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Actually, I have it on good authority that it means "sphincter". |
Posted on 03/26/2005 10:25:53 PM PST by freespirited
The packed room crackled with anticipation, and the man with a career-long penchant for drama and confrontation must have relished this opportunity.
The cadence of a ceremonial drumbeat and American Indian chanting heralded his arrival. The introduction given him was fiery, stoking anger for the opposition, real and imagined.
And then, cameras flashing, Ward Churchill stepped to the podium, words of defiance ready on his lips, his black-leather-clad security entourage shoulder-to-shoulder on the stage behind him.
"Hello, my relatives," Churchill greeted the crowd, using his usual speech opener. It reflects the spirit of Mitakuye Oyasin, a Lakota Indian phrase meaning "We are all related."
But Churchill quickly made clear he wasn't present to placate the offended.
"You make your words your weapons, and you say things that you understand to be true," Churchill called out, his voice rising, "and you understand them clearly and you never, ever, back up!"
Most in the capacity crowd in the University of Colorado's Glenn Miller Ballroom that February evening rose to their feet with lusty and sustained applause.
Save the absence of lit matches raised overhead, it could have been a rock concert.
Battered by talk radio and on editorial pages for two weeks, Churchill was back in a public forum - bold, unflinching, theatrical. A relatively obscure but long controversial academic, he'd suddenly vaulted from local notoriety to budding national infamy.
Enthralling as it was to most of those present, Churchill's performance played out against a second drumbeat that pounded outside the university's walls.
A drumbeat of public outrage.
A drumbeat demanding his professional hide.
The political and academic firebrand, who with two words - "little Eichmanns" - out of the million-plus he has written, had brought the wrath of many in his university, his community and his nation upon him.
"Little Eichmanns" was the stinger in Churchill's contemptuous characterization of the Americans who died in the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. The belated uproar triggered a probe by the university to determine whether anything in Churchill's writings or public utterances could lead to firing him from his $94,000 tenured faculty slot.
In making his report Thursday, CU Chancellor Phil DiStefano found Churchill's essay on 9/11 "profoundly offensive, abusive and misguided" but said it was protected speech under the First Amendment, as were other Churchill writings and speeches examined.
Seemingly, almost every aspect of Churchill's adult life - professional and personal - has been scored by a remarkable degree of conflict.
He has dueled frequently with others in the academic community, with rival activists in the American Indian Movement, with those who claim he isn't even an Indian, with Denver's Italians over their Columbus Day parade, with those who want to argue his war record, even with his ex-wives.
"I think that's how he feels alive," said his second wife, Marie Anne Jaimes. "He's so used to having conflict and drama."
The DiStefano report did find merit in two categories of allegations that it will forward to CU's standing committee on research misconduct. Both center on long-standing disputes between Churchill and his foes.
The first is whether he has plagiarized, falsified or fabricated authority in his work. The second is whether he fraudulently used his claim of Indian ethnicity to advance himself.
His critics say yes on both counts, but it will up to the research committee to decide.
Churchill does have his defenders, including noted intellectual Noam Chomsky.
"I've read a fair amount of Ward Churchill's work and have found a lot of it to be excellent, penetrating and of high scholarly quality," Chomsky said in an e-mail.
That opinion isn't shared by his critics, who had demanded Churchill's firing by CU long before the current controversy.
"He just keeps republishing the same thing, every other book," said Santa Fe-area artist David Bradley, a member of the Minnesota Chippewa tribe who describes Churchill as a "fake Indian."
Churchill's response to his detractors is equally sharp. He dismisses Bradley, for example, as merely "an untalented painter."
And as for a certain Colorado governor who called for his dismissal, Churchill said, "Bill Owens says I'm not qualified for my job, excellent scholar that he is. I should resign, he says, or be fired. Well, I'll return the compliment."
Churchill, ever true to the combative nature that has long defined his contentious life, says he isn't going anywhere without a fight.
A magnet for enemies
In some talks, Churchill says he also is called Kizhiinaabe, a name given to him by his third wife's people, the Ojibway. It means "kind-hearted man," he said in a speech in Oakland, Calif., two years ago.
"A little contrary to my own self-concept, in certain ways," he added.
Many who have followed his career closely would agree with that assessment.
