It was these Dog Soldiers who kidnapped and murdered an AIM activist Anna Mae Aquash.
The nature of Churchill's decidedly offensive remarks, however, forces us to critique in general the injurious approach to scholarship and basic human decency. We defend the right to broadcast and publish, but propose it is reprehensible to excoriate innocent human beings who have suffered great loss by rubbing salt in deep wounds simply to prove a political point and simply to strike (one more time) a political posture on behalf of the far left and under the guise of American Indian sentiment. Wrapped intimately with American Indian themes in his writings and lectures, and shielded apparently by his own American Indian Movement (AIM) security team, Churchill projects the image of the quintessential American Indian activist and/or warrior - angry, defiant, insulting, forceful and accusatory. Churchill sometimes captures the historical truth of a thing, but only to load it like deadly ammunition into his ideological machine gun.
http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096410293
It's a fine article, much better written than the one that provoked it. Here is the article in full:
Posted: February 03, 2005
by: Editors Report / Indian Country Today
A public speaking engagement at an Eastern college has turned hotly controversial for Ward Churchill, a professor and until last week the chairman of Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Churchill, a self-professed American Indian, is a prolific and highly polemical writer on Indian issues. Shortly after the murderous attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 in New York, Washington, D.C. and over Pennsylvania, Professor Churchill widely circulated an article in which he compared the victims of those attacks to Nazi functionary Adolf Eichmann, and to all appearances called their horrific deaths a ''befitting ... penalty'' for the ''little Eichmanns' ... participation.''
This week the Boulder professor's public representation of the 9/11 victims became the focal point of a serious broadside. New York's Governor George Pataki chastised Hamilton College for inviting a ''bigoted terrorist supporter'' to ''a forum.'' Hundreds of 9/11 survivors have similarly protested to Hamilton College for hosting such a person, and the furor has already forced Churchill to give up his department chair, as he wrote to his superiors: ''The present political climate has rendered me a liability in terms of representing either my department, the college, or the university.'' The university will allow Churchill to keep his teaching position, which is tenured but not safe from a frontal campaign such as Churchill is likely to continue to face. The focus of calls now is for Churchill to resign or be fired from his tenured position.
The case of a professor or any other American exercising the right of free speech is always important to us. We support that fundamental right more than any other and believe that even the extreme views of others (which sometimes become mainstream) must be defended against any force that would silence our First Amendment rights as citizens and as free human beings.
The nature of Churchill's decidedly offensive remarks, however, forces us to critique in general the injurious approach to scholarship and basic human decency. We defend the right to broadcast and publish, but propose it is reprehensible to excoriate innocent human beings who have suffered great loss by rubbing salt in deep wounds simply to prove a political point and simply to strike (one more time) a political posture on behalf of the far left and under the guise of American Indian sentiment. Wrapped intimately with American Indian themes in his writings and lectures, and shielded apparently by his own American Indian Movement (AIM) security team, Churchill projects the image of the quintessential American Indian activist and/or warrior - angry, defiant, insulting, forceful and accusatory. Churchill sometimes captures the historical truth of a thing, but only to load it like deadly ammunition into his ideological machine gun.
In our own pages this week, Churchill asserts that his remarks have received ''widespread and grossly inaccurate media coverage.'' No doubt, this is happening and a good range of commentators will have a heyday with Churchill's attitude on the issues of terrorism, and the causes and justifications he has professed for the attacks of 9/11. No doubt, he will be vilified for his anti-Americanism and his scholarship and there will be much misinformation about his positions. A careful reading of his article on the subject, however, gives a clear sense of the gist of Churchill's words; and we submit that any reasonable and decent human being would find them to be disgusting and cheap words, a callous insult to the dead and wounded in the horrific events of that fateful day.
Being in the crucible of hostility is not new to the chip-on-the-shoulder professor, who has become a celebrity for jumping into the polemic melee over issues big and small, internal and external to the Native world. Even in the question of personal identity, the professor's position is controversial. Churchill's Indian status is not verifiable in the usual ways of checking into tribal membership. We are expansive here from a national position on recognized and non-recognized tribes, southern nations and global indigenous people, but the question of relations and proper belonging in the tribal circles in the United States and Canada is generally verifiable for Indian observers and such appears to be completely lacking in Churchill's case. He has claimed membership in the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee, but reliable representatives from the tribe deny Churchill is or ever was, or has blood relatives on their rolls. He was granted an ''associate certificate'' by a former leader of the tribe (later impeached) for services supposedly rendered, not due to blood relations - but even the tribe declines to exactly identify what that means.
Discerning indigenous identity is not an exact science, but it has its rules. It would not be a primary issue relative to research and writing of producers from any quarter, except Churchill represents himself as a major spokesman for Indian people through his participation in a branch of AIM and his claim to Cherokee origins. So far, nothing whatsoever has surfaced that gives evidence to Churchill's claims to having Cherokee Indian origins. Given the intense antagonism and attention focused on Churchill, his biography in this context is likely to be further scrutinized by the University of Colorado, the media, and others who were led to understand he was an American Indian professional at the time of his hiring.
In the Native Studies field, Churchill has been one of those scholar-spokesmen who lead with the idea that Indian peoples are best served by constantly pushing the button of contradiction and the memory of every ill that has ever been inflicted against the tribes. To endlessly cite the misdeeds of the American Empire - while layering the legend of Nazi Germany over it - has the constant method of the Churchill scholarship. Producing a stream of abundant texts all wrapped around his brand of anti-colonialist rhetoric, Churchill has been - by far - the loudest and most obvious remonstrator against the Euro-American Empire's historical (and contemporary) evils inflicted on Native peoples. One can argue Churchill has projected the image of an angry Indian who became notorious for being in the face of non-Indians as much as possible - even though the evidence builds that he is, himself, non-Indian.
