Tribe Snubs Prof Cherokee band says Churchill’s claim of membership a fraud
By Charlie Brennan, Rocky Mountain News
May 18, 2005
Ward Churchill’s claim of membership in the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians is fraudulent, according to a scathing statement released by the tribal office.
The statement, issued May 9 in the name of the tribal leader, Chief George Wickliffe, and posted on its Web site Tuesday, does not mince words:
“The United Keetoowah Band would like to make it clear that Mr. Churchill IS NOT a member of the Keetoowah Band and was only given an honorary ‘associate membership’ in the early 1990s because he could not prove any Cherokee ancestry.”
Churchill has dismissed such comparisons, saying that the tribe investigated his genealogy and found him to be 3/16 Cherokee.
However, the tribe’s new statement contradicts Churchill’s claim.
“Mr. Churchill was never able to prove his eligibility in accordance with our membership laws,” the statement said.
The chief said his tribe had decided to honor Churchill with the associate membership because Church-ill had promised to write the tribe’s history and had pledged “to help and honor the UKB.”
“To date Mr. Churchill has done nothing in regards to his promise and pledge.”
Wow, this clown is a fraud in every aspect of his life.
After he gets fired, they should can the knucklehead that hired him.
I am so familiar with the rhetoric of this guy, who is a late 60s-early 70s throwback.
The beauty of playing the Indian victim card, is, that like the usual radicals, you can question the ENTIRE system AND further distance yourself from the evil white European by laying no claim to genetic inheritance! “I hate those in power and get off of my continent!” It’s like your are both radicalized and xenophobic, the latter being a characteristic of which you accuse your enemy.
Even the Black Panthers were not as radical as these guys. I was a page editor of my college paper back in the 70s when we had these Dennis Banks’ wannabes guys, including a guy very much like Churchill, who wanted a whole page of our paper to print weekly diatribes. When the editor refused, we were all, yours truly included, painted as white devil racists. I was called every name in the book because I had the misfortune of covering a campus pow-wow, in my capacity as reporter. I was led around by a truly odious fellow who “introduced” me to some musicians with “Explain your drumming to him, because these honkies don’t understand anything about our music.”
There was the familiar insults to Columbus (so stupid that he couldn’t find CHina, etc), the attacks on capitalism because we all know Indians were communalists and didn’t have private property and territorial mandates (patently untrue, though surely different than Euro standard of those who came). On and on.
Churchill made outrageous statements because he felt empowered by the Indian identity which so often terrifies white liberals. And to give separate deference to anyone playing that card is to further the racism, really, instead of healing it.
Perhaps he has received his karmic due in this lifetime.
Yes, he’s still teaching. The university has investigated the
charges against him and found nothing so far to warrant his
removal. His remarks about 9/11 are covered by
academic freedom, other charges like plagiarism haven’t
panned out, I believe. Basically he said something very
unpopular, understandably so, but the sort of opinion
that ought to be expressable, IMO. Academics who
said that 9/11 was, one way or another, a consequence
of our own bad behaviour have been slammed, which is a
pity as its true, I believe. The USA has never had
the sort of discussion we should have had about
why 9/11 happened, because people who express
the idea that the terrorists were motivated by
something other than the hatred of ‘freedom and
Western values’ have been silenced.
The relationship of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma to the United Keetoowah Band is an unusual one, among American Indians, but citizenship in either one is hinged on being a descendant of persons on the Cherokee rolls (these are closed rolls, and have been for most of the past century, dating to the period before Oklahoma statehood). The Keetoowahs have stricter requirements.
The Federal government issues us Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood cards (feels like being a show dog, at times—oh well), and that is what is official. The burden of proof is on the individual. Has to be proved with documentation, such as birth certificates.
Actually this wasn’t Churchill’s problem. His problem, besides being a plagarist and a fake, was saying that those who worked in the the Twin Towers deserved their fate, and were like “little Eichmanns,” referring to the bureacratic architect of Hitler’s Final Solution. No matter where you are on the political spectrum, a reasonable person cannot seriously compare anything any one of those people did with what Hitler was doing. A lot of people on this board are fairly left-wing, and are fairly outspoken in their hatred of things American, or at least of the “right-wing” of America, but I would hope that even they can see the idiocy of comparisons to Hitler.
If nothing else, Churchill should be fired for having such an apalling lack of understanding of history. If he does understand, his willful misrepresentation for the sole purpose of making headlines should be punished as it has no place in a teaching environment.
And furthermore, since his salary is paid by the state, I think it entirely appropriate that the state decide whether or not to fire him based on his remarks. They are not “abridging his freedom of speech” as he has claimed, but they are attempting to ensure that they pay competent and trustworthy professors. He has the right to say whatever lunatic things he wants, just not while being paid by an organization that disagrees with him. Welcome to the real world, Mr. Churchill.