Churchill has collected enemies as prodigiously as some people clip coupons. And few of his feuds are of the garden variety. Consider:
• When the Denver Police Department's "spy files" became accessible through an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit, one document revealed that the FBI had learned in 1995 of an alleged plot to assassinate Churchill, along with fellow American Indian Movement leaders Glenn Morris and Russell Means. The suspected perpetrators of the plot: rival AIM members.
• "The first time I met him face to face is when he spit on me," said Carole Standing Elk, who still holds a grudge.
Standing Elk, 54, of Davis, Calif., had her confrontation with Churchill outside the press club in San Francisco in 1994. She and her sister had gone to protest actions taken by Churchill's faction in the deeply riven American Indian Movement.
A flier written by Standing Elk didn't mince words. "We take offense at Ward Churchill's astonishing eagerness to exploit the American Indian Movement in order to further his personal career objectives," it began.
When Churchill emerged from the building, Standing Elk said, "He called me a liar, and he ended up spitting in my face."
Said David Lane, one of Churchill's lawyers: "Maybe she needed to be spit on."
• An unemployed German woman, Marina Klich, first learned of Churchill while watching a 1996 documentary about political activists. Since 2000, she has spent hundreds of hours submerged in a numbingly detailed study of his life. She seems obsessed, but her investigation hasn't turned her into a fan.
"This guy can be really, really convincing, really Mr. Nice Guy," Klich said, ever ready to offer her opinion via trans-Atlantic phone calls.
It's surprising, she said, that Churchill's activities didn't land him in hot water sooner.
"People there (in Colorado) are too close," said Klich. "It's like those pictures that when you are so close that all you see is those little dots."
Churchill, who initially engaged in a correspondence with Klich before cutting off communication with her, said, "From what I've been given to understand by those who know her, Kline (an alias Klich uses) is certifiable."
• Even the CU program director who gave Churchill his first job is unhappy that Churchill's resume appears to take credit for responsibilities he didn't have. Namely, those of the director.
Anarchist with a nice view
Five large windows offer a million-dollar view of the snow- draped Indian Peaks from Churchill's second-story, book- lined study. But he doesn't appreciate those wanting to peer inside his personal space.
"If she was still alive, I would half expect somebody to show up and ask my kindergarten teacher about my potty training. What that has to do with anything, I don't know," Churchill said.
The current controversy surrounding Churchill rocked CU in late January with the rediscovery of his Sept. 11, 2001, essay "Some People Push Back," which some believed further tainted the university's national reputation and contributed to the downfall of departing CU President Betsy Hoffman.
As the 6-foot-5 Churchill sprawled on a sofa in his spacious ranch home early one afternoon in the first days of the controversy, he saw himself as a victim.
"If you can't attack the message," he said of the white-hot public focus turned upon him, "attack the messenger."
He has heard himself labeled "Osama bin Churchill." But his refuge is a far cry from a chilly mountain cave. Churchill, who has never had children, shares his home, currently undergoing extensive renovation, with his fourth wife, fellow CU ethnic studies professor Natsu Saito.
Intricate Oriental carpets mix with indigenous woven tapestry. Soft leather chairs and a sofa are arrayed around a low circular coffee table, and the muted wood paneling in the main living space serves to amplify the vivid colors of American Indian art works - including numerous prints by Churchill, a one-time art instructor - that adorn the walls.
As he talks, Churchill's words often gush, sometimes passionate, sometimes defensive, in a cadence as relentless as a metronome - remarkably so, considering how much the man smokes.
And smokes.
Acquaintances estimate his Pall Mall habit at two to four packs a day.
On a recent return from a speaking trip, Churchill could be seen sticking a cigarette between his lips as soon as he hit the top of the escalator at Denver International Airport, even as airport personnel gave a disapproving waggle of the finger, then lighting it as soon as he hit the sidewalk.
A prolific author - "He doesn't suffer writer's block," one friend wryly noted - he even has written about smoking, in a political context no less.
In Acts of Rebellion: The Ward Churchill Reader, one passage offers pointed remarks in his patented sledge-hammer style:
"Every yuppie born has the same impact on the environment as another 70 Chinese. Lay that one on the next Polo-clad geek who approaches you with a baby stroller and an outraged look, demanding that you put your cigarette out, eh? Tell 'em you'll snuff the smoke when they snuff the kid, and not a moment before. Better yet, tell 'em they need to get busy snuffing themselves, along with the kid, and do the planet a real favor. Just 'kidding' (heh heh)."
