4 - Friday, January 25, 1991 - North Shore News Goodbye, Columbus; hello, insanity! IF THE rumor reported by Brian Kieran in the Pro- vince is correct — and who am I to take issue with a column on provincial poli- tics called Reliable Sources? — the Supreme Court of B.C. decision on the massive Gitksan- Wet’suwet’en tand claim will be released today. Which coincidentally fits into the theme I had chosen for to- day’s little chat: the rise of a trendy new “‘ism.”’ Not to keep up the suspense, V'll tell you — even though the tern: will mystify most readers — what it is. Precontactism. Huh? Yes, a strange word. Here’s a clue to what it’s about: think of a very iarge anniversary coming up in 1992. But first, while I can’t claim to have as many Reliable Saurces in Victoria as Mr. Kieran, I too have heard that Chief Justice Allan McEachern’s long-awaited judg- ment in this Indian land claim case will be released Friday. At this writing, the rumor is that the judgment runs to an eye- straining 600-odd pages, but the nub of it is: the court is tossing ” the tand claims issue back into (warning, cliche ahead!) the polit- ical arena. Mr. Kieran sees that as an ex- ploitable issue by Premier Bill Vander Zalm’s Socreds, one on which Mike Harcourt and the New Democrats are vulnerable. And so do I. Long months ago, in a publica- tion that competes for prestige with the North Shore News, | “predicted a March election on the Jand claims issue. And { have never been wrong, except in predicting there would be no war in the Persian Gulf, a temporary lapse in my fine record at- tributable to an over-generous estirnate of human intelligence — an error that, especially in the ease of Saddam Hussein, I will take pains not to repeat. But back, or rather forward, to 1992 and the rising fixation of precontactism. Find out more about yourself from these gifted channels! Sue Anderson, TAROT Doris Gray, TRUNES Gordon Mcllwraith, AURA Halainna, ASTROLOGER Sunomi, ENERGY FIELD READINGS Sandra Fisher, PALMIST CAPILANO MALL Monday, Jan 28 - Sunday, Feb. 3 263-6524 DON'T WALT TO READ IT Trevor Lautens GARDEN OF BIASES If you thought about it for two or three days, you would guess — correctly — that 1992 will be the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America. Oops. Scrub ‘“‘discovery.”’ This is a culturally-biased term. America, of course, wasn’t “‘discovered.’' [t has been there all along. Its inhabitants ‘*discovered”’ ii some years, thou- sands of them, before Columbus. In the pursuit of cultural self- hatred (by, of course, European- derived thinkers), Columbus himself is being mercilessly scorn- ed and derided, his character and his accomplishment held in equal contempt. As the left-wing critic Garry Wills writes of the quincentennial ceremonies planned for 1992: this time the Indians are waiting for him. **He comes now with an apologetic air — but not, for some, sufficiently apologetic. There are plans to blockade har- bors when replicas of his caravels arrive in 1992. Statues of the man have become the sites for demonstrations. He comes to be dishonored.*’ Wills’s essay, in the Nov. 22, 1990 issue of The New York Review of Books, should be read by everyone interested in land claims — and in the relentless assaults on the foundations of what used to be Western civiliza- tion. Lamentably, I can’t de justice to it here. But I did spend some time with one of the books Wills reviewed: The Conquest of Para- dise, by Kirkpatrick Sale (avail- able in the West Vancouver library). Sale is described as a founder of the New York Green Party and co-director of the E.M. Schumacher Society —~ remember the immense fashionableness some years ago of Schumacher’s ‘‘Small is Beautiful’ slogan? His book is long and, I would say, quasi-scholarly. But its theme is simple, a subsidiary of what far more learned folks than { would identify as the Rousseau inter- pretation of human society, which used to be seen as glorifying — perhaps the term has been drop- ped as racist — ‘‘the Noble Sav- age.”’ Rousseau argued that civilized man was immensely inferior to the grandeur of man in his primitive, unspoiled state. Safe argues the same. But with a specificatly American setting. Thus pre-furopean America is the Paradise of the titie — one in which Sale can scarcely find a single blemish -~ that was trashed by the European incursion — one in which Saie can find not a single redeeming feature. B.C. native leader Bill Wilson caused a sensation a couple of months ago when he said the In- dians of America had made a mistake in not resisting the ‘‘smel- ly’? white men. He could have been reading Sale — who, not so incidentally, seems to ignore totally the Indians of the Pacific Northwest, a re- markable oversight. But this school of thought has implications far beyond the In- dian-white ‘‘question.’ As Wills notes: ‘The issues that ramify out from the revolt against European imperialism are every- where evident around us — in the feminist and minority questioning of ‘dead white males’ as the ar- biters of our culture.”’ The title of Wills’ essay is “Goodbye, Columbus.’’ Good- bye, sanity, as the anti-culture’s ideologues capture the undefended ramparts that used to define our very identity as a society. Move over, Beethoven, for the drumbeat at the roadblock. LOUNGE PRESENTS SUNDAY, JAN. 27, 3 PM. 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