Page i, The Herald, Wednesday, December 6, 1978 saeee a TERRACE/KITIMAT ‘daily herald Generat Office - 635.6357 Circulation - 635-6357 PUBLISHER - Laurie Mallett GEN. MANAGER - Knox Coupland EDITOR - Greg Middleton CIRCULATION - TERRACE - Andy Wightman 635-6357 KITIMAT . Pat Zellnsk! . KITIMAT OF FLCE - 632-2747 Published every, weekday at 3212 Kalum Street, _ Terrace, B.C: A member of Varifled Circulation. Auihorized as second class mail. Registration number 1201. Postage paid In cash, return postage guaranteed. NOTE OF COPYRIGHT - The Herald retains full, complete and sale copyright in any advertisement produced and-or any editorlal or - photographic content published in the Herald. Reproduction Is not permitted without the written ~ permission of the Publisher. Published by Sterling Publishers 632-2747 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR Dear Mr. Fraser: lam writing in response to motion, Nor was there any confusion over the nature or - a-number of inaccurate or extent of the federal con- misleading attributed to you, concerning federal participation in disaster relief for victims of recent flooding in nor- _:thwestern B.C. -. As your statements have caused a good deal of con- fusion and concern among ' thése directly affected, I hope you will co-operate in “setting the record straight. ’ Specifically, you were quoted on the 11 p.m. CBC news on Monday, Nov. 27, as saying that “The provincial government has already ‘paid out 200 claims” and that "there is no indication of * what the federal contribution will be to the province’. This ’ was an eche of a report on the 6 p.m. CBC news -~ and was subsequently repeated in the Victoria Colonist of the following day. *, As you should have known, fot a single claim had been _. paid by the province at the time of your statement — although the machinery for settling such claims, jointly administered by the ‘: provincial and federal "+ governments, was firmly in . ve oe ae Pa ranee mae stim ate Tan eb ee OR ae . MONTREAL (CP) — Until this fal! the old Deerhouse home was just another aban- doned farmhouse on the Caughnawaga reserve, just south of the Island of Mon- treal, It had no windaws, the ‘floor was sagging and there was neither plumbing nar heat. But when the 4,600 Mohawk Indians of Caughnawaga decided to set ‘up their own high school on “thé reserve to protest the ‘provincial government's pol- icy on English-language education, the Deerhouse farm became an experiment in nativecontrolled education. In September, the Indians marched protesting a clause in Bill 101, Quebec's French- language charter, which requires them to obtain language eligibility cer- tificates to attend the nearby English-language high school. When the government in- dicated it was nol going to back down, the Mohawk decided to set up their own school, “We realized if we were going lo keep parents from sending their kids back to the high school, we would have ta previde an alternative," says school co-ordinator Lorna Delormier, A parent herself, she de- scribes herself as just a volunteer who answers telephones and passes on inessages, But Mrs. Delornier is the closest equivalent the school has to a principal, She says that although only four days passed from the time the decision to create the school was taken until registration started, the idea of a native-run school had been discussed for at least 10 years. The Kahawake Survival School, as it is called, has about 275 studentsin grades 7 toll, says Brian Deer, who is on loan to the school from the Caughnawaga Rultural Centre. About 60 other secondary students from the reserve attend schools out- side Caughnawaga. Parents have donated their lime to help with organization, answer phones and assist teachers in the classroom. Teachers went unpaid until the first of November, when the federal department of Indian affairs provided a statements,/ tribution — because itis set in a disaster assistance formula agreed to in ad- vance by the two govern- ments. The formula came into effect as soon as it became apparent that the cost of disaster relief would exceed $1 per capita — and Premier Bennett requested federal assistance. I am attaching an outline of the Disaster Assistance Agreement for your in- formation. Further, if you will check with officials in the Provincial Emergency Planning office, you will find that their relations with Emergency Planning Canada the federal organization responsible for disaster relief — are ex- cellent. Joint response has been fast, effective and very positively received by the people directly affected. To suggest otherwise in your public statements is to fuel confusion — and to fail to give credit where credit is due. Yours very truly, Iona Campagnolo ee ae ap one-month adyance cheque | to cover operating costs: Deer says a permanent funding agreement now is being negotiated. Classes are spread all over the reserve. Secretarial skills are taught in the Boys and Girls Club. Biology labs are held in a laboratory belonging to the town waler filtration plant, Mechanics classes are conducted in a garage on the busy highway to Montreal. The 15 Grade 10 and 11 stu- denta using the Deerhouse farm fixed up the building themselves outside of regular school hours, putting- in windows, a potbellied stove and an outhouse. The “classroom” itself consists of four or five large tables, some wooden chairs and an old armchair in the corner by the stove. 