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Radical Prejudice (From Mr NANA, Provincial High School of Kaya)

Dianne Oppenheim was working behind the counter of the local Dixie Lee restaurant when a middle-aged man and woman entered. They looked at the young waitress, then ordered ice-cream cones.
Oppenheim took two cones form the dispenser and wrapped tissue around their stems. The couple told Oppenheim that they did not want the cones, because she had touched them. Instead they asked that she serve their ice-cream in bowls. Oppenheim picked up a bowl by its base. The couple insisted that they would select their own bowls and hold them while she served the ice-cream. “I was so mad” recalls Oppenheim. I walked straight back to the boss’s office and told her that if these people had something against the color of my shin of my shin, I was not going to serve them”.
The incident did not take place in Arkansas in the 1950s, but in Merrit, British Columbia, in August 1991. The couple was white. Oppenheim, now 19, is a proud member of an Indian tribe, the Coldwater band who, with limited resources but evident determination, is striving to combat the damaging effects of racism on their youth.
Prejudice is one of the extra challenges that Oppenheim and other natives confront in their teen years. The Coldwater reserve- 275 km north east of Vancouver - suffers, like other reserves across Canada, form endemic poverty, alcoholism and unemployment.
For the reserve’s teens, those hard realities can make growing up even more traumatic. “There and to be something done,” says Gordon Antoine, chief Of the 550 – member Coldwater band. In 1984, in an effort to solve some of the problems, the band started its own school. “Our children’s eyes did not have a sparkle in them,” says Antoine. “We decided that our main objective was to put life back in those eyes.”
Before the establishment of the school, Cold-water’s children were educated off the reserve, where they say they encountered the kinds of problems that natives often face in White Canadian society.
Now, with the new school, the children are different, they are alive, vibrant and curious.

Hal Quinn, “Pride and prejudice”, MacLean’s, February 22, 1993.