Wednesday, July 25, 2007
Ward Churchill: HUAC rides again
Anyone out there remember HUAC? House UnAmerican Activities Committee? Joe McCarthy? All those days of rampant flag-waving and ruthless dissent-smashing? Not many, I guess, do. They might read about it in Howard Zinn or somewhere, but it’s obviously nowhere near as important as...hell...Lindsay Lohan or someone like that. Paula Abdul or Judge Judy. What’s happened, though, is that the blind vote-whoring and publicity sucking politicians are back in the saddle.
Ward Churchill is a man a lot of people don’t like. Big deal. A lot of people don’t like Hillary Clinton or Katie Couric or Brian Williams. That a person is popular or unpopular does not reduce her—or his—right to express an opinion. That’s a flat-out guarantee, that as citizens everyone has the right to express their thoughts and feelings.
Wrong. The old days of rabid Communist-hunting have returned. This time it’s wrapped in patriotism, of course rather than ideology. Ward Churchill got sacked from the University of Colorado because he said things that offended some politicians who needed votes and publicity.
I agree that the deaths in the World Trade Center were predictable and logical. We’ve fucked around in the Arab world for so long, there was a huge pile of instant karma ready to slam into us. I disagree that the people in the towers were Eichmanns, generally. Evil is banal, right? Maybe in the banality of their work, those people did enable a lot of evil...Most of us do, one way or another. We participate in a system that is ruthlessly exploiting as many of the world’s natural resources as we can. We’re vicarious participating in a mean and evil war—and if anything is evil, America’s war against Iraq is evil.
If I was a university teacher and some jerk-handed Republican read that, he might want my ass kicked off campus. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.
We need to remember that the only university teachers who kept their jobs in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia or Maoist China were ones that utterly and loudly supported their governments.
Amy Goodman is a brave person. I'm grateful she's out there, speaking up.
Professor Ward Churchill Vows to Sue University of Colorado Over Controversial Firing
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/25/145254
The Board of Regents of the University of Colorado in Boulder voted 8-to-1 Tuesday evening to fire tenured professor of Ethnic Studies Ward Churchill on charges of research misconduct. But Churchill maintains that the allegations were a pretext to remove him for his controversial political views. One day after his firing, Churchill calls the charges a sham and vows a suit against the school. [includes rush transcript]
The Board of Regents of the University of Colorado in Boulder voted 8-to-1 Tuesday evening to fire tenured professor of Ethnic Studies Ward Churchill on charges of research misconduct. But Churchill maintains that the allegations were a pretext to remove him for his unpopular political views. Churchill has written a number of books on genocide against Native Americans and the US government's COINTELPRO program. After yesterday's verdict Churchill said he planned to sue the university.
Churchill has written a number of books on genocide against Native Americans and the US government's COINTELPRO program. After yesterday's verdict Churchill said he planned to sue the university.
The controversy dates back to early 2005 when a college newspaper reprinted Churchill's three-year old essay on the attacks on the World Trade Center. He described the attacks as a response to a long history of US abuses and called those who were killed on 9-11 as "little Eichmanns" who formed a “technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire."
Adolf Eichmann was a Nazi bureacrat convicted for war crimes who political theorist Hannah Arendt famously described as embodying the "banality of evil." Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly repeatedly attacked Churchill for his comparison. Soon after, Colorado Governor Bill Owens wrote a letter to the university calling for Churchill’s resignation.
A special panel at the university immediately conducted an investigation into Churchill’s comments. They concluded that he could not be fired for his statements, which were protected by the First Amendment. However, another panel later determined that Churchill plagiarized and fabricated material in his scholarship and recommended his dismissal.
Supporters of Ward Churchill organized a rally before the Regents delivered their decision to fire Churchill at 5.30 pm. They had been deliberating behind closed doors all day.
Churchill supporter Ann Erika Whitebird.
Ward Churchill joins us on the phone from Boulder, Colorado.