I disagree. The plagiarism charge hasn’t been substantiated, at
least not so far; one can’t just help oneself to the claim that he
is a plagiarist, as a matter of fairness. As to being a ‘fake,’ it
isn’t clear what that means–if it’s claiming to be a descendant
of Indians when he is merely an associate member of the
tribe, that’s insufficient to fire somebody.
As to his academic competence, it’s manifest in his publications–which
have certainly earned awards and praise. Universities are places
where unpopular ideas should be expressible, even ideas
with which you and I or the state disagrees violently. As a fiercely
conservative pro-life academic, I cannot express strongly enough
how very important it is that academics who express heterodox
views be protected. In my experience, the chief threat to
academic freedom has been from within the university itself,
to people who express views considered ‘beyond the pale,’
too offensive and idiotic to allow expression, proof of
intellectual and professional incompetence, views like mine.
I feel strongly that, as a tenured professor,
I had the right to say what I thought
even though I was working for an organization that
disagreed with me.
Saying these people were little Eichmanns and comparing
the policies of the USA (for example the sanctions in Iraq, or
treatment of American Indians)
to the genocidal activities of Hitler
is not, in my opinion, idiotic or incompetent. Your claim
that he has said these things merely to grab headlines,
not because he believes them, has the force
of speculation, and it’s belied by his publication record.
By the way, to get behind the soundbites, here’s more
about the man and what he said (from Wikipedia):
As a scholar, Churchill has written on Native-American history and culture, and is particularly outspoken about what he considers the genocide inflicted on the indigenous peoples of North America by European settlers?repression that he argues continues to this day.
In Fantasies of the Master Race (1992), Churchill examined the portrayals of Native Americans and the use of Native American symbols in popular American culture. He focused on such phenomena as Tony Hillerman’s mystery novels, the film Dances with Wolves, and the New Age movement, frequently finding what he sees as examples of cultural imperialism and exploitation at work. Churchill calls author Carlos Castaneda (who claims to reveal the teachings of a Yaqui Indian shaman) the “greatest hoax since Piltdown Man.”
Churchill’s Indians ‘R’ Us (1993), a sequel to Fantasies of the Master Race, further explores Indian issues in popular culture and politics. He examines the movie Black Robe, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation killings, Leonard Peltier, sports mascots, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, and blood quantum laws, calling them tools of genocide. Churchill is particularly outspoken against what he characterizes as New Age exploitations of shamanism and Native American sacred traditions and what he scorns as the “do-it-yourself Indianism” of certain contemporary authors.
Struggle For The Land (reissued 2002) is a collection of essays in which Churchill asserts that the US government systematically exploited native land and permitted the killing or displacement of the Native American peoples who once inhabited it. He details Indian efforts in the 19th and 20th centuries to defend the land from defoliation, strip-mining and other destructive practices.
Churchill’s A Little Matter of Genocide (1998) is a historical survey of ethnic cleansing from 1492 to the present. He compares the treatment of North American Indians to other genocides in history, such as the ones in Cambodia and Armenia, and that of Gypsies, Poles and Jews by the Nazis.
In Perversions of Justice (2002), Churchill argues that the US legal system was adapted to gain control over Native American people. Tracing the evolution of federal Indian law, Churchill argues that the principles set forth were not only applied to non-Indians in the US, but later adapted for application abroad. He concludes that this demonstrates the development of America’s “imperial logic”, which depends on a “corrupt form of legalism” to establish colonial control and empire.
Churchill has also written several books on US state oppression. In Agents of Repression (1988), co-authored by Jim Vander Wall, the authors describe what they term “the secret war” against the Black Panther Party and American Indian Movement carried out during the late 1960s and '70s by the FBI under the COINTELPRO program. The COINTELPRO Papers (reissued 2002), also with Jim Vander Wall, examines a series of original FBI memos that detail the Bureau’s activities against various leftist groups, from the U.S. Communist Party in the 1950s to the Central America solidarity movement in the 1980s.
[The cover of .]
The cover of On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.
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9/11 essay controversy
Churchill wrote an essay called “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” about the 9/11 terrorist attacks in which he focused on American foreign policy actions which he argues provoked the attacks. The essay was later expanded and incorporated into a book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, which won Honorable Mention for the Gustavus Myer Human Rights Award in 2004. (The “roosting chickens” phrase comes from Malcolm X’s equally controversial comment relating to the assassination of president John F. Kennedy that Kennedy “never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon.”)
