To others, having a big to-do about the country that forcibly removed Indigenous children from their homes and sent them away to schools that seemed to many of the students who attended them more like prisons or work camps and, for at least a few thousand, were death sentences, whether from disease, malnutrition or other causes, in the wake of these revelations, shows how important dealing with our racist, colonial past and present really is. Are countries judged by their worst past actions, which in Canada’s case include other racist policies against people of Chinese, Indian and Japanese descent, to name a few? Or are they judged by their best actions and ideals, even if they fail to lived up to the latter many times? For individuals who have committed crimes, a category in which the number of Indigenous people far outweighs their proportion of the country’s population as a whole, it seems to be the latter.
Photograph By Thompson Citizen photos by John Barker and Jeanette Kimball
Garson Manitoba s Select Shows has been bringing their midway to Nickel Days for years. A family-run business, it was started after Robert Mills retired from the Winnipeg Police in 1969. A few months later he met up with an old army buddy, who asked him to sell tickets for his five-ride carnival. Later in the fall of 1969, three rides were for sale for $1,600 from a fellow in Minnedosa - a 20-foot Ferris wheel, a swing ride and a car ride - as well as a small generator and a cotton candy machine. The rest is history, and today, 45 years later, Jim Mills, his youngest son, wife Michele, along with their sons, Eric and Cory, and their daughter Ashley, operate Select Shows.
Last year around this time, we ran an editorial entitled “A June like no other” detailing how, in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the sixth month of the year in Thompson was gong to look. . .