Recently I was in a small Alaskan museums run by the National Park Service.
There was an excellent display of Tlingit cultural artifacts, with brief
historical outlines.  The main historical summary ran something like this:

3Tlingit culture was sophisticated and diverse, with highly developed art
and political and religious system. Then they were invaded by the  civilized9
Russians and their culture was brutally torn apart by the invaders. Surviving
Tlingits are now in the process of trying to reclaim their culture.2 etc.

I saw nothing too wrong with this label; it9s something I might write, trying
to stress that the Tlingit culture was whole and sophisticated before the white
invaders came with their labels of 3deficient2 and tried to 3enlighten2 it at
the expense of their lives.

My friend, however, was incensed. He saw the label as biased and condemning.
The quotes around 3civilized2 imply that the Russians weren9t as civilized as
the Tlingits, a biased judgement. It does not reflect that this event, however
tragic, is part of a whole universe of tragedy that we know as history. That
before the Russians invaded Alaska, they were a people who were invaded by
Mongols, who were invaded before that by someone else; that the Tlingits also
fought other nations for territory and killed people and took slaves. The
history of human kind is inarguably a brutal one, a continuous cycle of
conquering and being conquered, and taking one time periodout of context
lacks a broad perspective.

In fact, what he seemed to be saying is that the label, by portraying the
events as being between 3good Indians2 and 3bad whites,2 reflected very
simplistic, dualistic thinking - the same thinking and the same prejudices
that once were directed against Indians.  And when I commented that the writer
was probably trying to correct the commonly held, erroneous belief that the
Indians were 3helped2 by the arrival of whites, he said that you don t fight
bullshit with bullshit; you give them the truth instead.

I9m wondering what  the professional community thinks about PC in labelLing.