In the essay, which subsequently became the focus of significant criticism and controversy, Churchill compared Americans to the “good Germans” of Nazi Germany, claiming that the vast majority of Americans completely ignored the civilian suffering caused by the sanctions on Iraq during the 1990s. He characterized these sanctions as a policy of genocide, and repeatedly referred to their effect upon the children of Iraq.
In addition to the impact of the Iraq sanctions, Churchill argues that the Middle East policy of President Lyndon Johnson and the history of Crusades against the Islamic world contributed to the “provocations”. Churchill also compared the World Trade Center victims to the Nazi Adolf Eichmann, writing that those killed in the attacks:
were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it. [1] (http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html)
Churchill stated further:
As for those in the World Trade Center, well, really, let’s get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire the “mighty engine of profit” to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved and they did so both willingly and knowingly.
In January of 2005, attention was drawn to the essay after he was invited to speak at Hamilton College as a member of a panel titled “Limits of Dissent”. The text was then quoted on the January 28, 2005 edition of the Fox News Channel program The O’Reilly Factor. Bill O’Reilly initiated a campaign against Churchill imploring his viewers to e-mail the college. A flood of 6,000 e-mails resulted. In the ensuing uproar, the lecture was changed to a larger venue, but then was ultimately cancelled by president Joan Stewart due to “credible threats of violence”.
In response to what Churchill called “grossly inaccurate media coverage concerning [his] analysis of the September 11, 2001 attacks” Churchill clarified his views:
I am not a “defender” of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. I have never said that people “should” engage in armed attacks on the United States, but that such attacks are a natural and unavoidable consequence of unlawful U.S. policy. As Martin Luther King, quoting Robert F. Kennedy, said, “Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable”.
He continues later:
It is not disputed that the Pentagon was a military target, or that a CIA office was situated in the World Trade Center. Following the logic by which U.S. Defense Department spokespersons have consistently sought to justify target selection in places like Baghdad, this placement of an element of the American “command and control infrastructure” in an ostensibly civilian facility converted the Trade Center itself into a “legitimate” target. Again following U.S. military doctrine, as announced in briefing after briefing, those who did not work for the CIA but were nonetheless killed in the attack amounted to no more than “collateral damage”. If the U.S. public is prepared to accept these “standards” when they are routinely applied to other people, they should not be surprised when the same standards are applied to them. [2] (http://rockymountainnews.com/drmn/education/article/0,1299,DRMN_957_3512084,00.html)
Following the report on Fox, Churchill became a focus of national attention. On January 31, 2005 he resigned as chairman of the Ethnic Studies department at University of Colorado but remains a tenured professor. A special meeting of the Board of Regents of the University of Colorado was held on Thursday, February 3, 2005, to discuss the case. Colorado Republican governor Bill Owens and other Democrat and Republican state lawmakers have publicly called for his dismissal. Churchill’s supporters among the faculty and student body claim that allegations against Churchill are a pretext to discredit a notable liberal academic, which they say undermines freedom of speech, academic freedom, and ethnic studies departments nationwide.
Churchill’s claim that a majority of Americans ignored the effects of Iraqi sanctions on civilians in the 1990s has been disputed. These sanctions had been described as “genocidal” by UN Assistant Secretary General Dennis Halliday who later resigned over them, followed by Hans Von Sponeck, the UN Humanitarian Aid Co-Ordinator who also resigned over the same issue. The death of 567,000 children from the sanctions by 1996 was acknowledged by Madeleine Albright in an interview with Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes, however she believed the political price was “worth it”.
The Colorado House of Representatives, with unanimous support from Republicans and Democrats, adopted a resolution condemning Churchill’s statements about 9/11.
The Board of Regents of the University of Colorado, meeting in executive session at The Fitzsimons campus of the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center on February 3 2005, adopted a resolution apologizing to the American people for Churchill’s statements regarding the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and ratifying Interim Chancellor Phil DiStefano’s review of Churchill’s actions. He was directed to investigate whether Churchill overstepped his bounds as a faculty member, whether his actions are cause for dismissal, and whether his writings are protected by the First Amendment.
In response to Churchill’s speech being cancelled at Hamilton, Hawaiian Studies Professor and Hawaiian Sovereignty movement member Haunani-Kay Trask invited him to speak at the University of Hawaii on February 22 2005, where Churchill responded to his critics and argued for academic freedom and free speech.
A fellow professor at the University of Colorado, Emma Perez, alleges that attacks against Ward Churchill are an organized “test case” by neo-conservatives to stifle liberal criticism of the War on Terror and to directly undermine the funding of ethnic studies departments nationwide. [3] (http://www.counterpunch.org/perez02282005.html).
The Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights gave an honorable mention award to Churchill’s volume in 2004 (prior to the controversy), and has defended Churchill’s right to free speech. [4] (http://www.myerscenter.org/pages/statement.htm)
[edit]
As a “fairly left-wing” person on this board, I’m baffled by this comment. First of all, fairly left-wing people DON’T HATE AMERICA. Second, there hasn’t been one comment here by anyone left- or right-wing saying this guy was right to compare the victims of 9/11 to Hitler. Whether or not he had the right to say it or something like it is another matter and I’ll let Jim Stone argue that one. So, yes, even us “fairly left-wing” America-haters can see the idiocy of the comparison.
I’ve seen all of this, and I’ve actually read parts of his first book. He is still disembling and dishonest, as the quotes you provided prove:
But before that he said:
He wants to have things both ways. He wants the freedom the US provides him, but he wants to condemn it. He wants to say shocking, hateful things, but doesn’t want to be held responsible for them. His moral cowardice is perhaps his most evident personality trait.
I get tired of this “hate America first” mentality. There are some things we have done which are probably wrong, but generalizing our entire foreign policy as “illegal” is both intelllectually lazy and innacurate. Plus it misses the point. Do you really think that condemning the US is a valuable excercise, while we push the United Nations to do something about Darfur, and no-one acts? Do you think that in the sanctions referred to by Churchill and others America is really the problem when Kofi Annan is abusing his office to subvert those sanctions and make his son wealthy off illegal oil sales? And remember, Kofi’s mismanagment of that situation probably directly contributed to more deaths of innocent Iraqis than any action of any ten thousand inhabitants of the Twin Towers.
Academics like Churchill do not see the whole problem, because it is easy, safe and popular in the academy to condemn America, the idea of absolutes, and the idea of truth. You probably realize this, Mr. Stone, given your position on abortion. Churchill is not unpopular in his circle, he is not even daring. What he really needs to do is realize where the fingers ought to be pointing. There is evil throughout the world, even in America, but we are not the greatest evil, and pretending we are may be comforting, or help you sell books, or even fit your beliefs, but it does nothing to alleviate the suffering you pretend to care about.
I’m baffled by your misunderstanding. Look what I said. Left-wing people are quite often fairly outspoken in their hatred of things American, or of right-wing America. Very true, just read any of David Levine’s or jGilder’s comments for proof. I didn’t say any of you agreed with Churchill, , and I am glad you can see the idiocy of the comparison.
Chang He is the one who brought left- and right-wing into the discussion, insinuating that America-hating left-wingers would somehow agree with this guy. I merely attempted to point out that nobody was agreeing with what the man said and that left or right wing had nothing to do with it.
Susan, the comparison wasn’t to Hitler but to Eichmann, who is a different
sort of beast. As you know, he was the fellow whose
job it was to arrange the trains that would bring Jews
to the death camps. "I just did my job’ he explained
at his trial. There is a deep feeling that such people are
culpable, even if they aren’t raging murderers, even if
they hate nobody, that evil can be banal and undramatic.
Churchill sees American foreign policy as fundamentally
exploitive and wicked, occasionally genocidal, and he
thinks the people pushing papers around in the World Trade
Center who help make it possible are culpable–
they can’t just say: ‘hey, I was a civilian and I was just
doing my job.’
You know, I know a lot of people in universities
who compare Bush to Hitler,
who are quite vocal about it. I disagree strongly,
but I don’t think they should be fired.
The terrorists stuck 9/11 principally for two reasons, they
said: America’s one-sided support for Israel in its war
against the Palestinian people, and American troops in the
same country as Mecca. None of this ever got covered,
the official account was that they hate freedom, rock and roll,
and Jennifer Lopez. Meanwhile we have quietly removed our
troops from Saudi Arabia–but plainly the government
doesn’t want us to know about the Israel connection,
that this was principally political terrorism that flows
from our role in the continuing conflict over Palestine.
At least this guy Churchill is in the right ball park, at least
compared to the governmnet, as to why 9/11 happened.
Though I wish he was more on target.
It is, by the way, a relief to see an academic freedom
case where the threat comes from OUTSIDE
the university.
But, I don’t honestly care WHY the terrorists did what they did on 9/11/01. What they did was wrong, and there is no reason you can give me that will make it “less” wrong.
And before someone brings it up, yes, I think us being in and continuing being in Iraq is wrong, too, and reasonings behind it doesn’t make IT “less” wrong, either.
I also feel this way when I read about murders, child molestations, and other henious crimes. I honestly do not care WHY someone did what they did. I only care that they DID it.
Getting back to the subject of the OP - if anyone thinks it is legitamate say that anyone in the WTC “deserved” what they got - it is the same to me as saying a rape victim “deserved” what happened due to whatever circumstances, or a murder victim “deserved” to be murdered because of the place they were at or whatever. Taking the blame off of ANY perp. and placing it on the victim is WRONG.