Review — EDITORIAL PAGE ae Printed by Union Printers Ltd., 550 Powell Street, Vancouver 4, B.C. TOM McEWEN, Editor — HAL GRIFFIN, Associate Editor — RITA WHYTE, Business Manager. Published weekly by the Tribune Publishing Company Ltd. at Room 6, 426 Main Street, Vancouver 4, B.C. — MArine 5288 Canada and British Commonwealth countries (except Australia), 1 year $3.00, 6 months $1.60. Australia, U.S., and all other countries, 1 year $4.00, 6 months $2.50) - Authorized as second class mail, Post Office Department, Ottawa SO RE WS week the British Columbia - Yukon district of the Labor- Bressive party will hold its eleventh nual convention in Vancouver. I io like, for myself personally, and “Or the Pacific Tribune, to extend warm greetings to all the delegates. There will be a lot of discussion on all those key issues which concern Disnn Progress, over two days of it. : a Ussion of major problems is prob- the bly one of the chief features which “inguishes the LPP from all other. Political parties. «Whenever the Liberals, Tories, Socia © CCFers meet to determine policy, ines are always basic problems re- tee to the wellbeing of the people 4 ich their gatherings seek either noe or if they cannot evade them, Wha. to some committee or other €te they are fairly certain to be lost. ject So with the LPP. It tackles the ; ae and says what should be done _-/out them. Usually time verifies the “oundness of its diagnosis of our Politicial ills, whether these be local th hational in character. And where “it 4, Uagnosis is shown to be faulty, ~ 4S quickly and publicly corrected. gaxOU remember all the LPP had to * ay about the Marshall Plan, the met Plan; on Yankee raiding upon de ‘€conomic and political indepen- “Ree; on the suicidal NATO organi- yon which .tied Canada to the apron n&s of U.S. imperialism; on the and. of Canadian-Soviet friendship : & new independent role for Canada 2 the world. ian as the delegates look at some of those Velopments today in the light of the ay Geneva conference, they can © a great pride, not only in having a €n eventualities, but in being a tal , 2 Rohe acc ot in helping to effect the Ing international climate. hy Te Re oe t This brings me to the point which gates as a greeting for victory. Wh, keep a good thing to ourselves ? ad Not use the Pacific Tribune to a ins, the good news of what is doing Souk ur province, country, and through- “. the world, into every factory, mill, © and home in the province ? Stbech month we began an annual and Tiption drive for around 1500 new Tenewed subscriptions. We have Noy Ged the time of this drive until to pber 15 to give everyone a chance Sagas What they can do. It must be ; however, and I think this vention will make it so, that al We all begin to speak to addition- eine Ousands. with: the Pacific Trib- min Sa be missing an opportunity uch history will not wait for us! saig a William (OV Bill) Bennett to th ack in the thirties with respect sh ibe heed for getting a fighting labor sti). 2mto the hands of the people ze oe holds good today. : abo oe Workers want to know anything ay Reno: or politics either, they the Not. seek such knowledge from Drasg ack editorial writers of. the daily hain That is why the workers need % 1 Own press” slogiitor Hal Griffin coined a good Py RG for this LPP convention. The a feos the door — Promote it more. ‘the , Makes good objective sense for tack ig aths: ahead in every job we Rey = New readers of the PT make ™ fighters for progress and peace. 1 Crediters, and-:unfortunately even” aes Would like to enlarge upon for the © east Richard L. Neu- berger of Oregon visited this province last week to look over our hydro-electric power sites and inform us that what- ever plans we have for develop be carried through without first getting Yankee approval. Short of contriving to annex this country (and he’s in favor of that), the senator from Oregon comes up with his next best: B.C. “should provide upstream storage of water—which would greatly increase downstream power in the U.S.” In this, as in other developments. vital to the industrial growth of Canada, ‘ the idea that Canada should be nothing more than a source of ‘raw materials for U.S. mass “production industry. Neuberger is concerned with the steady flow of power for U.S. industries and can see ** .. serious employment straights if anything interf with that power.” : For the future of Canadian industrial and domestic needs the Senator is not too concerned, but he did manage to get in a The Senator is impudent ing our water resources shouldn't . Neuberger and his kind hold to. deft supporting. play for Social Credit after he had talked with Attorney General Robert Bon- ner. Developing his theme of Columbia River water storage in B.C. for “downstream power in the U.S., Neuberger proposed that we should get our reward in “electric kilowatts rather than money ...such benefits would then be focussed entirely within B.C., rather than handed out from Ottawa, where money pay- ments would have to be made sierese Enemmier Warn hoe Denis nett must have