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Solutrian letter full of holes

I agree with Larry Barnes (The Citizen, July 31) that it is unhelpful and often unfair to label someone a racist (ill-informed or not), as he claims Carolyn Bennett (federal minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations) did in the National Post.
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I agree with Larry Barnes (The Citizen, July 31) that it is unhelpful and often unfair to label someone a racist (ill-informed or not), as he claims Carolyn Bennett (federal minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations) did in the National Post. Mind you, a careful, unsickened reading of the source article shows that Bennett's statement was about Beyer's website content, not her personally.

Good parents always distinguish between condemning an act and condemning a person. The political leader who most prominently came right out and called Beyer a racist was her fellow Conservative, Andrew Scheer.

Still on the issue of being a racist - although Mr. Barnes "assures" that he is not a racist, such a self-evaluation is hardly surprising or persuasive. Most people who spout bigoted remarks will quickly explain that, mind you, they're not racists, just like we all know, there's no guilty people inside jails.

I worked for most of a quarter century on behalf of First Nations but would not for a moment claim that my views have been pure and untainted by the deeply ingrained racism of mainstream white society. For me, each day was a new struggle to confront my own prejudices. I hope that Mr. Barnes is purer in his unbias - but I'd be kind of surprised.

In his short essay on pre-contact archeology, Barnes gets one (and only one) thing right, stating that the origins of the first peoples of what we now call the Americas is something no one positively knows. As in any complex scientific matter, definitive final proof is rarely to be had.

However, Barnes' greatly admired "Solutrian hypothesis" - that the earliest emigrants to this hemisphere were from Europe - is nowhere nearly so strongly evidenced, as he seems to think.

A much larger body of disconfirming evidence has been raised against the idea by the majority of qualified scientists, pointing out defects in the Solutrian account. These include absence of mitochondrial DNA that would show that America's indigenous populations had some European ancestry; the flaws in the Solutrian theory originators' analysis of the Clovis site arrowheads; the absence of archaeological remains of vessels or what would now be subsea routes of passage from Europe.

In short, while it has its adherents, most relevant experts see the Solutrian theory as unsubstantiated and probably motivated by - that naughty word again - racism.

No doubt scientific debate will long continue on this but the most pathetic part of Mr. Barnes clutching at such straws to try to refute the prior and original occupation of the Americas by ancestors of today's First Nations, is that even if the Solutrian hypothesis was right, it is utterly irrelevant to the undeniable Aboriginal claim of prior and long term use and occupancy of this continent. The legal and moral case for recognizing prior ownership and jurisdiction would in no way be undermined if it were found that some of the primordial occupation of the Americas was by early Europeans, tens of centuries ago.

What no one can dispute is that when the likes of Columbus, Hudson, Cartier etc. were staking their little pennants to claim ownership by discovery, a mere five centuries ago, there were already countless long established indigenous cultures all over this hemisphere. Whether they had small quanta of European blood in their veins (as does not seem to be the case) or not, it was unquestionably their land and its seizure without agreement or proportionate compensation was a violation of European values as well as theirs.

Norman Dale

Prince George