Cultural Terrorism Masquerading As Vandalism

An erratic, near Okotoks, Alberta, Canada

Back in June I highlighted the mysterious act of vandalism inflicted on the Lia Fáil or Stone of Destiny at Teamhair (the Hill of Tara), a crime that remains unresolved, but we are not the only ones whose history has suffered at the hands of cultural terrorists. From a report in the Indian Country Today:

“A rock drill, acid and a power washer; it’s not the beginning of a joke about a hardware store—it’s what was used by cultural vandals to destroy aboriginal pictograms and petroglyphs on a boulder in Alberta, Canada.

The damage was discovered when historian Stan Knowlton, Piikani First Nation, went to photograph and test the markings on the Glenwood Erratic near Pincher Creek in southern Alberta on September 9.

“It seems a little coincidental that the night before I was planning to go in with a high definition camera to record the markings, someone in a truck brings in a generator or compressor, a large hammer drill, maybe lights and a ladder and decimates the very thing I was hoping to preserve,” Knowlton said a report, titled “Desecration of Glenwood Erratic,” which the Pincher Creek Voice published with its story.

Knowlton pointed out in his report that this is just the latest in a string of vandalized pictogram and petroglyph sites in Alberta…

The vandals used a truck to get to the rock—Knowlton saw the tire tracks as he arrived on September 9—and he suspects they used a power washer to remove the lichen covering the symbols before spraying acid on the paintings and drilling away the carvings with a rock bore or hammer drill.”

A gross act of historical revisionism in the most literal of sense of the word and to be utterly condemned.