new face on the elitist club filled with white privilege (to understand white privilege, google it and look at yourself for your own determination). If you did an eye-roll or said why can’t those Indians give it a break, I made my point.
What was glaringly obvious to me, that causes me to express my views, in the Tyee Club’s plans are that there is no mention of us in this process of “building on the past.” You cannot build a facade that you are not elitists without addressing your past with and without us, in your history.
Your editorial cartoon couldn’t be more timely in my expressed views, and ask, for people in Campbell River to look at themselves. The systems in Canada are filled with colonial,oppressive and systemic racism that further white privilege to this day. Look at our Prime Minister, look at what he he has done and how he is not accountable and believes he does not have to be… he is the Prime Minister, after all. Shameful, right? Well in our entire history with non-Indigenous people, we have faced this. Walk a mile in our shoes before you do your eye-rolls and get judgmentally defensive. For a better future for all of us, is to educate all about our past, about the whole and true past, with inclusiveness and not a selective and censored history.
We all know that “‘you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” so Tyee Club, correct this and do not perpetuate your past.
Jim Wilson
Campbell River
