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Someone was dragooned into the National Post last week to respond to my comments on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s final report on the Indian residential school system. Having assured his tiny number of Twitter followers that my approach was “hopelessly racist,” his rebuttal was piffle. The metal tools from 6000 BC (in the midst of an ice age) that were discovered around Lake Superior, for example, had largely disappeared from North American Indigenous society by the time the Europeans arrived 7,500 years later, and there has never been any evidence that they used smelting, melting or casting in the production of metal objects. I have been a militant racial egalitarian all my conscient life. People and races are equal, but civilizations are not. He asserted that: “Europeans no more brought civilization to the Americas than they discovered it,” and alleges that civilizations of equal levels of development met each other and that “something like a slow-motion genocide occurred here.” This a monstrous falsehood for which there is not a shred of believable evidence. The European explorers and settlers were emissaries of the civilization of Shakespeare, Descartes, Michelangelo and Leonardo to a splendidly agile civilization of woodsmen who largely lacked any form of written language or advanced technologies such as wheeled transportation and metal tools and most other appurtenances of contemporary European life.