smiled at that one ! It is time Neuberger was told in forthright language from official sources that his impud- ent interference in the internal _ affairs of this country is resented ‘by its people. As a visiting guest he is wel- come any time, but as a spokes- ‘man for Yankee trusts intent on plundering our resources, or throwing political monkey wren- ches into plans for our own industrial development, the wily Senator from Oregon is neither wanted nor welcome. Old disease a ea the years organized labor in this province has waged a consistent struggle against’ com: — pany towns. The history of that struggle has been written in Ocean Falls and Powell River, Cumber- land and Trail. Now, in Kitimat, fabor faces the old evil in new form, | an industrial empire ruled by a foreign power in the heart’ of B.C. Frank Howard, CCF MLA for Skeena, has already protested to > the Bennett government that prices for houses at Kitimat are too high. But selling ‘‘Mickey Mouse’’ homes to employees is only one phase of company control of work: ers’ economic, social and political life. A company town can be given the superficial appearance of a legitimate labor town and be no less a company town when its legitimate unions are in the hands of reactionary leaders more con’ cerned with dues collections than in new form preserving the democratic rights ~ of the workers. Kitimat is just such a company town where company control is strengthened by geographical iso- lation. The ‘rank-and-file union member who exercises his demo- cratic right to criticize and fight for his interests doesn’t last long. As the buyer of a company home (built with NHA money) he is a ‘free’, wage earner—with an economic ball and chain to keep him in line. In their methods of developing Kitimat as a company town the Yankee aluminum bosses make the late C. S. Blaylock of Consolidated Mining and Smelting look like a small operator in his years-long domination of Trail. The trade union movement need§ to act against this recur- rence of the company town dis- ease at Kitimat before it spreads to new centres. ‘Hal ) Griffin ee leafing through the pages of Native history before the coming of the white man, as they have been recon- structed through legend and investi- gation of ancient dwelling sites, you invariably come to those places where fact and fancy are blended. The records are so scanty, the story so incomplete, that all sorts of fanciful theories have been advanced to explain otherwise inexplicable facts. On the cliffs opposite Spuzzum, 1000 feet above the Fraser River, there are inscriptions which have baffled ethnologists for 40 years, ever since they were accidentally discovered through the slipping of a carrier’s horse. x The inscriptions are carved a quarter of an inch deep in the rock. They are unquestionably the work of human hands and not the freak markings of wind and water. They are unlike any known Indian inscriptions, but if Indians did not carve them, who did ? Scientists in this country to whom | photographs-‘were submitted have tenta- tively identified the writing as Ogam, the earliest form of Runic writing. Only one other example of this writ- ing has been discovered on this con- tinent, in Montana, although similar inscriptions are found throughout the Scandinavian countries and elsewhere in Europe. From the mystery surrounding these inscriptions high above the Fraser River a theory has been evolved, a fanciful but nonetheless intriguing theory, that they are the work of the legendary Welsh colony established on the Atlantic coast of North America in the twelfth century. it m co The story of Prince Madoc of Wales is part of Welsh folklore. He is said to have crossed the Atlantic around the year 1170 and to have established ‘a colony somewhere in what are now the Canadian Maritime provinces. The settlers intermarried with the Indians and slowly migrated westwards until at length they crossed the Rockies and reached the Pacific coast. There the tenuous thread of the legend ends. Apart from the persisting Welsh folk story, only the strange inscriptions in Montana, through which the settlers’ descendants supposedly passed, and above the Fraser River provide any ’ substance for the legend. But a few years ago, in 1947, two Victoria men, W. A. Jones and Eric Rhodes; authorities on Wales, published the conclusions of their investigation into the origin of the Kootenay Indians. They suggested that a comparison of the Welsh and Kootenay languages upheld their theory that the Kootenay Indians are descended from the med- ieval Welsh settlers. : Both the Welsh and Kootenay words for the numbers 1 to 10 are the same, except for the suffix used by the Kootenays. Welsh and Kootenay words for dog, cat fish, are virtually the same. : Strangest of all, both the Welsh and Kootenays use the same words for going home. But the suffix used by the Kootenays is lladynam, the name of a Welsh town. ae _ Fancy? Perhaps, but proving only how little is known of our story be- yond recorded history. PACIFIC TRIBUNE — OCTOBER 28, 1955 — PAGE 5