* Ward Churchill. He was just terminated from his tenured post as Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Churchill is an activist and author of a number of books on genocide against Native Americans and the US government's COINTELPRO program.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...
AMY GOODMAN: The Board of Regents of the University of Colorado in Boulder voted 8-to-1 Tuesday evening to fire tenured professor of ethnic studies Ward Churchill on charges of research misconduct, they said. But Professor Churchill maintains the allegations were a pretext to remove him for his unpopular political views.
Churchill has written a number of books on genocide against Native Americans and the US government's COINTELPRO program -- that’s Counter-Intelligence Program. After yesterday's verdict, Churchill said he planned to sue the university.
JUAN GONZALEZ: The controversy dates back to early 2005, when a college newspaper reprinted Churchill's three-year-old essay on the attacks on the World Trade Center. He described the attacks as a response to a long history of US abuses and called those who were killed on 9/11 as “little Eichmanns” who formed a “technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire.”
Adolf Eichmann was a Nazi bureaucrat convicted for war crimes, who political theorist Hannah Arendt famously described as embodying the “banality of evil.” Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly repeatedly attacked Churchill for his comparison. Soon after, Colorado Governor Bill Owens wrote a letter to the university calling for Churchill's resignation.
A special panel at the university immediately conducted an investigation into Churchill’s comments. They concluded that he could not be fired for his statements, which were protected by the First Amendment. However, another panel later determined that Churchill plagiarized and fabricated material in his scholarship and recommended his dismissal.
AMY GOODMAN: Supporters of Ward Churchill organized a rally before the Regents delivered their decision to fire Churchill at 5:30 last night in Boulder. They had been deliberating behind closed doors all day.
Today we'll be joined by Ward Churchill on the phone from Boulder, but first to a clip of yesterday's rally. We turn now to Ward Churchill, his lawyer David Lane, American Indian Movement activist Glenn Morris, and one of Churchill's students.
ANN ERIKA WHITEBIRD: And the decision to fire Ward Churchill is really sad for me. He's the only professor that I’ve taken a class, where I really felt empowered as an Indigenous person. And our history, the history of genocide against our people, the history, the policy, the US policy of extermination against our people, the forced sterilization of our women -- that was found out as early as the ’70s -- it was all something that Ward talks about in his books. So I’m not just talking about the class that he’s offered, the FBI at Pine Ridge, but, you know, other classes that he teaches and then the books that he's written is really affirming as a Native person.
The history that we hear growing up about the smallpox blankets, it's not something that you question. It's something that is part of our oral history. And it's part of the history of other indigenous peoples. So when I’m here at CU Boulder and I talk to other students who are Dene or from other nations, it's a common understanding.
AMY GOODMAN: That was a student talking about Ward Churchill. Now, we turn to the ethnic studies professor, who joins us on the phone from his home in Boulder. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Ward Churchill.
WARD CHURCHILL: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Your thoughts today on the morning after your firing?
WARD CHURCHILL: Well, a period of glaciation, which was this process of creating the illusion of research misconduct to cover a firing for political speech, has come to an end. That process has now run its course, so there's a new phase that's begun, which is, I suppose, for lack of a better way of putting it, my period of defensive posture has come to an end and the offense has begun, kicks off this morning with the filing of a suit.
AMY GOODMAN: Who will you be suing?
WARD CHURCHILL: Regents of the University of Colorado for accepting, in full knowledge at this point, a non-scholarly sham of an investigative report, creating the pretext. And I say “non-scholarly” because the university has withdrawn the entire investigative report from any scholarly scrutiny. They refuse to allow it to be subject to scrutiny by competent scholars. And there are research misconduct complaints in place at this point against the members of the investigative committee for serial plagiarism, wholesale falsification, outright fabrication -- in other words, fraud. It's a fraudulent finding.
So there is no defensible scholarly conclusions that anything I’ve said in my writing is even inaccurate, much less fraudulent, or that I committed the so-called plagiarism. All they've got is public outrage in the form of very well-organized rightwing, active-style lobbying blocks, and the statements of public officials, and so on, saying I should be removed as the basis for removing me.
