American Indian Movement : Ward Churchill

**Tumbleweed** · Admin Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts votes: 4

I came across this article on Ward Churchill. It seems he isn't making many friends in the NA community.

From the American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council Ministry for Information

Quote:

On Tuesday, July 25, following a lengthy investigation by a special panel, the University of Colorado Board of Regents on a vote of 8-1 fired tenured professor of Ethnic and Indian Studies, Ward Churchill. The charges were research misconduct and plagiarizing the writings and research of other academics. While we, the leadership of the American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council applaud the thoughtful and reasoned decision, we want to point out to all that for more than 25 years the legitimate leadership of AIM’s Grand Governing Council attempted to expose Ward Churchill as an academic, literary, and ethnic fraud.
Churchill perpetuated his fraudulent Indian identity in order to get himself streamlined into tenure and Director of the Ethnic and Indian Studies Department as well to market his plagiarized and revisionist books. He has also plagiarized the American Indian Movement’s intellectual property rights and tainted the goodwill for Indian people that exists nationally and worldwide.

He has made hundreds of thousands of dollars on the lecture circuit, promoted, yet today, by Speak Out Speakers Bureau promoting him as Indian, all after we notified them of his ethnic fraud. The result of this was to ignore the voices of authentic Indian academics, intellectuals, leaders and activists.

Churchill has fraudulently represented himself as a member of the Keetoowah Nation of Cherokee Indians of Oklahoma, which he is not. When challenged to show proof of any Indian ancestry he waves an associate membership card that at one time the Keetoowah Nation would give to anyone who would promise to help them. Even former President Bill Clinton received one of these cards of associate membership. Ernestine Berry who presided on the Keetoowah Enrollment Committee and served on the tribal council for years stated to Denver Post writer, Howard Pankratz on February 3, 2005 that Churchill was trying to get recognized as an Indian. He could not prove he is an Indian. Berry said that he was given this associate membership in the 10,000 member tribe based in Tahlequah, Oklahoma in the early 1990’s. “Churchill started coming around in 1992 or 1993 saying he wrote some books and was a big time author, and convinced us he could help our people,” Berry said, “and it was on that basis he was given the associate membership card.”

Barry also said, “Churchill never fulfilled his promise to help the tribe, and after he received his associate card, we never heard from him again.”

Due to this abuse and misrepresentation of the associate card by Churchill, the Keetoowah Nation has discontinued the practice of issuing these cards.

Not only is Ward Churchill a literary and academic fraud, just as egregiously he continues to fraudulently represent himself as being Keetoowah Indian, and a member of the American Indian Movement’s chapter in Denver, Colorado. With deceit and treachery, he has been able to manipulate the Denver Indian community into giving him and his co-conspirator, Glen Morris, credibility and cover. Glenn Morris is a professor at the University of Colorado who is another Caucasian American masquerading as an Indian, This is designed to confuse Indians and non-Indian alike. Following the decision of the University of Colorado Board of Regents, he, along with former personality in the American Indian Movement, Russell Means, created the illusion that AIM supports Ward Churchill.

Because of disruptive behavior and ethnic fraud, both Churchill and Morris were expelled from the International Indian Treaty Council by its International Board of Directors on September 23, 1986. The International Indian Treaty Council, or IITC is the international, political, and diplomatic Corp of the American Indian Movement. Seven years later on November 23, 1993, following a lengthy investigation, the American Indian Movement’s National Board of Directors expelled Churchill and Morris from AIM.

Read More Here

**CHUQ** · Agitator Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts votes: 3

I wish I could say something pleasant about today's AIM, but I cannot! AIM lost its rep for NAs when they became a tool of the governmentr. Their sole purpose is to debunk anyone spoeaking out on NA issues. It is a way to lessen the effect the person may have. Check on the original founders most are distancing themselves from the organization.

Personally, I do not care if he is a member or not. If he is bringing past or present tragedies to light thenb I say leave himn m alone and let the man talk. AIM seems to think that they need to work within the system, in today's world, that was never the original intent.

**Tumbleweed** · Admin Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts votes: 4

I don't know much about AIM, but I do know Ward Churchill has had a lot of his material and claims shot down by the academic community. He could be doing more harm than good by putting out a lot of mis-information.

**CHUQ** · Agitator Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts votes: 3

If he is lying then he should be nailed and nailed hard, but if he is furthering the issues and such of NAS, I do not care what he calls himself. I do not like the idea that he is making tons of money off his words.

AIM was an organization founded to return NAs to a more traditional path, the Red road; they did well until Wounded knee, then with a massive campaign to discredit the group the govt broke their hold on the NAs. Now it is nothing more than a for profit org that sspends more time trying to keep Nas from the very path it originally wanted them to travel. IMO, it has become a bullsh*t organization.

**Tumbleweed** · Admin Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts votes: 4

Thanks for the insight CHUQ. Cool

It just seems that since Ward Churchill has come into the public eye lately that he has given some folks who like to claim the NA weren't mistreated someone they can point to as an example of crying wolf.

I can't find any articles or statements that seem to back up some of Churchill's claims . My impression is the guy is a BS artist. He hasn't been able to prove he is even a NA.