Churchill, who favors a casual look around campus that typically includes jeans and dark sunglasses, is as charismatic to some as he is alienating to others.
His CU classes are popular, particularly to those who share his anarchistic views; his speeches on campuses everywhere draw far more supporters than critics. His message stirs echoes of a fading counterculture, a voice his fans perceive as rising in defense of the oppressed.
Churchill, who often cites the four times he's been a finalist for the Gustavus Myers Award for Outstanding Books Advancing Human Rights, is disgusted with the avalanche of criticism against him.
"This is absurd," he said with exasperation, that day in his living room. "I'm the opening round of a concerted effort to remove anyone with whom they (conservative thinkers) fundamentally disagree from positions in the academy. It's a purge."
A turbulent home front
Churchill's personal life has been as steeped in turmoil as his professional one.
Marie Anne Jaimes met Churchill at a conference in 1979, started living with him in Boulder in 1984 and was married to him in Santa Fe in 1988. She remained his wife until they separated in July 1994 and filed for divorce that same year.
"The environment around him was always tense and stressful, with an 'us against them' mentality, whether it was about academic politics or his movement activism," she said.
Referring to Churchill's "hyperbolic and incendiary style" in public, Jaimes said the private Churchill was prone to "apoplectic fits if he is defied. To say he is a control freak is putting it mildly."
Churchill, those close to him say, is known for referring to himself in third person, dubbing himself "his Ward-ness," or making remarks such as "the Ward giveth and the Ward taketh away."
Heated disagreements and arguments in their final "turbulent" years together left Jaimes feeling, she said, "increasingly sabotaged by him, until I was able to deprogram and break away."
Many who discuss Churchill call him a bully, but Jaimes is one of a few who would say it on the record: "Churchill is just a bully. . . . He intimidates people."
Prior to Jaimes, Churchill was married by common law to Dora-Lee Larson. They divorced April 30, 1985. During the divorce proceedings, Larson's lawyer filed a motion to keep her new address secret from Churchill, stating: "The past violence and threats (of Churchill) has caused (Larson) to seek housing unknown to (Churchill) for her own safety."
Larson is now director of the Denver Domestic Violence Task Force.
Asked about her time with Churchill, she said, "No comment, because I'd really like to stay alive and safe for a while longer."
Said Lane, Churchill's attorney, "He hasn't had any contact with her for 10 years. He said this (Larson's comment) is the kind of thing you expect when you're dealing with ex-spouses."
Churchill's third wife, Leah Kelly, was hit by a car and killed while walking in Boulder the night of May 31, 2000. An autopsy showed she was extremely drunk.
Family members say her time with Churchill was often unpleasant.
Her older sister, Rhonda Kelly, of Winnipeg, Manitoba, said her sister's alcoholism was worsened by "the torment and humiliation of living in her marital home."
Churchill has previously said that Rhonda Kelly had only limited contact with Leah Kelly in the last years of her life and dismissed claims that he was violent with his wives as groundless and "a hatchet job."
In a May 19, 2004, letter to his third wife's mother, Barbara Kelly - a letter examined by CU because of a passage the Kelly family perceived as a threat against them - there are paragraphs that show a softer side of Churchill.
His decision not to visit the Kelly family on the one-year anniversary of Leah Kelly's death, he wrote, "has nothing to do with the depth of my love for Leah or the profundity of the sense of loss I'll carry for the rest of my life. Nor does it have to do with the fact that I'm now with Natsu (a major reason I'm with her is because she knows from her own experience the kind of pain and anguish with which I'll always be burdened, and thus does not begrudge the nature of my feelings for Leah).
"I - or we - will be visiting Leah a bit later this summer, on my/our own, and this will remain true in the years ahead. By the same token, I also visit, and will continue to visit, Natsu's late husband, Chimurenga . . ."
Natsu Saito, meanwhile, is aggrieved at what her husband has suffered in recent weeks.
"Ward speaks the truth as he sees it, forcefully and without compromise," Saito said. "Those close to him understand that the anger he can project is not personal, but stems from the pain of seeing lives and communities needlessly destroyed.