JUAN GONZALEZ: The amazing thing about this is that the so-called -- the investigation focused on everything but the apparent reason why there was such a determination to investigate you. The essay having to do with 9/11, that wasn't even a subject, supposedly, of this investigation, was it?
WARD CHURCHILL: No. And a point to be made there is that while I was a target, was a target that would serve as a sort of conduit, in a way, they considered me to be, and said so, considered me to be kind of at the forefront of a sort of critical line of analysis, historically speaking. And they wanted to roll back that line of analysis altogether, to discredit it, so that you basically have a return to that triumphalis, celebratory white-supremacist interpretation of American history with all of the denial and falsification that that is known to entail. That's the reason, in part. And it's in large part for the charade that they have acted out over the last two-and-a-half years, the going after the historical analysis, as well as a purveyor of it. And so, this goes way beyond me. I’m intended to symbolize the cost and consequence of challenging orthodoxy in certain critical domains, at least.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And what has been the response of the press in Colorado? Have any of the newspapers or any of the press defended your right to speak your mind?
WARD CHURCHILL: Well, yeah. They've created this false dichotomy, in a way: Well, it's reprehensible, we disagree with it, blah, blah, blah, but he had a right to say it, however repugnant it may have been. On the other hand, he did all these things that constitute research misconduct. Basically he's pedaling lies to the public that cause discontent with the status quo. And that's what the issue is. The specific acts of research misconduct has nothing to do with that speech.
The press was instrumental in framing that. There's been a symbiotic relationship between the administration at the university and the press all along. The press really took the lead in drumming up furor. There were 400 feature articles on my case, or what is supposed to be my case, in the Denver metro area newspapers in barely sixty days. Pope died; I had the front page of the Rocky Mountain News. The Rocky Mountain News was at the very forefront of creating the appearance that there was scholarly impropriety involved in my work and to be able to separate that set of issues then, the scholarly impropriety from the speech issues.
AMY GOODMAN: Ward Churchill, we have to go. But in addition to the lawsuit you're filing, what are your plans now?
WARD CHURCHILL: Well, my plans now are to continue to do what it is that I’ve always done: I mean, being a professor at the University of Colorado hardly defines the nature of my life. In fact --
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to have to leave it there. I want to thank you for being with us from Boulder, Ward Churchill, just fired by the University of Colorado.
www.democracynow.org
Ward Churchill is a man a lot of people don’t like. Big deal. A lot of people don’t like Hillary Clinton or Katie Couric or Brian Williams. That a person is popular or unpopular does not reduce her—or his—right to express an opinion. That’s a flat-out guarantee, that as citizens everyone has the right to express their thoughts and feelings.
Wrong. The old days of rabid Communist-hunting have returned. This time it’s wrapped in patriotism, of course rather than ideology. Ward Churchill got sacked from the University of Colorado because he said things that offended some politicians who needed votes and publicity.
I agree that the deaths in the World Trade Center were predictable and logical. We’ve fucked around in the Arab world for so long, there was a huge pile of instant karma ready to slam into us. I disagree that the people in the towers were Eichmanns, generally. Evil is banal, right? Maybe in the banality of their work, those people did enable a lot of evil...Most of us do, one way or another. We participate in a system that is ruthlessly exploiting as many of the world’s natural resources as we can. We’re vicarious participating in a mean and evil war—and if anything is evil, America’s war against Iraq is evil.
If I was a university teacher and some jerk-handed Republican read that, he might want my ass kicked off campus. Wouldn’t surprise me a bit.
We need to remember that the only university teachers who kept their jobs in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia or Maoist China were ones that utterly and loudly supported their governments.
Amy Goodman is a brave person. I'm grateful she's out there, speaking up.
