GIRL'S ESSAY WINS JAPAN TRIP Helen Joseph of Cassiar, B.C. will travel to Japan this summer at the expense of the local Lions Club. She will visit Japan for six weeks, as a result of her award winning essay. HELEN'S WINNING ESSAY Mr. Chairman, honored club mem- bers. It gives me a great deal of pleasure and apprehension to be here tonight giving a speech on why I would like to go to Japan. Setting a favorable example for the younger students to follow has let me to talk on, "Why I Would Like To Go To Japan". Indian students today, are the parents and leaders of their reserve, of the community of tomorrow. Win- ning this trip would make me a better person to meet the challenges of the future and also would illus- trate to other Indian students that they too can and should work towards goals that will broaden their ex- perience outside the reserve. A number of my friends have ask- ed what life on the reserve is really like. As much as I have talked and tried to explain to them what it is like, there is still a feeling within me that the emotions experienced cannot be truly tran- slated - that the best way for any- one to know what life is like in a community, reserve, or Japan is to be there and live their way of life in their setting, eating their food and associating with their friends. I think the cultural shock that I would experience in Japan would be less than that of an average middle class white student because I met this shock when I was five. I can recall quite easily, travelling in a covered car for the first time to Cassiar. Transferring from a small high school to a larger one in Terrace is another challenge that I am glad to have been able to meet and I look forward to the challenges and experiences of a Japanese way of life. The residents of Terrace are faced with the problems of unemploy- ment, lack of shelter, pollution, etc. As Terrace only has a pop- ulation of fourteen thousand and is presented with these problems to a minor degree, how much more these problems must be complicated in Japanese cities which have over a million people. Northern B.C. cities should take a closer look at what industrial expansion has, and is doing to the conservation of the wilderness. As it recedes further north to obtain their winter supply of food. Les= sons may be learned from the mis- takes of settlers in other areas. The position of the woman in the Japanese society interests me also. Is she getting more equal rights, does she have seat in their government, does she get a lower wage than the men even though the type of work and level of effic- iency is the same, or has the Woman's Liberation Movement really started to infiltrate into Japan. Other aspects of the Japanese culture I am interested in are architecture, the plans or designs for the future, their religion, how it differs from ours, funerals, weddings and feasts, customs, and generally the arts and literature. I suppose my greatest interest and reason for wanting to go to Japan is a historical-ancestrial one. Anthropogists believed that our ancestors had originally des- cended from Asia. They believed there was a time when the two con- tinents, Asia and North America, Page 1l