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BACKGROUND
Did the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission really say 'kemosabe' was not a racial slur?
In a case that grabbed headlines around the world, the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission spent an entire day watching reruns of the Lone Ranger, a classic television show from the 1940s and 1950s, to determine if the word "kemosabe" was racist.
And while the headlines said the commission - and the Nova Scotia Court of Appeal -determined the term kemosabe was not a racial slur, a look at the case shows there's more to the decision. The board didn't flatly state kemosabe was not a racial slur. It merely said that, in this case, the term was not used or taken as a slur. Nor was it used or taken as a slur in the television show. But the commission said the term definitely has the potential to be one.
But the decision did shed some light on how human rights legislation is interpreted, and underscored the fact that it's not what the employer intended by the comments that matters, it's how the employee took those comments, how they affected her and whether or not the comments made the workplace intolerable.
The case: Nova Scotia (Human Rights Commission) v. Play ft Again Sports
The case involved Dorothy Moore, an Mi'kmaq woman who worked at a second-hand sports shop in Sydney, N.S. She started working at the store on Sept. 12,1998. She quit in October 1999.
Moore said on a number of occasions while she was working at the store she was greeted or referred to as kemosabe by Trevor Muller, the store's owner, and his father Ronald. The greeting was a reference to an expression used by the Lone Ranger and Tonto in the television series and movies.
When Moore asked Muller what the word meant, he said "my friend." But in her complaint to the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission she said she was offended by the term and found it demeaning and insulting to her Aboriginal origin. In her complaint she said she told the Mullers that the Mi'kmaq word for friend was "nitap" and that they could use that greeting but not kemosabe. But...