Professor Ward Churchill Vows to Sue University of Colorado Over Controversial Firing
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/25/145254
The Board of Regents of the University of Colorado in Boulder voted 8-to-1 Tuesday evening to fire tenured professor of Ethnic Studies Ward Churchill on charges of research misconduct. But Churchill maintains that the allegations were a pretext to remove him for his controversial political views. One day after his firing, Churchill calls the charges a sham and vows a suit against the school. [includes rush transcript]
The Board of Regents of the University of Colorado in Boulder voted 8-to-1 Tuesday evening to fire tenured professor of Ethnic Studies Ward Churchill on charges of research misconduct. But Churchill maintains that the allegations were a pretext to remove him for his unpopular political views. Churchill has written a number of books on genocide against Native Americans and the US government's COINTELPRO program. After yesterday's verdict Churchill said he planned to sue the university.
Churchill has written a number of books on genocide against Native Americans and the US government's COINTELPRO program. After yesterday's verdict Churchill said he planned to sue the university.
The controversy dates back to early 2005 when a college newspaper reprinted Churchill's three-year old essay on the attacks on the World Trade Center. He described the attacks as a response to a long history of US abuses and called those who were killed on 9-11 as "little Eichmanns" who formed a “technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire."
Adolf Eichmann was a Nazi bureacrat convicted for war crimes who political theorist Hannah Arendt famously described as embodying the "banality of evil." Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly repeatedly attacked Churchill for his comparison. Soon after, Colorado Governor Bill Owens wrote a letter to the university calling for Churchill’s resignation.
A special panel at the university immediately conducted an investigation into Churchill’s comments. They concluded that he could not be fired for his statements, which were protected by the First Amendment. However, another panel later determined that Churchill plagiarized and fabricated material in his scholarship and recommended his dismissal.
Supporters of Ward Churchill organized a rally before the Regents delivered their decision to fire Churchill at 5.30 pm. They had been deliberating behind closed doors all day.
Churchill supporter Ann Erika Whitebird.
Ward Churchill joins us on the phone from Boulder, Colorado.
* Ward Churchill. He was just terminated from his tenured post as Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Churchill is an activist and author of a number of books on genocide against Native Americans and the US government's COINTELPRO program.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
This transcript is available free of charge. However, donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.
Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...
AMY GOODMAN: The Board of Regents of the University of Colorado in Boulder voted 8-to-1 Tuesday evening to fire tenured professor of ethnic studies Ward Churchill on charges of research misconduct, they said. But Professor Churchill maintains the allegations were a pretext to remove him for his unpopular political views.
Churchill has written a number of books on genocide against Native Americans and the US government's COINTELPRO program -- that’s Counter-Intelligence Program. After yesterday's verdict, Churchill said he planned to sue the university.
JUAN GONZALEZ: The controversy dates back to early 2005, when a college newspaper reprinted Churchill's three-year-old essay on the attacks on the World Trade Center. He described the attacks as a response to a long history of US abuses and called those who were killed on 9/11 as “little Eichmanns” who formed a “technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire.”
Adolf Eichmann was a Nazi bureaucrat convicted for war crimes, who political theorist Hannah Arendt famously described as embodying the “banality of evil.” Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly repeatedly attacked Churchill for his comparison. Soon after, Colorado Governor Bill Owens wrote a letter to the university calling for Churchill's resignation.
A special panel at the university immediately conducted an investigation into Churchill’s comments. They concluded that he could not be fired for his statements, which were protected by the First Amendment. However, another panel later determined that Churchill plagiarized and fabricated material in his scholarship and recommended his dismissal.
AMY GOODMAN: Supporters of Ward Churchill organized a rally before the Regents delivered their decision to fire Churchill at 5:30 last night in Boulder. They had been deliberating behind closed doors all day.
Today we'll be joined by Ward Churchill on the phone from Boulder, but first to a clip of yesterday's rally. We turn now to Ward Churchill, his lawyer David Lane, American Indian Movement activist Glenn Morris, and one of Churchill's students.
