ERROR: relation "geometry_columns" does not exist

I've been using shp2pgsql successfully on a freebsd platform for awhile now.  I'd then take the the .sql file I out put and run it as a batch file on PG Navicat.  I was doing a bunch of these and all of a sudden I started getting this error:

Error at query 3: ERROR:  relation "geometry_columns" does not exist
CONTEXT:  SQL statement "DELETE FROM geometry_columns WHERE
                f_table_catalog = '' AND f_table_schema = 'public' AND f_table_name = 'cottonwood_wa' AND f_geometry_column = 'the_geom'"
PL/pgSQL function "addgeometrycolumn" line 102 at execute statement
SQL statement "SELECT AddGeometryColumn('', $1 , $2 , $3 , $4 , $5 , $6 )"
PL/pgSQL function "addgeometrycolumn" line 4 at SQL statement


I've gone back and tried to redo some that worked previously and they get this error now too.  I tried restarting PG, but no luck.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.  This is very frustrating!