Some people use language to reduce their guilt. Ronald Wright’s most recent book called ‘What is America?’ (2008) has many great examples of this. In 1927 the Grand Council Fire of American Indians were just telling the truth when they told the mayor of Chicago that students were being brainwashed by being told to “call all white victories, battles, and all Indian victories, massacres….and white men who rise to protect their property are called patriots - Indians who do the same are called murderers”.

Wright further explains that white people legally justified the stealing of Native land because it was deemed that “by agricultural labour that man appropriates the soil”. Therefore since Natives were nomadic hunters they didn’t have rights to the land. You gotta love how people steal land and then create laws to justify it.

This completely ignored though that Natives around North America were successful farmers. In 1535 Cartier wrote that Hochelaga (renamed Montreal) had several thousand Natives living in longhouses. The surrounding land was filled with bountiful agriculture. By the early 1600s these Natives ‘disappeared’.

Even the meaning of savage changed. Wright says that originally savage “was a Latin word for woodland dwellers”. In fact at first the English described the Natives as “very handsome, and goodly….and in their behaviour as mannerly, and civil, as any of Europe.” This had to be revised to reduce guilt.

Wright said that Europeans “could see their political and social liberties in action: open debate, the rule of consensus and even - when agreement could not be reached on a serious matter - the right to secede”. The white man destroyed this culture.

Later on Wright says that “to justify its policy of ethnic cleansing, America had to deny the fact of Indian achievement and even destroy the evidence....the Georgia Guard wrecked the Cherokee printing press. The real problem, of course, was that the more the Civilized Tribes progressed on white terms, the more they competed with the white republic. And as the Indians filled their territory with thriving farms and good houses, they aroused more white greed. Why conquer a wilderness when one could take over a ready-made estate?”

The Calgary Sun’s editoral further stated that “it's time we stopped portraying Canada with such a heavy emphasis on our Native roots. Our home and Native land has been shaped by the aboriginals who were here on this land first, but they no longer define the country”.

So what the Calgary Sun is saying is that we should stop feeling guilty, like we owe Natives something more. I am surprised the Calgary Sun didn’t say that instead the jersey should be of 2 white homesteaders who by the sweat of their brow transformed a vast wilderness, and through perseverance and hard work created this great nation. This is what white people want to believe. The hope is to rid white people of their guilt of being the perpetrator of the biggest slaughter in human history.

The Calgary Sun’s attack is also trying to whip up hysteria and eliminate that darn pesky political correctness. Sometimes this shameful tactic works in economic downturns. The article ends by saying “we've missed the mark, but we lit the lamp on political correctness. Hooray for us.”

What the Calgary Sun is hoping for is that we forget our genocidal past. The Calgary Sun pretends it is on a crusade to wipe away political correctness so that we can get back to telling the ‘truth’. We all know this is a lie, but the Calgary Sun can’t handle the truth. 

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