The Editor,
National Post
February 6, 2010
Dear Editor:
RE: The heading of your editorial page: Greensboro, 1960, Kahnawake 2010
While your editorial compares the Greensboro sit-ins of 1960 and goes on to compare it with Kahnawake 2010, you have unknowingly or deliberately avoided raising the issue of the issue of the an Ontario government funded clinic that sent away patients that were not Joual-speaking in Cornwall, Ontario. Further to that you do not mention that Hawkesbury, Ontario, refused to allow local English-speaking residents to rent space for their wares at a fair.
Why, I ask is it only segregation when the Mohawks do it, and not segregation when the Metis (Quebecois or Canadien) do it? Is this just another case of selective Amnesia or is this the standard policy of your paper?
If the Natives of Kahnawake are undermining the bedrock principles of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, then why do you not raise the issue of Quebec's violations of not only the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, but also the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights of December 10, 1948.
As for the sit-ins that began on February 1, 1960s by those four college students at a Woolworths lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., I am not sure that if one was refused service in English in a restaurant or cafe in Quebec, that any action would be taken by the Federal or Quebec Governments to rectify the situation. And if English-speaking people began sit-ins the Surete du Quebec (Police) would just be called in to shoot them and get away with murder like they did in many Southern States of the U.S. during the era of segregation.
Thus, if your paper is so quick to pick on the Mohawk Natives of Kahnawake, then it should certainly have taken on Quebec's violations of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and also the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms long before ever raising the present-day violations in the Mohawk Reserve at Kahnawake.
Sincerely,
Kenneth T. Tellis
CC: To Chiefs of all American Indian Reserves
