US officials make amends for 122-year-old lynching

OLYMPIA, Washington (Reuters) - It came 122 years late, but Washington state and the Canadian province of British Columbia tried to make amends on Wednesday for the mistaken lynching of a Canadian Indian boy, an incident that nearly started a cross-border race war.

State officials, a provincial minister and tribal elders chanted and drummed together in a "healing circle" in the ornate rotunda of Washington state's Capitol and lawmakers approved a resolution expressing "the deepest sympathy" to the victim's descendants.

In February 1884, a vigilante mob of more than 100 Americans rode across the newly finalized border into Canada near Sumas, Washington. They grabbed Louie Sam, a 14-year-old Sto:Lo Indian, from Canadian police custody and hanged him from a tree.

Louie Sam had been accused of the murder of a shopkeeper on the U.S. side of the frontier -- a crime that Canadian investigators later determined he never committed.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060302/us_nm/crime_canada_lynching_dc

if at all.

During the FDR years, and then briefly in the sixties . . . we showed signs of greatness.

The sad fact is, unless a person was white and male, this country has been all about POWER . . . and unbridled greed.

And that's a shame.

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that they grabbed in the US and sent him to Syria for some of that rendition stuff.

Damm

I'll miss it . . .

:eyes: