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TI: In terms of, you were talking, I was curious about the neighborhood and the, sort of the mix. Why don't you start all over again?

OK: Okay. The area where I was raised was called Riverdale, and it was in the river valley of... there's a river that runs through the city of Edmonton, the North Saskatchewan River, and this area was low-income, very, very heavily ethnic. I mean, there were Ukrainians, Germans, Dutch, aboriginal peoples, French Canadians, you name it essentially and they were there. It was a transitional neighborhood as well. People who came into Edmonton, immigrants who came into Edmonton very frequently ended up in that part of the city, didn't stay long. As their economic situation improved, they left and moved to other parts of the city. But the school I was raised in was a very mixed neighborhood, a very mixed school. There were Asians, there were east Europeans, there were Brits, there were, you name it. Edmonton had very, very few black people, but one of the black families in Edmonton lived in Riverdale. One of the interesting things about that that I think also partly formed who I became was I was very much involved in athletics when I was young, playing football, baseball and other things. One of the people I played with was a young black fellow who was a very, very good athlete. I brought him home one day, and he... I can't even remember what time of the day or anything it was. But after he left, my mother said, "You can't play with him anymore." And I said, "Why wouldn't I be able to play with him?" "Well, he's black." And I was stunned by this even at a very young age, twelve or thirteen, because where my mother was raised, there were no black people in Ukraine. There were simply no blacks whatsoever in that country. She had picked up, in Canada, in a few short years, a prevailing view of black people that a lot of Canadians don't think we have, that Canadians have a rather ill-informed opinion of their tolerance and everything else. But it struck me as I was older, when I thought back on it, where did she get that from? Where did she pick that up? She worked, she worked as a, in a greenhouse in the community where we were raised, and I can only assume she got it there. The owners of the greenhouse were Danish-Americans who had immigrated first to the United States and then ended up coming into Edmonton, and that's where I think she must have picked that kind of attitude up. Because it wasn't, even though they were, my parents were strong church-goers, I doubt that they got it there because the church was so Ukrainian that you wouldn't have had those kinds of attitudes about black people. They had attitudes about other people, but not about black people. As I was older, it really struck me as being curious. Why would she have had that attitude? But going back to a point that I made earlier, I think growing up in that neighborhood, growing up with such an incredible mix of people, that I just thought everybody was like that. I didn't realize that there were important ethnic stratifications in Canadian society until I was much older.

TI: And so after that incident with your mother where she said, "Don't play with that boy anymore, don't bring him there," how did that change your relationship with this friend of yours?

OK: It didn't, really. I ignored my mother. [Laughs] I continued to play with him, we were on the football team together, and I just, thinking back on it now, that he was just one of the guys in the neighborhood. And what she said just didn't stick with me very much, and it didn't stick with my twin brother. I mean, we both played with him and continued to be involved with him. I don't remember, did he come around the house as often as others did, I just don't remember back on that now. But I know we certainly continued on 'til we went to, we moved out of the neighborhood and his family stayed there and I kind of lost contact with him over the years.

TI: You know, you mentioned earlier that there were also Asians in the neighborhood. Were there any Japanese Canadians...

OK: No. Mainly they were Chinese Canadians. The area immediately above Riverdale, once you got up out of the river valley, bordered on where the Chinese Canadian community, or the Chinese community, there was very few Canadians in the community at that time, were settled. And to this day, that remains the core of Chinatown in Edmonton. There were very, very few Japanese Canadians in Edmonton. I, when I went to high school, there were, I had a couple of people that I, of Japanese origin that were in the same high school, but that was the first time I'd ever come into contact with a Japanese Canadian.

RD: Do you have any idea when you became aware of what had happened to the Japanese Canadians on the West Coast?

OK: Uh-huh. It... when I was in college, when I was in the United States, when I was attending Western and I'd first heard about what had happened to Japanese Americans that I started asking questions: did something like that happen in Canada? There was absolutely no mention whatsoever of the internment of Japanese Canadians in any of my educational experience in Canada, nothing. It was just simply, and even with... now I'm going to miss his name. I'll think of it... that I met in high school, it never came up. It just wasn't something that was ever mentioned. And it struck me later on that, how this was something that was simply buried in Canada, it did not occur in Canada. It was ignored totally in the educational system. When I was working in the Multiculturalism Program, one of the things that we commissioned was a book that was called Teaching Prejudice. And that's when one of the first stories started to be told that went into the educational system about the Japanese Canadian internment. But it was simply, in the history of Canada, in the educational system, a non-event.

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