"This is what motivates him - a deep sense of obligation to use his particular talents to document and articulate harsh truths that others would prefer to ignore."
Routine but different
Ward LeRoy Churchill was born Oct. 2, 1947, to Jack L. Churchill and Maralyn Allen in Urbana, Ill. He was named for his paternal grandfather, Ward LeRoy Churchill.
Maralyn and Jack Churchill divorced while Ward was a toddler. In March 1950, his mother married Henry Carlton Debo, and the family lived in Elmwood, Ill., with Debo commuting to the Caterpillar plant in nearby Peoria. The family was typically blue-collar, said a relative, who asked not to be identified. Churchill's mother was a homemaker.
Churchill had two half-brothers, Tom and Danny, and a half-sister, Terry.
The relative said Churchill stayed with his grandparents, who lived not too far from his mom's, a few months at a time. The grandparents felt sorry for him because of the divorce and took him in to give him some special attention. Churchill was his grandparents' favorite, but his birth father had little to do with him, the relative said.
By the time Ward enrolled in Elmwood High School, he went by the name Ward Debo, taking his stepfather's surname. When he graduated in 1965, he was listed in his yearbook, the Ulmus, as Ward L. Churchill.
He has little wish to share information about those early years. His upbringing, he insists, was routine.
"I'm protecting some other people's privacy and probably sanity," he added. People in his distant past, he said, "have nothing to do with nothing."
Churchill graduated in a class of 55 students, some of whom referred to him as "Wardo."
He was a tall, skinny kid who sometimes wore glasses. He played on the Trojans basketball team in his freshman and sophomore years and for the football team all four years. He was an involved student, active on the yearbook staff, junior and senior class plays, high school band, pep club, declamation club and the letterman's club.
Several of Churchill's high school classmates said they do not remember him talking about any American Indian heritage. But they remember he was unique even then when it came to politics.
"I guess the best way to say it was, he was always marching to a different drummer," said classmate Donald Peckham.
"But," said Peckham, taking note of the current controversy, "I didn't picture him being quite that outspoken."
High school friend Boyd Christy remembered how Churchill once dug graves at a local cemetery and that they both worked on neighboring farms and at the nearby Caterpillar plant in Peoria.
Both of Churchill's biological and adoptive fathers are deceased. His mother, Maralyn Debo, declined to talk much about her son. But she offered this in his defense: "I think he's gotten a bum rap."
Another family view, according to the relative, is that Churchill is "so smart he's crazy."
War a searing influence
In a biography punctuated by question marks, there is little doubt about the consequences of one chapter. Churchill was transformed irrevocably by the Vietnam War.
He was drafted in 1966 and served a tour of duty as the war escalated. When he came back, he was angry, alienated and well on the road to the conviction that the U.S. was a rogue nation.
A favored Churchill expression is "connecting the dots" - which, in his view, links the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre to civilian deaths during the Vietnam War to U.S. attacks on Iraqis fleeing Kuwait on the "Highway of Death" after the Gulf War.
"Small wonder," Churchill wrote in 2003, "that much of the world, including some of the more oppressed sectors of the U.S. population itself, have long since come to understand 'Americanism' and Nazism as synonyms."
What he actually did in Vietnam is in dispute.
His military records show he was honorably discharged in two years. He was trained as a light vehicle driver and served in a truck convoy unit based in Cam Ranh Bay. Such a company typically consisted of 40 to 60 five-ton cargo trucks that transported everything from food to weapons.
A 1980 resume said that he was a public information specialist for the Army who "wrote and edited the battalion newsletter and wrote news releases."
But Churchill has claimed in past remarks a much more daring and dangerous service career.
When he was a visiting professor at Alfred University in 1990, Churchill told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle that he had been on a reconnaissance patrol infiltrating enemy territory.
This January, when Churchill was on trial in Denver for his role in disrupting the city's annual Columbus Day parade, he told the judge his world view had been shaped by his time in Vietnam.
Churchill said he had been referred to as "chief" in a combat unit and often was forced to patrol "on point," the most dangerous position, "despite the fact I'm three times the size of a normal target in an infantry unit."
