A

Review .

“EDITORIAL PAGE

Tom
McEwen

F EVER there was an issue exposing
ene complete moral, political and
judicial bankruptcy of the Social Credit
government it is the Doukhobor “prob-
lem.” Events in Nelson proclaim the
fact from the housetops. :

1 think I know what is wrong with
Attorney-General Robert Bonner. To
describe it in a few words: Just
another Tory trickster with a new halo
and a job much too big for him.

However, I’m not so sure that I
know what has gone wrong with the
women of this province, and in that
I include everyone from the newest
housewife to the First Lady of the
province.

Twenty years ago we used to have
Many: active women, Communist, CCF,
trade union women, yes even Liberals,
who would fight at the drop of the
hat against any and all social injust-
ices. Today it would seem they have

settled back into political “respect- ~

ability” and domestic complacency.
ok x x .

It is not my purpose here to go 19 :
the rights and wrongs of the Doukhobor
people in refusing to send their chil-
dren to public school. Personally I
think they should behave 1n this re-
spect as in others, -i keeping with
Canadian institutions.

The issue in Nelson is that of mothers
fighting for the possession of their
children — forcibly taken from them
by the RCMP on the orders of 8
Socred government.

Even in the animal world, mothers
instinctively fight for the possession
and protection of their youns. That
is the “crime” of 25 young Doukhobor
“mothers, cuffed around and arrested
in Nelson last week by the RCMP —
mothers fighting for the possession of
their children. .

Foolish, one might say, to do such
things. But just think it over, sister,
whatever your politics, beliefs, your
Tace or creed. What would you do if
the police took away your children,
tegardless of the alleged reasons for
doing so? I imagine your Doukhobor
sisters fee] much the same way. That's
why they fight to regain their children.

In this they measure up to the prim- |

itive instincts of the animal world —

and it is all to their honor, and to the.

Shame of those who make such actions
necessary. ; :
And the Doukhobor ‘children 1n de-
tention “school” at New Denver, how
' do they feel? Can the government rear
them with that true concept of Cana-
dianism, which finds its first and best
expression in the family unit?
A news item in a Nelson paper tells

the unwritten story of the need of a

Public inquiry: “.. , . however in New
Denver Monday, the 85 children re-
fusted to attend any classes.” spit

The fighting women of B.C. must
come to the aid of their Doukhobor

Sisters, to help erase a cruel and mon-,

strous injustice by restoring children to
- their mothers.

Pacific Tribune

Published weekly at
Room 6 — 426 Main Street
Vancouver 4, B.C.

Editor — TOM McEWEN
Associate Editor — HAL GRIFFIN
Business Manager — RITA WHYTE

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ae Saskatchewan

should beware

Cer CREDIT’s ‘‘Drang nach

Osten’ (drive to the East) is
under way. Like the crusading
knights of old, the high priests of |
the cult have girded on their armor
and polished their dimming halos.
In their drive to the East they plan
to ‘liberate’ Saskatchewan from
CCF ‘‘socialism’’ en route.

As Lenin once wrote of “‘chick-
ens dreaming of millet,”’ the Socred
‘Viberators’’ dream of a Socred
Western Bloc (British Columbia,
Alberta and Saskatchewan),
through which they can storm the
Ottawa bastion of entrenched Lib
eralism.

For cheap political advantages
and under the pretext of giving
hattle to the ‘Eastern financiers’’
of St. James and Bay streets, the
dormant weeds of “‘secession” can
be nursed back to life, fertilized
with lavish Socred promises and
posed as a grave threat to Cana-
dian unity and independent.

It is well known that in Alberta
and B.C. under Socred “‘give-away”’

regimes, the U.S. monopolists and

their home-grown partners have
done very well in their grab of
natural resources — in this. prov
ince even better than under the
old Tory-Liberal Coalition. And
in both British Columbia and Al
berta the ‘‘holier-than-thou’’ Socred
halos have been sadly tarnished with
the ‘‘moth and rust’’ of political
corruption,

* Vancouver's first school was the building at Hastings Sawmill. It opened

36

in 1873 with 12 pupils. This picture was taken in 1886, the year the City

of Vancouver was incorporated.

