Such are the stakes that prompted President Clinton to carry out what could be called the biggest cover-up of his scandalous administration. If Kennewick Man is Caucasian, then white people, according to the racial politics Clinton has promoted, have as legitimate a right to be on American soil as do any people of color. If evidence shows that white-skinned Americans were exterminated by invading ancestors of today s Indians, then this genocide could give Caucasian Americans a claim to victim status even stronger than that of Native Americans. Had such genocide not taken place, the argument would go, perhaps most of America s population and territory would have been Caucasian. Columbus might have been greeted by natives with faces whiter than his own.
History is written by the winners.
On today s university campuses, the fashion is to depict Euro-Americans as evil and Native Americans and most Hispanics as the virtuous survivors of white colonial exploitation, rape, and genocide. Kennewick Man might prove the opposite that the true Native Americans were white, victims of murderous genocide by the ancestors of today s Indians who seized their land. The European invasion of the past five centuries, in this potential revisionist history, merely reclaimed land stolen 9,000 years earlier from their murdered kin. Perhaps a bit of both, perhaps neither. In an age of science it would have been best to let scientists, not politicians and politically correct ideologues, sort out the evidence unhindered.