There is no evidence of reconnaissance experience in Churchill's military records. Those who served in similar truck companies say the fighting was normally left to others.
"We were never intentionally involved in combat," said Larry Sanford, a Colorado City resident who commanded a truck convoy in Vietnam from 1970 to 1971. "That was simply not our role. The standing order for any attack on a convoy was simply to keep moving no matter what."
Churchill, however, in an interview last month, suggested his Vietnam experience was more intense.
Asked if he took lives in combat, he said, "Yeah, presumptively . . . When you're firing a .50-caliber machine gun at people, for example, and you see them go down, you assume they're dead. And did I fire a .50-caliber machine gun and see them go down? Yeah, I did."
All the angry young men
Churchill's second wife, Jaimes, now a tenured associate professor of women's studies at San Francisco State University, believes Churchill was traumatized by Vietnam.
"I always had a feeling he had a breakdown in the military," she said. "He was with a group that was trained to be together. For some reason he went on leave, and when he came back they were all dead. And he felt guilty for being the only one alive."
Others who know him have heard a similar story.
"I recall hearing that," said Bob Sipe, now chairman of the political studies department at the University of Illinois-Springfield, who knew Churchill when Sipe was a young professor and Churchill was a student at the school, then known as Sangamon State University.
"What I remember is that there were a lot of young, naive people, and he was one of them," said Sipe. "You enlist and you go there to kill commies and get there and realize, 'My God, what are we doing?' "
Churchill is tired of this part of his resume being dissected.
"You know what? If I had been there as a complete noncombatant, as a reporter, or something in that capacity, it still would have been a galvanizing experience," he said.
And, in a recent e-mail, he wrote, "My trauma is mine, and the details of it are going to stay that way, at least for now."
Sipe, 60, describes the present-day Churchill as a respected professional colleague, one who has edited books to which Sipe has contributed.
As for Churchill the student, Sipe said, he burned with a degree of rage.
"A lot of our students when I came here were Vietnam veterans, and they were angry at the government. They thought the government had ripped them off, and they were right. He had a lot of anger over that."
Churchill's first teaching job came as an art instructor during a one-year stint from 1975 to 1976 at Black Hills State College, in Spearfish, S.D.
Marcus Hartse, 53, and living in Miles City, Mont., took a couple of art courses from Churchill and recalls having something of a falling out with his instructor over the loan of three record albums. He said Churchill returned them warped and unplayable.
Seeing his former art teacher in a media uproar 30 years later, Hartse thought it remarkable how little Churchill's appearance has changed.
"The glasses are exactly the same, the hair, everything," said Hartse. "Ward's stuck in a time warp. And his thinking might be more akin to the revolutionary attitudes of the late '60s and early 1970s than to this day."
Hartse said he agrees with Churchill on many points but said, "He appears to have become inflexible, and his position on life appears to be the same."
A question on the resume
Norbert Hill is the man who opened the door to Churchill at the University of Colorado.
At the time, Hill was director of the American Indian Education Opportunity Program and needed an administrative assistant. The year was 1978.
The job carried no requirement that the person be an Indian, Hill said.
"I was just looking for good help," Hill said. "An Indian would have been a bonus.
"He claimed to have Indian heritage," Hill said of Churchill. "A lot of people do that. He said that his grandmother said (on her deathbed) that they were Indians. I wondered, but I took him at his word in 1978.
"I'm a trusting soul."
Over time, Hill said, Churchill's Indian identity became "more overstated."
"There are some people he told he wasn't an Indian," said Hill - including his brother, comedian Charlie Hill. "It all becomes very cloudy."
What wasn't uncertain though, Norbert Hill said, was Churchill's work ethic in the program designed to make adjusting to life on the Boulder campus easier for American Indian students.
"He would work extraordinary hours with me," said Hill. "He did whatever I asked of him."
Churchill also was known to lend money to struggling young American Indian students. "And I don't know that he always got paid back," said Hill.
Hill is bothered, however, that Churchill's resume claims that Churchill was the program's director from 1980 to 1983.
"From 1978 to 1983, I was his supervisor that whole time," Hill said, except for one year that Churchill served as acting director while Hill was in Washington, D.C., on a fellowship.
"People are looking for facts," said Hill. "He reported being something that he wasn't."