ANN ERIKA WHITEBIRD: And the decision to fire Ward Churchill is really sad for me. He's the only professor that I’ve taken a class, where I really felt empowered as an Indigenous person. And our history, the history of genocide against our people, the history, the policy, the US policy of extermination against our people, the forced sterilization of our women -- that was found out as early as the ’70s -- it was all something that Ward talks about in his books. So I’m not just talking about the class that he’s offered, the FBI at Pine Ridge, but, you know, other classes that he teaches and then the books that he's written is really affirming as a Native person.
The history that we hear growing up about the smallpox blankets, it's not something that you question. It's something that is part of our oral history. And it's part of the history of other indigenous peoples. So when I’m here at CU Boulder and I talk to other students who are Dene or from other nations, it's a common understanding.
AMY GOODMAN: That was a student talking about Ward Churchill. Now, we turn to the ethnic studies professor, who joins us on the phone from his home in Boulder. Welcome to Democracy Now!, Ward Churchill.
WARD CHURCHILL: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: Your thoughts today on the morning after your firing?
WARD CHURCHILL: Well, a period of glaciation, which was this process of creating the illusion of research misconduct to cover a firing for political speech, has come to an end. That process has now run its course, so there's a new phase that's begun, which is, I suppose, for lack of a better way of putting it, my period of defensive posture has come to an end and the offense has begun, kicks off this morning with the filing of a suit.
AMY GOODMAN: Who will you be suing?
WARD CHURCHILL: Regents of the University of Colorado for accepting, in full knowledge at this point, a non-scholarly sham of an investigative report, creating the pretext. And I say “non-scholarly” because the university has withdrawn the entire investigative report from any scholarly scrutiny. They refuse to allow it to be subject to scrutiny by competent scholars. And there are research misconduct complaints in place at this point against the members of the investigative committee for serial plagiarism, wholesale falsification, outright fabrication -- in other words, fraud. It's a fraudulent finding.
So there is no defensible scholarly conclusions that anything I’ve said in my writing is even inaccurate, much less fraudulent, or that I committed the so-called plagiarism. All they've got is public outrage in the form of very well-organized rightwing, active-style lobbying blocks, and the statements of public officials, and so on, saying I should be removed as the basis for removing me.
JUAN GONZALEZ: The amazing thing about this is that the so-called -- the investigation focused on everything but the apparent reason why there was such a determination to investigate you. The essay having to do with 9/11, that wasn't even a subject, supposedly, of this investigation, was it?
WARD CHURCHILL: No. And a point to be made there is that while I was a target, was a target that would serve as a sort of conduit, in a way, they considered me to be, and said so, considered me to be kind of at the forefront of a sort of critical line of analysis, historically speaking. And they wanted to roll back that line of analysis altogether, to discredit it, so that you basically have a return to that triumphalis, celebratory white-supremacist interpretation of American history with all of the denial and falsification that that is known to entail. That's the reason, in part. And it's in large part for the charade that they have acted out over the last two-and-a-half years, the going after the historical analysis, as well as a purveyor of it. And so, this goes way beyond me. I’m intended to symbolize the cost and consequence of challenging orthodoxy in certain critical domains, at least.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And what has been the response of the press in Colorado? Have any of the newspapers or any of the press defended your right to speak your mind?
WARD CHURCHILL: Well, yeah. They've created this false dichotomy, in a way: Well, it's reprehensible, we disagree with it, blah, blah, blah, but he had a right to say it, however repugnant it may have been. On the other hand, he did all these things that constitute research misconduct. Basically he's pedaling lies to the public that cause discontent with the status quo. And that's what the issue is. The specific acts of research misconduct has nothing to do with that speech.
The press was instrumental in framing that. There's been a symbiotic relationship between the administration at the university and the press all along. The press really took the lead in drumming up furor. There were 400 feature articles on my case, or what is supposed to be my case, in the Denver metro area newspapers in barely sixty days. Pope died; I had the front page of the Rocky Mountain News. The Rocky Mountain News was at the very forefront of creating the appearance that there was scholarly impropriety involved in my work and to be able to separate that set of issues then, the scholarly impropriety from the speech issues.