7 an Natives n One oi the survivors near here- Hoa layiur piu Tam reading Alexsendr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. The title resulted from his equating the Soviet slave camp system to a group of islands, or archipelago. According to Solzhenitsyn, this vast system of prison camps had its beginning at the time -of the Bolshevik takeover of Russia. He likens it to a relatively unknown — stale-within-a- state, which, under the termination of the Party's enemies. ‘Tt is almost an in- ‘eredible book (ar, I should say, books, bacause it is in three parts) which forces us to faee and ponder a subject that is almost too horrible for us free people to comprehend. In ‘his monotonous style, Solzhenitsyn gives names, places, numbers and other details of that almost This is a good book to read compared to the Soviets’ systematic displacement and extermination of whole races of people. He describes the plight of conquered Russians who, upon returning to their Motherland, were killed as traitors, He describes the utter hopelessness of the prisons, especially the Special Prisons, the purpose of which was to work, starve and torture the prisoner to death. ‘ passive resistance, un- dercover art, poetry, humour, which plague the jailers and threaten outright rebellion. Archipelago should be read by. everyone, especially those of us who still enjoy our freedoms. ~ Solzhenitsyn paints ja picture of - man's .. inhumanity to man. It is a: long, heartrending story, describing the events of Gulag -. because a AANNAS. AARNE OAD Y OTTAWA OFFBEAT BY RICHARD JACKSON: - OTTAWA - Up to how it’s yeen the party's unofficial word, whispered from the aack of Liberal hands, ail on che QT. ; But now it’s the doctrine. Official. ; Laid down by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau aimsell. Vote Liberal or lose quebec. ; Keep French power in Jtlawa or see Confederation break up. . Party publicists and media Liberal apologists have spoken of it before — preparing the way for the leader's blessing of the creed — warning that if in the next election Trudeau were to be turned out, “polarizing” the country between French Quebec and the English- speaking provinces, boom. The end. Even of a way were to be found by desperate Liberals to usher Trudeau from the throne of power, they cautioned, it would have to be done with “grade” and in “style”, or else. Curtains. But now deep into autumn, there was hardly time to Jay. ona leadership convention — it takes a minimum of three months — there was really - no alternative. It was Trudeau or game over. _ Like the prime minister or not, they warned, unless you were prepared to use your ballot to blow up Con- federation, you had better elect him one more time. Party publicists, media apologists and the Great Gril Propaganda Machine made it a patriotic duty to think and work and vote Liberal. -. It was all unofficial. ft was suspect as the worst form of scare propaganda and political blackmail, But it was working there alwavs remained the nagging fear that there might be a note of truth in it, And then the prime minister made it official, At the recent rally of Ontario Liberals, while claiming that only the federal Liberals can keep Canada strong and that only he, Pierre Trudeau, and other Quebec Liberals could . keep the country tinited, he went on the record with this: “Take away that bunch of Quebecers in Ottawa and | guarantee you Quebec will vote for separatism the day after — andI can guarantee you that.” It sounded like a threat. Then he made it sound almost the only right and proper thing to do, For he said: ; “Our way, the Liberal way, for a strong Canada is not shared by any other rty.” So he gave you no choice, Came then the doctrine of the infallible. "If we do what’s right,” he said, “then it is right, and that's the end of it,” He made it sound as if it were Trudeau himself, and the loyal Liberals, against all the rest. ; Loyal Liberals? Yes, for the prime minister spoke of his shame thal “some” Liberals — obviously less than loyal — with “the press, the Op- position and public opinion” had been persistently at- tacking his government, Public opinion’ the enemy too? - : Apparently that’s the way the prime minister sees it. This attitude of voting Trudeau or breaking up the country might be more alarming if it were original. But it’s not. Remember Liberal Prime Minister Mackenzie King, and his party’s election battleery: “King or chaos?" direction of the MGB and ~—vast_ prison system. He Shining through all this almost sixty years. It has . in turn, the Party, han- tells us that the Hitler incredible misery, is a profound end sobering tet hia mes e dies the imprisonment, atrocities were only a man's unconquerable effect on the reader. torture and ex- drop in the bucket spirit; the mutinies, I urge you to read