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KAMLOOPS THIS WEEK 1988
2013
THURSDAY
Thursday, May 30, 2013 X Volume 26 No. 43
THIS WEEK
Richard Jules was known as Smiley when he went to the Kamloops Indian Residential School. “I was always smiling, whether I got the strap or heard a good joke,” he said. Jules was just five when he was sent to the school. “When I got there, I thought how happy I would be with all these kids to play with,” he said. “I didn’t know what kind of surprise I was in for.”
CHILDHOODD EVIL CONFRONTED CHILDHOO By Dale Bass STAFF REPORTER dale@kamloopsthisweek.com
T
HREE WEEKS before he died, Don Seymour sat down in front of a video camera and told his story. In those few minutes that he stared at the lens — stopping only once to regain his composure — the man who knew his days were limited told a tale of a life both destroyed and made strong again. It was a story of a little boy and the Kamloops Indian Residential School. Seymour was the third generation of his family sent to the red-brick building on Tk’emlups Indian Band land, three generations told by the federal government their culture, their beliefs, their language, even the colour of their skin, was wrong. Seymour told of getting on a bus at 7
a.m. and being taken to the school, of how his life was one of “good and evil, where the priests were the evil.” His family showed the video on Tuesday, May 28, the first of
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two days of hearings before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The commission and its head, Justice Murray Sinclair, were at TIB’s Moccasin Square
Gardens to listen to tales from residentialschool survivors. Seymour told of going home at the end of the day — he was a day scholar — to chores, to riding hors
es, to playing with his siblings, but of never telling what happened at school because the priests had threatened him, telling him he would burn in hell. X See WE STOOD A2
The B.C. Lions roar into Kamloops Page A19 Thompson River Publications cations Partnership Ltd Ltd.
MLA Lake says cabinet not a given By Andrea Klassen STAFF REPORTER andrea@kamloopsthisweek.com
Political pundits may have Terry Lake on their lists of MLAs most likely to sit in Christy Clark’s new cabinet, but the Kamloops-North Thompson Liberal MLA is playing down the likelihood he will hold on to his environment ministry portfolio. Clark will likely unveil her new cabinet in the next week and Lake said he thinks she will have a tough time deciding which MLAs to select. “We have very strong people that have been elected as MLAs and, when you look at the resumes of many of these people — Michelle Stilwell, who’s a worldchampion Paralympian and a tremendous public speaker, you’ve got Sam Sullivan, former mayor of Vancouver, Suzanne Anton, former councillor — they’re really top-notch people all around the province,” Lake said. “Todd Stone here is very accomplished. So, it’s going to be tough.” In 2011, Clark named Lake minister of environment. Before that, he had served as a parliamentary secretary for the minister of health services and the minister of agriculture. Lake said the environment file has kept him in the provincial-media spotlight — it’s his ministry that is most involved with the proposed expansions of the Enbridge Northern Gateway and Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain oil pipelines — which likely explains the buzz about his return to cabinet. “It’s natural to speculate that I’d be back in cabinet but, again, it is a really tough thing,” he said. “And I think all of us are part of one team and I, above all else, am a team player. Still, it’s expected that someone who’s been there before and done an OK job is going to be in consideration again.” Lake said he is passionate about the environment file and would love to stay on as environment minister, if that’s what Clark decides. “But, whether I’m the minister or whatever role I have, I’m certainly going to be a huge supporter of the ministry anyway,” he said. As for the rest of the cabinet, Lake expects it won’t change much in size from Clark’s previous structure, though he said the premier may create a separate cabinet post to deal with the natural-gas sector.
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