This story about the blankets might or might not of happened like he said it did, I don't know for sure. The event wasn't very well documented. He seemed to have included facts that were his personal theory more so than the facts of the way events took place. It seems there were several different ways they might got the blankets.

**Coyote** · Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2007 10:20 am Post subject:

Well, as for his proving he is NA...

I have mixed feelings. It has to do with Tribal Sovereignty. A Tribe can control its own membership, IMO, regardless of blood quanta, or what the federal government has to say about it. That said, if he has abused the trust of the Tribe that originally gave him membership, they would do well to kick him out and disassociate themselves from him.

**Tumbleweed** · Admin Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts votes: 4

I don't know much about Tribal Sovereignty, but I thought he should at least either be a NA or officially be part of a tribe if he was going to make those claims.

I don't think an honorary member is quite the same thing is it? Once he got his card he seemed to have ignored the tribe that issued it. I got the impression he sucked up to the tribal leaders just to get a card.

I don't know much about how a tribe views outsiders, like if a tribal member marries outside of the tribe, like when for example ,they marry or have a common law relationship with non-member people. Just from my own outlook, wouldn't they be considered part of the tribe, and be required to abide by the same tribal laws and customs as the tribal members are?

**CHUQ** · Agitator Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts votes: 3

I believe that the blankets went to the Mandan, is that about right? If so, why go to them and check their oral history to see if there is a reference to this? If it happened there will be word of it. I have not read his article, does he mention any references to the nation in question?

**Tumbleweed** · Admin Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts votes: 4

He doesn't see to be relying on oral history. It's more like putting his own views of how he thinks events took place.

According to the timeframe of the blanket theory, there was a big outbreak of smallpox in St Louis. Here is an account of the event that quotes Mandan chief Four Bears.

Mandan chief Four Bears reportedly stated “a set of Black harted Dogs, they have deceived Me, them that I always considered as Brothers, has turned Out to be My Worst enemies”.[18] Francis Chardon, in his "Journal at Fort Clark 1834–1839", wrote that the Gros Ventre, who were one of the tribes affected by the smallpox, “swear vengeance against all the Whites, as they say the small pox was brought here by the S[team] B[oat].” (Chardon, Journal, p. 126). In the earliest detailed study of the event in 1902, "History of the American Fur Trade of the Far West" Hiram Martin Chittenden pointed blame on the American Fur Company for the epidemic.[19] Oral tradition of the effected tribes continue to claim that whites were to blame for the disease.

There are no accounts of the event that state the soliders were the source.

Here is another explanation.

On may 4, 1837, Francis A. Chardon, the churlish head trader at Fort Clark, a fur-company outpost on the Upper Missouri River, reported in his journal, “Last night the Cock crowed five times.” The superstitious Chardon then added: “Bad News from some quarter is expected.”

But with the severe winter over, and the ice-clogged river finally thawed, Chardon’s mood inched toward optimism. The nearby Mandan and Hidatsa tribes had gathered hundreds of packs of bison robes. Traders and Indians alike were eagerly awaiting the arrival of the steamboat St. Peters, churning upriver from St. Louis to pick up the furs and drop off its annual load of supplies from Pratte, Chouteau & Company, the western branch of John Jacob Astor’s former American Fur Company.

The St. Peters, a 119-ton side-wheeler, docked at Fort Clark on June 19 and unloaded trade goods and Indian provisions. Also aboard was Chardon’s 2-year-old son, Andrew Jackson Chardon, whom he had fathered with a handsome Lakota Sioux woman, Tchon-su- mons-ka. That night the crew members of the St. Peters joined in a boisterous “frolick,” singing and dancing with the men and women at the Mandan’s bustling village of Mit-tutta-hang-kush.

The next day the St. Peters headed upstream toward Fort Union, at the mouth of the Yellowstone. But in its wake it left a ticking time bomb. In addition to its cargo of supplies, the steamboat had been carrying several passengers and crewmen infected with variola major, the lethal virus feared for thousands of years by its better-known name: smallpox.

**CHUQ** · Agitator Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts votes: 3

Thanx for the article.

**Tumbleweed** · Admin Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts votes: 4

I have other perspectives to post also CHUQ. Some of the info I'm looking into are quite long articles so I have to post a short version of it, or it would read like a book. I chose this one first because I found 3 articles that basically say the same thing as this one.

I'm looking into previous smallpox outbreaks in that region, and I found an article today that seemed to suggest this outbreak was even spread into parts of Canada.

My problem with Ward Churchill isn't so much about what he said as what it was he didn't say.

There are a few personal accounts of the event that he didn't research, or chose to ignore. There is a case of what seems to be of NA being given blankets or suggested they be given blankets that carried the smallpox virus, but it wasn't related to this event. I'll be looking into that a bit later.

If I found some of these personal accounts and statements this easy, surely he knew of them also. At the very least, I feel he should have presented these theories along with his own and let people judge for themselves what they felt took place, based on all known facts.

**CHUQ** · Agitator Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts votes: 3

Tumble--good post! And yes I agree, that is the way I would do it. Give the reader all info and let them decide what is true and what is not.