it. ff UR STS eee ag WR ee oe Pies Ws Toure oft wredate he re uals mnie: ait j “Soo pee Vigtnamnbat call the 4 y {too wih Pe Teopenes huge Mekong River “nine that more health stations ave elr O Ww n S & 00 dragons," and 1976 well may will be built. suudenis spend abo the dragons ran as ine year Outside aid has included udents spend aboul two to talk with provincial boundaries, as well as how to tail reaches below her : . rice from the Philippines an days @ week in structured government officials about deal with people, vraist, and who Keeps. the ped aeries oF rapical Storms, money from the Soviet Union essons in English, math, the exhibit. Now they are = Mary Cross, one of the class attendance lists, says 5 oe, awent the Meken and various UN agencies. French and history, and negotiating with a publisher middle-aged generation of she doesnot think thelack of =} oo. countries of Vietna iB _Engagedin a costly border three days a week on group materials will hinder the m, war with Cambedia to the projects. For example, a science class is doing an ecological study of Caughnawaga, looking at pollution and the effects of the adjacent St. Lawrence seaway on the reserve’s marshlands. A Grades 10-11. project class is putting together a photographie exhibit on the _ history of the reserve, lo be shown in Quebee City. The students chose the photographs, designed the arrangement and = are writing the captioen English, French and Mohawk. They interviewed older people on the reserve to help identify the pictures and travelled to Quebec City regarding a book on the history of Caughnawaga. Although photographic records only go back to the mid-19th century, the first indian settlement here appeared 1)69.Jn 1680, Louis XIV signed a deed at the Palace of Versailles giving the Indians perpetual ase od 40,000 acres. Land has been expropriated several times, and the reserve currently consists of about 13,000 acres. Student Charlie Jacobs, his hair tied with a red bandana across his forehead, says working on the extibit has taught him something about the history of the reserve and ils true ’ materials Caughnawagans who speaks the difficult Mohawk language fluently, sits in on all the group’s lessons,’ en- couraging the students to ask her to supply the Mohawk words for things as different topics come up.” This is a new approach to the teaching of the Indian language, replacing structured Mohawj lessons. ’ Textbooks, reference and other resources are in short supply at this school. . “Other schools have lent us surplus textbooks," says Deer, ‘“‘and anyway, you, don't rely on texts as much in project education." Parent Selma Delisle, a small woman whose black students. “In a regular school they give you everything,” she says. “These kids are learning how to iook for things themselves." Some parents are disturbed when they do not see their teenagers bringing homework from schoo! and wonder how much the students are learning. But many students con- tend they are learning more than they did Jast year. “T'm learning more about Mohawk culture,’ says Grade 11 student Joy Rice with an enthusiastic smile, adding that she likes the freedom to work at her own pace. kilometre hike, Pole, i'd come so far." GRANDE PRAIRIE, Alla. (CP) — Edward Heller likely will not make a big dent in the history books but he has lived a lat of history, much of it in war and the rest in the ploneer development of Alberta's Peace River country. The 89-year-old United States native came north in 1913 and made his way Lo Edmonton before walking up the old Edson trail in nine days to homestead near thia northern Alberta community. “I wondered how anybody found their way up here,” he says of his 400- "“T thought I must be close lo the North Working at odd jobs on area farms, feller saved $350 to buy an abandoned homestead at Beaverlodge, near the British Columbia border. He cleared and worked the land by hand until 1915 when he enlisted in the army, fighting overseas until a German shell ended his sotdiering days, at least ~ ' for the Firat World War. Heller's memories are full of war: visions of muddy trenches; the rotting unburied corpses of dead men and horses and the exploding artillery shells churning up the already buried dead. He did not hear the explosion that bought him a shrapnel wound inthe right _- ae ihe hardships. “[ remember the sound of the shell vegetables, a small herd of cattle EDWARD HELLER coming in and knew that It was for me," he recalls. “When I woke up I was buried in mud. I must have lay there a long time.” After a long convalescence in England, Heller returned to the Peace country to take up where he had left off. A soldier's grant helped him buy another quarter section of land and he was determined to make his farm work. “When I came back | wanted to settle down,” he says. "I’d never wanted a family so much.” Invited {o supper at a neighbor's homestead, Heller met Lora Davis from Surrey, 5.C., who was visiting her sister. "'] missed s0 much in my life, with the war and ali, [ figured it was about time 1 got married, Besides, | was really at- tracted to her." __A year later, at age 30, he