It is:indeed ironic to hear pre-
miers Bennett and Manning prom-
ising prosperity to Saskatchewan,
but no one in that province should
forget that this conglomeration of
Tory and Liberal dissidents and op-
portunists have already done a
slick job of ‘‘selling the people
short’’ in the two provinces already
governed by Social Credit.

It is not for nothing that the big
hydro, lumber, gas, oil and other
big monopoly tycoons in B.C. and
Alberta have given Social Credit

their undivided approval. As the’

inimitable Mr. Dooley once ob-

served, ““Whin th’ boss starts han-

din’ out bouquets, it’s to cover up
a stronger smell.” .

Should Social Credit attain the
saddle in Canada’s banner wheat
province ‘“Western Bloc’ politics
would take over with its philistine
aura of exclusive sanctity, and its
strengthening of the rule of the
trusts . . . the last thing Saskatch-
ewan needs.

From this distance we would
suggest that come election time, the
good folks of Saskatchewan unite
their ranks to keep Tories, Liber-
als and hybrid Socreds out; to hold
fast to what they have and fight to
improve it. That way lies progress.

Hal
Griffin

HERE’S a lot of history in British
Columbia — not history as it is
reckoned in the old countries by
the slow accumulation of centuries
so that every village is permeated
with story, but history as it is rep-
resented in the new countries by
the rapid transformation of decades
go that the old is erased before ever
it has had time to age. And in this
province you can still find it en-
compassed within one person’s life.

I met just such a person last Sun-
day when I went to Hatzic with
Harry Merrill of Mission, himself
an oldtimer in the progressive labor
movement, to meet Mrs, Josie Ed-
wards.

As I did, you would find Mrs. Ed-
wards a very gracious and interest-
ing woman, not only for what she
has seen and can recount with as-

- tonishing memory but for what she
has done. At 88, a recent bout of
pneumonia has left her shrunken,
but her dark eyes flash and her
voice is vibrant with life as she

speaks of those days when British ~

Columbia — and herself — were
young.
+ at 5o3

She was born at Seton Lake in
1868, three years before British Col-.
umbia entered Confederation. Her
father was Thomas Basil’ Humph-
reys, an Englishman who came out
to the colony during the Cariboo
gold rush. Her mother was the
daughter of the Indian chief at
Harrison whose brief marriage to
Humphreys ended when he went on
to Victoria, to carve a political career
for himself — he represented Lil-
looet in the legislature from 1867 to
1875 and Victoria from 1875 to 1890,
and was provincial secretary in the
Walkem government.

“My grandfather, Seymo, was
chief of all the Chehalis Indians
at the time Simon Fraser came down
the river,” she told me.

When Humphreys married her
‘mother a big Indian wedding cele-

' bration was held at Harrison. But

the official records ignore it. They
mention only: his later marriage to
- Carrie Watkins in 1873. That was
two years after Humphreys had sent
his Indian wife back to her people
and taken their daughter away to be
reared at the convént in Mission,
then a settlement of less than a doz- -
en families besides the Fraser, which
provided the only means of trans-
- portation.
“IT never really knew my own
people,” she said. “I didn’t see my
mother until I was married and

' the first settlers in a virgin wilder-

then, when my children came, you
couldn’t have kept her away.”
She was at the convent when the
first train came through — “you
can’t imagine the excitement” —
and in 1884, on her sixteenth birth-
day, she became the bride of Pat-
rick Edwards, one of the workers
who helped to build the CPR.

They went to live at Hatzic Lake,

ness and they built their first home
— a one-room log shack — on the
summer camping ground of the Hat-
zie Indians,

Hatzic, she explained, takes its
name from the Indian word for fire-
weed — “the whole countryside was
ablaze with fireweed for miles and -
miles when we came” — and the
Indians used it as a blood purifier,
splitting the stalk down the middle
and sucking the sap.

For 71 years she has lived on the
acres that she and her husband and_
later her sons cleared by hand. Her”
present home is the third the family
has built — the second, an imposing
many-roomed log house built in 1890,
was burned to the ground in the
twenties’ just after the insurance
had lapsed.

There she has reared her six sons
and three daughters, six of whom
are now living, and there now she
lives for her 14 grandchildren and
18 great-grandchildren. And, she
adds with a quiet pride, “they’re all
in Canada, all Canadians, every one
of them.”

MAY 11, 1956 — PACIFIC TRIBUNE — PAGE 5_