AMY GOODMAN: Ward Churchill, we have to go. But in addition to the lawsuit you're filing, what are your plans now?
WARD CHURCHILL: Well, my plans now are to continue to do what it is that I’ve always done: I mean, being a professor at the University of Colorado hardly defines the nature of my life. In fact --
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to have to leave it there. I want to thank you for being with us from Boulder, Ward Churchill, just fired by the University of Colorado.
www.democracynow.org
Comments:
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I commented, slightly, on this 'ore at orcinus, but am at a loss as to what too say. I took some classes from one of his proteges` fifteen or so years ago, and met both WC and RM in DC thirty-one years ago. Have read many of his books, some banned in the "us". I'm not so much angry as disappointed, but then again... what's too be disappointed with?
Afterall, ain't nuthin' east 'o The Rockies we need.
Afterall, ain't nuthin' east 'o The Rockies we need.
# posted by 
: 4:31 PM
: 4:31 PM
Normally, Talapus, I applaud your postings, am usually in total agreement. But the issue of Ward Churchill is another animal all together. Does it even matter to anyone that he lied about his Native heritage, or at least cannot prove it? He flat out lied on his intial university application.
I know many people who share his insights, but they do not claim to be Native, nor do they use that distinction to take a pivotal faculty job away from those who are Native, and who have struggled to achieve academic success. I don't believe Howard Zinn ever made manipulative claims to further his research and perspective. No, Ward Churchill is another animal altogether.
These excepts are from Ward Churchill's wikipedia entry, similar information abounds in other sources.
Ethnic background
Both of his birth parents are listed as white on the 1930 census, as are all of his other known ancestors on previous censuses and other official documents. [27]
Churchill claims ancestry of three different tribes, Creek[28][29], Cherokee[30], and Metis[31][32] and states that he is an enrolled[33] member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians. The Rocky Mountain News investigated and found "no evidence of a single Indian ancestor" [of Churchill's].[34] The Denver Post's genealogical investigation resulted in the same conclusion. Ernestine Berry, who was on the tribe's enrollment committee (Keetoowah) and served on the tribal council for four years, told the The Denver Post: "He (Churchill) was trying to get recognized as an Indian. He could not prove he was an Indian (Cherokee) at all." [35] Moreover, the United Keetoowah Band responded to Churchill's claim by clarifying that he was not an enrolled member, but an honorary associate member (just as former President Bill Clinton was) for few months in 1994. According to tribal chief George Wickliffe, Churchill's claims to Keetowah membership "are deemed fraudulent by the United Keetoowah Band," and that Churchill "could not prove any Cherokee ancestry."
Misconduct issues
There have been disputes over Churchill's claim of American Indian heritage. Churchill was hired into a tenured professorship at the University of Colorado as part of a program to increase diversity, in part because the university believed Churchill's claim to be a Cherokee Indian. The Keetowah Cherokee tribe has since denied that Churchill is an enrolled member.
(A denver Post article)
Tribe says he's not full member
Howard Pankratz
Denver Post Staff Writer
Article Last Updated: 06/09/2005 10:47:53 AM MDT
Churchill steadfastly maintained that he is an Indian, claiming he is three-sixteenths Cherokee. But he acknowledged that he is an associate member, not a full member, of the Keetoowah.
"I don't vote, I don't hold office, I don't collect benefits," Churchill said. He said he was enrolled as an associate member of the Keetoowah after a genealogical investigation showed his Cherokee lineage.
He said he could have become a full member of the larger, 240,000-member Cherokee Nation because it has no "blood quantum threshold." But he chose the Keetoowah because they are a more "hard- line" group.
Berry, of the Keetoowah Band, said Churchill was given an associate membership in the 10,000-member tribe, based in Tahlequah, Okla., in the early 1990s.
"Mr. Churchill started coming around in 1992 or 1993, said he wrote some books and was a big-time author, and convinced us he could help our people," Berry said.