Churchill has made a reputation and a career out of these themes and in some circles has come to represent the Indian view to various national and international publics. This is unfortunate for the vast majority of Native people who do not at all share in his opinions about the brutal murder of some 3,000 innocent people during the events of 9/11. Churchill has claimed the media is now misquoting him and he is even parsing ''technicians'' (his bad guys) from the ''janitors, service people, etc.'' (his good guys). It doesn't play any better that way.
Here is what we read in his original article, perhaps the more troubling for his own admission that it was written in a ''stream of consciousness'' expression. Churchill, about the victims of 9/11:
''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. Recourse to 'ignorance' - a derivative, after all, of the word 'ignore' - counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in - and in many cases excelling at - it was because of their absolute refusal to see.''
The victims' crime, according to Churchill, was to be ignorant of the crimes of the American Empire. This ignorance of real international reality, he further recriminates, was ''likely ... because they 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.'' For this, the logic apparently follows, they deserved to be murdered.
This is the clincher of Churchill's troublesome message, which has him now running up a tree from the barking dogs: ''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.''
In our opinion, Churchill hurts himself with this kind of callous thinking. This is not the way to represent American Indian peoples. What Churchill and his thinking-cap buddies seem to miss is the necessary and much more compelling need of the families and communities of Indian people to find a way forward for the survival and prosperity of their future generations. Men and women leaders who understand the world and actually represent bodies of social and political life never take this type of insulting tack.
Churchill's remarks on the subject reflect easy ideological posturing in the face of horrible personal tragedies that befell so many families. His lost real point, that Americans need to pay more attention to the suffering they cause in the world at large, has been made by others in much more perceptive and eloquent ways, so that those who should hear it most will be able to receive it more readily. The Churchill approach -- to beat the audience over the head with his arguments, as if people had no right to make their way in the world as best they can, for their families and tribes -- has always been counterproductive. These days, it has him in serious hot water.
We will defend a good Indian argument in these pages any time. But, again, there is no evidence that Churchill is Indian. Further, Churchill's statements are obviously devoid of even the most basic humanity that American Indian peoples hold dear. In no way does his insult reflect the views of Indian country. To know the response of Indian country to the 9/11 tragedies is to reflect on the humanitarianism shown by Eastern Native communities: from the Mohawk to the Oneida, the Pequot, Mohegan and many others who immediately put their people - ironworkers, ferry-boat crews and medical personnel - into the rescue and recovery operations, to the California Indian nations that expressed their solidarity with America and donated generously to the rescue efforts, to the Lakota families who brought their Sacred Pipe to pray at the site, leaving their quiet offerings early one dawn. This is always the preferred way of human beings - to understand the kind of empathy required to belong to the human race is essential in all political and economic discourse. To call the people who were murdered on Sept. 11 ''little Eichmanns'' is a hideous expression that when combined to Churchill's mistaken Native identity can only poison the public discourse concerning American Indians.
Churchill writes that his life has been threatened since the controversy began over his published characterizations of the 9/11 victims. Churchill deserves police protection. We applauded the initial steadfastness of Hamilton College in sponsoring the forum and initially sustaining a First Amendment position on the controversy, yet understand that security concerns did cause the cancellation of the event. Now Colorado Governor Bill Owens has requested Churchill's resignation from his teaching position. The hounding of the professor intensifies.
Ward Churchill would do himself some good to express a profound apology to people he has offended and misled. He should also come clean about his appropriated American Indian identity. This is not advice he will likely take. Churchill has jumped on the cougar of controversy ever since he came onto the Indian scene as Russell Means' main speechwriter in the early 1980s. Churchill thrives on riding that controversial cougar, but this time he poked it in the eye.
For simple historical accuracy, and because there are a great number of Dog Soldier societies that are not even remotely affiliated with the American Indian Movement, I would like to point out that those people who call themselves Lakota Dog Soldiers actually have no reason to do so other than to use the name.
The reason that they borrowed the name, for the record, was because the Cheyenne Dog Soldier Society would traditionally, while in battle, stake themselves (or their sashes, to be more specific) to the ground and not leave until either all their opponents were dead, or until they were dead. The AIM subgroup which calls themselves "Dog Soldiers" has no affiliation with the actuality - and, in fact, most of the actual Dog Soldier societies are rather ticked off about AIM's pilfering of their name for political use.
So, just for the record: not all Dog Soldiers are bad. The subgroup of AIM which ripped off the name, yeah, they're not great... but the actual Dog Soldier societies aren't involved in this. Thought that might need to be said before there's any concern about anyone who calls themselves a Dog Soldier. :)
read later
I saw them on C-Span at a rally for this wierdo
they looked like a bunch of thugs
day bump
I gotta say this as a man married to a 1/2 Blackfoot, 1/2 Quinault (out of Wa state)....My wife is a conservative and depises Churchill both for what he said and for claiming Indian heritage while doing so. My in-laws (all very liberal) surprisingly also despise this anti-american bastard. For the same reasons.
It was a couple of punk kids who WANTED to be considered "Dog Soldiers", in the vein of the old Cheyenne Warrior Society... They were not "Dog Soldiers". They were murderous cowards, unlike the real Dog Soldiers of history.
But I think you've been told this before ;0)
I thought they were supposed to be the elite that fought to the death in rearguard action?
Funny they would dishonor their legacy defending a member of the Wannabe tribe...