COLUMN LEFT : Is It Perversity to Speak Truth of Genocide? : Today’s ‘PC’ battles are mere warm-up for the Columbus war.

History comes to many Americans these days in the form of TV spectaculars and expertly staged hoopla. Thus it was with the Bicentennial in 1976, Liberty Weekend in 1986, the “Welcome Home” extravaganzas just celebrated in Washington and New York; and thus it will be, next year, with the fifth centenary of Columbus’ voyage.

But if the people on the losing end of the Gulf War did not have to witness the cheering, the same won’t be true next year. There will be plenty of “Iraqis” on hand, in the form of American Indians with nothing to cheer about at the memory of what Columbus brought. The tensions around the quincentenary were hinted at in the row about the Smithsonian exhibition I discussed here recently.

When Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) started raising hell about the Smithsonian exhibition “The West as America,” he got his cue from Daniel Boorstin, the former librarian of Congress. On the first page of the visitors’ comment book, Boorstin had scrawled “a perverse, historically inaccurate, destructive exhibition.” Stevens, informed of this, opened fire.

It’s not hard to see why Boorstin was incensed at a presentation that stressed the mutilation of truth by artists celebrating the opening of the West. He’s seasoned in such mutilations himself.

In “The Americans: The Democratic Experience,” Boorstin writes of Western ranchers: “Their great opportunity was to use apparently useless land that belonged to nobody.” So whose history is perverse and inaccurate? Boorstin’s dram of nonsense is drawn from the same poisoned well that proposed a Yellowstone uninhabited before the white man came. The natives, so the story went, held the geysers in “superstitious awe” because of their rumble and hiss, “which they imagined to be the wails and groans of departed Indian warriors suffering punishment because of their earthly sins.” This rubbish was made up in the late 1870s by the park’s first superintendent, Philetus Norris, who had lobbied for the expulsion of such Shoshone, Crow, Bannock and Blackfoot as remained, hoping thus to avert “in future all danger of conflict between those tribes and laborers or tourists.”

Boorstin was blind to indigenous culture and the actual history of American Indians, the same as so many other scholars of presumed learning. In 1900, anthropologist Alfred Kroeber began a series of encounters that lasted many years with the Yurok Indians along the Klamath River in northwestern California. He finally concluded that the Yurok were “inwardly fearful people . . . the men often seemed to me bitter and withdrawn.” Kroeber mused that “for some unknown reason, the culture had simply gone hypochondriac.”

What Kroeber never mentioned was that between 1849, the start of the Gold Rush, and 1910 the Yurok population in that region was reduced from about 2,500 individuals to 610. Disease, starvation and murder had wiped out 75% of the group. Kroeber knew the facts well enough. According to Thomas Buckley, writing in the fall, 1989, issue of American Indian Quarterly, Kroeber was once asked “why he had not attended to recent Yurok history and acculturation, (and) Kroeber replied that he ‘could not stand all the tears’ ” that these topics elicited from his Yurok informants. In Kroeber’s view, anthropology was a matter of “millennial sweeps and grand contours,” so “the billions of woes and gratifications, of peaceful citizen lives or bloody deaths” were of no immediate concern.

So much for the founding father of academic anthropology in California, choosing to ignore the Yuroks’ extermination at the precise moment that coherent reports would have been of inestimable value. It was for making this kind of analysis that the organizers of “The West as America” got into such trouble.

Still, as Cicero wrote, “to be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be forever a child.” Jack Norton used this as the epigraph to his book “When Our Worlds Cried: Genocide in Northwestern California.” Norton quotes an 1860 article from the New York Century, reprinted in the same year by the San Francisco Bulletin:

“In the Atlantic and Western States, the Indians have suffered wrongs and cruelties at the hands of the stronger race. But history has no parallel to the recent atrocities perpetrated in California. Even the record of Spanish butcheries in Mexico and Peru has nothing so diabolical.”

These days this would be derided by the cud-chewers as a toxic effusion of PC vapors. One hundred and thirty-one years after the Century took its stand, Sen. Stevens seized as evidence of the evil of the Smithsonian exhibition its espousal of the pernicious view that American Indians had been victims of genocide.