On that basis, he was given an associate membership, said Berry, who was on the tribe's enrollment committee and has served on the tribal council.
Berry said Churchill never fulfilled his promise to help the tribe, which she said is an extremely poor offshoot of the Cherokee Nation.
"After he received his associate card, we never heard from him again," Berry said.
I know many people who share his insights, but they do not claim to be Native, nor do they use that distinction to take a pivotal faculty job away from those who are Native, and who have struggled to achieve academic success. I don't believe Howard Zinn ever made manipulative claims to further his research and perspective. No, Ward Churchill is another animal altogether.
These excepts are from Ward Churchill's wikipedia entry, similar information abounds in other sources.
Ethnic background
Both of his birth parents are listed as white on the 1930 census, as are all of his other known ancestors on previous censuses and other official documents. [27]
Churchill claims ancestry of three different tribes, Creek[28][29], Cherokee[30], and Metis[31][32] and states that he is an enrolled[33] member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians. The Rocky Mountain News investigated and found "no evidence of a single Indian ancestor" [of Churchill's].[34] The Denver Post's genealogical investigation resulted in the same conclusion. Ernestine Berry, who was on the tribe's enrollment committee (Keetoowah) and served on the tribal council for four years, told the The Denver Post: "He (Churchill) was trying to get recognized as an Indian. He could not prove he was an Indian (Cherokee) at all." [35] Moreover, the United Keetoowah Band responded to Churchill's claim by clarifying that he was not an enrolled member, but an honorary associate member (just as former President Bill Clinton was) for few months in 1994. According to tribal chief George Wickliffe, Churchill's claims to Keetowah membership "are deemed fraudulent by the United Keetoowah Band," and that Churchill "could not prove any Cherokee ancestry."
Misconduct issues
There have been disputes over Churchill's claim of American Indian heritage. Churchill was hired into a tenured professorship at the University of Colorado as part of a program to increase diversity, in part because the university believed Churchill's claim to be a Cherokee Indian. The Keetowah Cherokee tribe has since denied that Churchill is an enrolled member.
(A denver Post article)
Tribe says he's not full member
Howard Pankratz
Denver Post Staff Writer
Article Last Updated: 06/09/2005 10:47:53 AM MDT
Churchill steadfastly maintained that he is an Indian, claiming he is three-sixteenths Cherokee. But he acknowledged that he is an associate member, not a full member, of the Keetoowah.
"I don't vote, I don't hold office, I don't collect benefits," Churchill said. He said he was enrolled as an associate member of the Keetoowah after a genealogical investigation showed his Cherokee lineage.
He said he could have become a full member of the larger, 240,000-member Cherokee Nation because it has no "blood quantum threshold." But he chose the Keetoowah because they are a more "hard- line" group.
Berry, of the Keetoowah Band, said Churchill was given an associate membership in the 10,000-member tribe, based in Tahlequah, Okla., in the early 1990s.
"Mr. Churchill started coming around in 1992 or 1993, said he wrote some books and was a big-time author, and convinced us he could help our people," Berry said.
On that basis, he was given an associate membership, said Berry, who was on the tribe's enrollment committee and has served on the tribal council.
Berry said Churchill never fulfilled his promise to help the tribe, which she said is an extremely poor offshoot of the Cherokee Nation.
"After he received his associate card, we never heard from him again," Berry said.
# posted by : 9:49 PM
: 9:49 PM
Yeah, I understand the resentment at his statements about his ancestry. I also know that there are plenty of people who are Ndn who can't "prove" it. What I suspect as 1) there's the ex-lover syndrome—you know, like when you find out the person you were so enraptured with turns out to be less than advertised; 2) His insights and work got so much applause a lot of people feel guilty about that, and 3) the fucking academic community gave him a pass because he was "Native American"—in other words, they patronized him. Now they discover they don't have to patronize him, so they can hammer him because he exposed them as fools and dupes.
Yeah, he's a jerk. But his punishment is about revenge.
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Yeah, he's a jerk. But his punishment is about revenge.
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