Charlie Cambridge, meanwhile, has watched Churchill's rapid ascent from midlevel administrator to tenured CU professor with wonder and frustration.
Cambridge, an enrolled member of the Navajo tribe, has his own curious and colorful history with CU.
As an undergraduate he founded both the Native American Education Opportunity Program and the Native American Studies programs at CU. And as a doctoral candidate in anthropology, he earned headlines by helping to spearhead the construction of three solar Navajo hogans on the CU campus.
Along the way, he has twice sued the university for racial discrimination and received out-of- court settlements. He believes he is the first American Indian to earn a doctoral degree at CU.
Most troubling to Cambridge has been seeing Churchill shine at CU as an American Indian academic, while his own opportunities at CU have been few.
"The university considers Ward as a real Indian, and they carried the ball forward with that attitude," Cambridge said.
"It was their mantra. If you say the words enough times, it sort of becomes real, and I'm the only person on the sideline, waving my hands, saying, 'Wait a second here, this is not a valid situation.' "
Cambridge charges that Churchill's claim to Indian identity has a clear commercial motive.
"A tall, lanky white man does not sell Indian art, but a tall, lanky Cherokee Indian does sell Indian art. I think it became a situation where he had to be an Indian to sell his art."
Drumbeat in court
Churchill nevertheless developed a reputation as a tough advocate on American Indian issues.
In 1989, Joanne Arnold found herself butting heads with Churchill over the name-changing of a campus dorm. She's never forgotten the experience.
Arnold, then a professor and associate dean of the journalism school, favored the name Bly E. Curtis, whom she described as the "mother of the modern resident halls" at CU.
Not yet a professor, Churchill urged it be named after the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes.
"He called, and he berated me and all that stuff," Arnold said. "I have my notes. I quote him as saying that, if I didn't back off, 'evil consequences will come to you.'
"I took that as a threat."
Arnold, one foot shorter than Churchill and about 15 years his senior, reported the incident to the journalism school dean. She opted not to make a police report for fear of escalating matters.
"I didn't back off," said Arnold, professor emerita of journalism at CU. "But he did win."
Churchill has won many battles - some in which he seemed to face long odds.
In January's three-day Denver County Court trial for eight leaders of the effort to block the 2004 Columbus Day parade, some of Denver's best lawyers took their cases for free.
Co-defendant Glenn Morris, who holds a Harvard law degree, let another lawyer handle his defense. But Churchill, who has no law degree, represented himself.
A prosecutor close to the case, who asked not to be named, was impressed.
"I think it was a calculated strategy," the prosecutor said, "because 'pro se' defendants are always given a lot more leeway by the courts. They can get more stuff in without facing unending objections from the prosecution."
One stunning example, the prosecutor said, is the fact that Churchill was able to use his testimony on the witness stand - with his direct examination handled by attorney David Lane - to win permission from the judge to put on a display of Indian drumming in the courtroom that lasted several minutes.
Churchill's intention was to demonstrate for jurors how it might have been possible for the defendants arrested that day not to hear police orders to disperse delivered over a bullhorn.
"How else could they have gotten the drumming in" as evidence, the prosecutor said, with an apparent tone of grudging respect.
Before the day was over, the jurors acquitted every defendant.
An argument over status
Churchill's ascent at CU unfolded not only without benefit of an earned doctoral degree, but despite a parade of critics from within the American Indian Movement, indigenous activists and scholars, who demanded his ouster on the grounds that his academic work didn't stand the test of intellectual scrutiny and that his claims to American Indian status are fraudulent.
National AIM leader Vernon Bellecourt, who has feuded mightily with Churchill for nearly 20 years, speaks of Churchill with nothing short of disgust.
"This whole thing of Indian wanna-bes taking Indian names and putting on jewelry, holding professional positions and writing books, it's epidemic," said Bellecourt.
"He started to take on this phony identity, I guess, because he found it very profitable. It led to a good job, becoming chairman of the ethnic studies department," Bellecourt said.
Said Hill, the man who hired Churchill at CU: "He used the status of being an Indian for personal and professional gain, when it in fact was always on the margins, at best. And now he says it is not relevant. But it was relevant when he was advancing himself.
"There's collective embarrassment we share, because our community is so small, and the media always wants to paint him as an Indian activist, when he doesn't have the credentials. He's like the (affirmative action) box checkers, who have no credibility."