married Lora, and they raised a family of four children and 14 grandchildren. Heller quit farming and lived in B.C. for four years after becoming ill in 1925, but found he could not give it up for good. “Once you get farming in your blood it's just as bad as belng a sailor who can't forgel the seas." The Depression brought lean yeara, but they held no horrors for Heer despite raised His wile One of Canada’s pioneers | p provided meat and other essentials were obtained by barter. . “It was different then,” “Everyone was doing the same thing you were doing, trying to make a living and raise a family." The Hellers managed to build and furnish a house in those years, in bits and pieces as money became available. A washing machine Heller promised his wite took 10 years for him to deliver. Heller went to war again in 1940, largely to prevent his eldest son from | being called up. ; “T guess [ took Ja bit too seriously,"’ he says. ''I didn’t want my son to go to war but I didn’t see how the Germans could be stopped.” condition. By now too old lo be shipped overseas, Heller was stationed in Calgary and later Grande Prairie as a prison camp guard with the Veteran’s Guard. Later he gave his son permission to join up, bul with a “T told him he could enlist in the navy or the air foree, but never, never in the army," he says, recalling his own ex- periences in the trenches. His son returned safely and the Hellers went back to the land in 1946, farmirig thelr property until 1962 when the elder - Heller retired at the age of 73. Most of us who came up here came looking for a place to make a home,"' he says. “We found it. We made do." he says. Cambodia and Laos in September, creating huge losses to the valuable rice crop. Large areas of Thailand and northern and central Vietnam also were ‘hit as the flooding inundated a huge chunk of Southeast Asia. Vietnam, already engaged in a costly war with Cam- bodia, suffered the worst, with more than four million of its people affected and crop ‘oases of 2.6 million metric tons, Ng. 1 Than Phong, vice- chairn’ .n of the people's committee of Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), was put in charge of massive relief operations in nine flooded southern provinces. He said 83 per cent of the winter rice crop in the south totalling 230,000 metric tons — enough to feed one million people for one year — was destroyed, More than 80 persons, In- cluding soldiers on rescue work, were killed, 16,000 | families in the Mekong Delta area were evacuated to safe ground and 10,000 head of cattle were lost along with 32,000 pigs and 200,-000 poultry. Phong said the flood damage in the south was unprecedented. The mon- soon floods struck early and quickly leaving the peasants without tlme to bring in their crops. The Vietnamese official praised the herculean efforts of the people ta save what rice they could, sometimes plunging beneath the water to harvest rice and forming bucket brigades to drain some paddy fields. With the kind of deter. mination they showed in the Vietnam war, the people have been mobilized to cope with the massive problems left by the floods. Measures being taken in the south include the plan- ting of 200,000 acres of winter-spring rice and 50,000 acres of sorgham. Roofing material and timber are being purchased from other areas to rebuild homes destroyed by the floods. Tens of thousands of young volunteers are helping in the construction. The Vietnamese hope that west and locked ina growing confrontation with China to the north, the last thing Viet -nam needéd was a natural ca ; -lamity, Yet the Hanoi Nhan Danh newspaper admited frankly: “We are facing great diffi- culties caused by the recent typhoons and floods.’ The Vietnamese Com- munist party daily said that in order to surmount the difficulties, it was necessary to put the forces of the whole country at the service of agriculture, _ "All arable land whether collective or private in the mountains or the deltas must be put under crops, Net a single inch of Jand will be allowed to lie fallow," the paper said, Lok Cambodia also has. been hit badly by flooding, but Phnom Penh has given few details. : The official radio Phnom Penh admitted only that there had been large rice losses and that peasants, workers and troops had been mobilized to replant rice, vegetables and fruit trees, Unlike Vietnani and nelgh- baring Laos, Cambadla has refrained from publicly calling for internationa assistance, but Western intelligence sources in ‘Bangkok say China un- doubtedly is giving what aid it,can in addition to Chinese arms for the fight with Vietnam. It is too soon to assess how seriously the floods have af- fected the economies of the Indochina countries. Vietnam, with its large population of 50 million to feed and still engaged in reconstruction after the Vietnam war as well ag its: new war with Cambodia, is clearly in the most difficult position. ; The ald it receives from the Soviet Union is largely in arms and ammunition, and Western reporters who have travelled recently in Viet- nam say Hanoi has to ship fruit and other goods -to Russia in return, booyuseath ogg