John Kelly, a Canadian Ojibway and the father of Churchill's third wife, said he has wrestled with some of the same basic questions concerning Churchill that have troubled others.
"Whether he's a person of aboriginal descent, I don't know," said Kelly. "To me, I have questions regarding that. To me, he just doesn't seem to be one. His approach to things are different from my approach."
It comes down to blood
Churchill's most consistent claim to Indian identity is that he is an associate member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, based at Tahlequah, Okla., a membership awarded to him in 1994.
Shelley Davis, an Arizona school teacher who worked for the Keetoowah Band office not long after Churchill received his associate membership, had encouraged him to apply there. Davis disputes the suggestion of others that his membership is nothing more than honorary.
"He submitted his information," she said. "The gentleman in charge of registration for the Keetoowahs located some of Churchill's ancestors on the (federally sanctioned Dawes Commission) rolls, and the application was sent to the council for approval."
Churchill has singled out Joshua Tyner of Georgia, a great-great-great-great-grandfather, as half-Cherokee.
But Tyner family genealogists have found no evidence that Joshua Tyner had any Indian blood. No other Churchill relative known through genealogical research appear on the Dawes rolls.
That doesn't shake Davis' conviction that Churchill, whom she considers an informally adopted "brother," is a worthy spokesman for American Indian causes.
"I love Ward so dearly," she said. "He's a character. He's a wonderful person, but he is also very outspoken, and he won't back down."
The relative who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that some members of Churchill's family don't appreciate Churchill claiming to be an Indian, when, by their calculations, he is 1/128th Cherokee.
In his address March 1 at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Churchill said, "I claim to be a sixteenth (Cherokee). They (the Keetoowah) said I might be as high as 3/16. That would make me either a sixteenth less or a sixteenth more than John Ross, the greatest resistance patriot in Cherokee history who in 1830 was one-eighth Cherokee."
'I didn't even know him'
In a recent interview, Churchill said, "I was solicited, I was asked, by John Ross (a direct descendant of the revered Cherokee patriot), who was chief of the Keetoowah Band in the mid-1990s, to apply for membership, because there was a controversy about my identity then."
But Ross flatly denies doing so.
"No, I didn't even know him until he showed up," Ross said this week. "He came with another friend (Shelley Davis). She brought him over."
Ross insisted Churchill's associate membership was not based on any degree of verifiable Indian heritage. Additionally, he contradicted Davis' claim that Churchill's associate membership is more than an honorary gesture. He termed it no different than what the Keetoowah bestowed on President Clinton.
"It means, basically, he had an association with the Keetoowahs as a friend, that he promised that he would help the Keetoowah on certain things," said Ross.
This was reiterated to the Di- Stefano investigation by principal chief George G. Wickliffe of the Keetoowah Band, who said Churchill's association with the tribe is merely an honorary designation.
Suzan Shown Harjo, president of the Morning Star Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based national Indian rights organization, who is also a former executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, is a longtime doubter of Churchill's authenticity as an American Indian.
"He is not native culturally, and he is not native by ancestry," said Harjo. "He is not native."
In a recent e-mail, Churchill made sarcastic light of the controversy over his identity: "I once wore another guy's jersey during my senior football season in high school (pretty deceptive stuff, after all; probably reflects on my 'character,' eh?)."
CU's attempt to determine whether Churchill has crossed any line that would give the university justification will now be taken up by its Standing Committee on Research Misconduct.
Before the release of the Di- Stefano report, talks between lead CU counsel Charles Sweet and Churchill's lawyers broke down this month in the wake of a report concerning alleged plagiarism and threats on the part of Churchill.
Chomsky, in an e-mail, expressed concern that the scrutiny of Churchill might result in a loss greater than one man's job.
"Entirely separate from this (Churchill's record in academia and scholarship) is his right to free speech and academic freedom," Chomsky wrote. "That has to be defended, vigilantly, whatever we think about his beliefs and writings."
News from Indian Country editor Paul DeMain, who has followed Churchill's career closely, characterized the puzzle posed by Churchill this way:
"When Churchill is telling the truth, there seems to often be a shadow of deception," said DeMain, "and when he's telling a deception, there is a shadow of truth nearby."
Means, Churchill's longtime AIM colleague, sees instead a life's work that constitutes a weighty contribution to the literature of oppressed people around the world.
"Surely enough, they're looking at his whole body of work and trying to tear it apart," said Means. "That's what it's all about. To ultimately and completely discredit him, so that his library of work will be ignored."
Montreal-based editor and translator Michael Ryan, who co-authored Pacifism as Pathology with Churchill in 1998, is also a staunch defender.
"I think this entire thing is a red herring. I think the Republicans feel that they're in a sufficient position of strength now to rout leftist and liberal voices out of the academy."
Whatever Churchill's fate at CU, those who have known and observed him for years doubt he'll be muzzled.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a professor emeritus in ethnic studies at California State University, East Bay, a prominent radical activist and author, has known Churchill since about 1978.
Herself a veteran of the same academic speaking circuit of which Churchill is a part, she said she thinks that if Churchill were to be fired by CU, that might drive his pricetag per speech from about $3,500 to $35,000.
"He talks everywhere, from Monterey, to Montreal, to Vancouver," said Dunbar-Ortiz.
"Anywhere you can name, he has been there, and he will be there again. I don't think any of this will change that."
Perhaps so.
But as the drumbeat surrounding Churchill intensifies, it's clear that the always ready-to-rumble professor is in the battle for his professional life.
brennanc@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2742
classic moonbat
Like the rest of the Radical Left, Churchill's life is one big fantasy.
Why do we allow this man his freedom, when he so damages others' freedom to live their lives.
There are laws and social constraints meant to control deviant behavior. Apparently not enough of them.
When will people, especially CU, fiqure out that this Ward "Carp with flapping lips (his Indian name)" Churchill is a flim-flam man...
True, but as you know, with liberals it is not the results (truth) that counts; it's the "intention" (spin).
He's supposed to be Cherokee...and has a objibwe name, and says hello using a sioux phrase...
Amusing. the Chippewa (objibwe) are traditional enemies of the Lakota/Dakota (Sioux).
It would be like saying L'chaim and claiming one is Saudi...
How Kerryesque LOL
I missed the "big announcement" today but I'm guessing he won't be leaving his position. I bet the kids love him because it's the one class in which they're all sure they're smarter than the teacher.
Wow, that's a lot to say about a liar and a cheat nobody. Just keep giving him rope, I see the gallows just up ahead.
bttt
LoL..
Churchill does have Indian ancestors!....He's related to Chief Horse Crap!......
This ignores the motivation of a typical white radical liberal male academic.
A white male without an issue of some sort is viewed by the academic profession with skepticism and suspicion. Even a white radical liberal male (because he can always change his mind later). For the academic career track, it is better to be a dyslexic, or have been abused as a child, or part minority in ancestry, etc. That way, one can claim victimhood with impunity; this also tends to immunize one against any would-be enemies and competitors. Being part minority is better since that legitimizes the necessary political rock-throwing that goes with being an academic these days.
Most troubling to Cambridge has been seeing Churchill shine at CU as an American Indian academic, while his own opportunities at CU have been few.
Sounds as if he did not have radical enough liberal credentials (can't ignore the fundamentals)...
As far as this hero-wannabe's phoney sounding RSVN claims .... maybe Mr.B.G.Burkett [of Stolen Valor fame] might be interested in digging up Ward Churchill's real Army record for us.
Anybody got Burkett's email or number?
Protection of free speech does not mean anyone is required to keep him on the payroll if his speech is horribly offensive. That the Chancellor of CU does not understand what the 1st Amendment means is as troubling as this idiot Churchill continuing to maintain tenure. I will ask this cowardly Chancellor one more time.... anti-semetic, anti-black, anti-gay, anti-female speech is also protected under the 1st Amendment, but if Churchill declared himself a sympathizer of the Ku Klux Klan and gave racist speeches would he still keep him on as a professor at CU? Of course not, because what we are really talking about is protecting radical leftist speech, not just unpopular speech.
The mark of a true sociopath and psychotic is believing the lies you tell other people- and the more grandiose the embelishment, the bigger the character you become. I grew up with a kid like this, and I wonder which prison or asylum he's in now...
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Actually, I have it on good authority that it means "sphincter". |
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