Harjo: Why Native identity matters: A cautionary tale (Ward Churchill smacked by Indian columnist)

Shawn Setaro
Ward Churchill interview

This issue's column is an interview that I conducted in late September with Ward Churchill. Churchill is one of the country's foremost experts on indigenous peoples and their struggles in the Americas. He has also written extensively about the FBI and political repression, the penal system, the portrayal of Indians in literature and film, the nature and definition of genocide, and many other topics.

Running through all of his writing, though, is a powerful desire for justice, an eloquent sense of indignity at wrongs inflicted, and a passionate hatred of, as he so often puts it, "business as usual."

Some of Churchill's books include The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States (with Jim Vander Wall), Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the Colonization of American Indians, and Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America (with Mike Ryan).

Instant: What initially made me think of contacting you was that right after the shootings in Los Angeles at the Jewish day care center, I noticed there were several news stories saying the FBI claimed it was chafing under the Church Committee-era [the Church Committee was a Congressional Committee headed by Senator Frank Church that investigated the FBI in the 1970's] restrictions and claimed it needed to loosen its bounds in order to infiltrate "hate groups." I was hoping you could explain what they really wanted, what that rhetoric really meant, and maybe another time or two that tactic has been used to increase FBI power.

Ward Churchill: I suppose we can get into that. I'm sitting here working on a thing for Kathleen Cleaver and the repression of the Black Panther Party, so I'm fairly back into the orbit at the moment.

For starters, there were no restrictions accruing from the Church Committee era with regard to such infiltration. The restrictions that accrued from the Church era went to targeting groups for infiltration on the base of political belief per se. I mean, the FBI had infiltrated everybody up to the faculty of Notre Dame, every Mother for Peace, clergy and laity concern, on the basis that they were expressing opposition to the war in Vietnam. They had infiltrated black universities because of the civil rights agitation and so forth, which had nothing whatsoever to do with anything that could be construed as hate crimes, terrorism, or criminal activity. They were targeted solely on the basis of political articulation that was considered to be, more than anything, inconvenient to the Johnson administration and to those paleoconservatives who were resident to the FBI and occupied every position within it. That was restricted, to a certain extent. And by restriction it simply means that they had to offer a predication as to why they had a belief there was some sort of criminal activity going on within it, or any group, and they would then have license to be able to pursue that, using their standard investigative techniques, which often included infiltrating undercover operatives, either agents or people who were contracted on one criteria or another specifically for that purpose, or they would be developed as informants within the groups, rather than infiltrate it.

The other thing for which there was a restriction articulated, but which was already articulated as a restriction in law, was criminal activity. Arguably, this targeting on the basis of political belief was criminal and a Constitutional infringement as well, but clearly there were criminal constraints against infiltrating personnel or developing personnel within groups who would act as agent provocateur - that is, solicit or actually themselves engage in criminal activities in order to facilitate the discrediting of groups and/or arrange for the pretext arrest or sometimes prosecution of members.

So if they're chafing against something, it's chafing against the inability to simply exercise the political license to truncate the Constitutionally protected political liberties of citizens and their inability to legally consummate their prophecies of criminal intent on the part of groups. In other words, by getting into groups and then carrying out the criminal activities of which they've accused or raised suspicions that the groups are engaged in - a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing.

Now, with that said, let's go a little further. The fact of the matter is, and this is already a matter of record in several of the trials that have occurred around the rubric of "terrorism," the FBI has been very visibly infiltrating such groups anyway. The Arabic group that was convicted of bombing the World Trade Center…

Instant: I wanted to talk to you about that, also. I read something you had written about that.

WC: Unfortunately, I can't remember the details of all of these off the top of my head. But the fact is, you had an interlocking network of several Arabic groups there. Now, assuming that the people that took the fall in this were actually the actors - and they may be; I'm not absolutely convinced of that, but that's simply on the basis that I'm never absolutely convinced that a conviction obtained by the FBI is the whole story. But let's just assume that these guys who went down for it were actually the perpetrators, and it was their cell. They were interlocked with a cell in which there was an FBI informant.

So that these guys need license to infiltrate such groups is a redundancy. They've already done so, and demonstrably, infiltrating them does not necessarily preclude the acts which they say it's going to allow them to preclude. There's two possibilities in that scenario. One, that the informant, despite obvious advantageous placement within the groups, was not aware of the act which was perpetrated (laughs). So, duh, your infiltrator didn't accomplish anything. The other alternative is that the infiltrator did know, therefore the FBI did know and found it advantageous to allow the act to go forward. Why would that be? Because it would create a public sensibility that would reinforce sentiment that would fulfill the desire of the Bureau for a greater degree of investigative and counterintelligence latitude.

Instant: A good friend of mine, in the wake of all the recent shootings, from Columbine to Los Angeles to the recent one in Texas, suggested, somewhat seriously, somewhat jokingly, that these were all black ops to accomplish that exact same thing.

WC: Yeah, that's not that unusual a theory.

Instant: I tried to laugh it off, but I didn't find it very funny.

WC: It's not funny. They act like you're a lunatic when you bring that up, but it's on record that they've done that exact same thing, usually on a somewhat smaller scale, granted, but nonetheless the same sort of thing, over and over and over and over again. And people, somehow or another, aren't able to remember that beyond about a fifteen minute time frame. Example being, it was either '73 or '74 in Los Angeles, you had the Watts Writers Workshop, which was a community focus thing in South Central L..A. It was torched. The person who torched it, by his own admission, was a guy by the name of Darther Perry. Darther Perry was an infiltrator working simultaneously for the conspiracy section of the Los Angeles Police and the FBI. And Darther Perry was enlisted by the FBI to torch the Writers Workshop, because they were concerned that it was a hotbed of radicalism.

In the northeast, around three or four years before that, you had a guy by the name of "Tommy the Traveler" - Tommy Tongyai. He would go from campus to campus under FBI orders, teaching local SDS [Student for a Democratic Society, a radical New Left group] chapters how to construct incendiary devices to take out local ROTC buildings. So several buildings would not have been blown up had it not been for Tongyai. And the FBI used the bombings that they themselves had set up as a predication to really get heavy-handed with the SDS. It's really hard to advance justification and requirement of additional resources and latitude, relaxation of laws, suspension of civil rights and liberties and so forth, to combat terrorism if there's no terrorism going on, so they have a vested interest in creating at least the appearance of terrorist activity. In order to do that, they often have to perpetrate it.

Now, I'll grant you that the World Trade Center and the Oklahoma City bombing transcend anything that I can think of that they actually have done. But that's a difference in degree, rather than in kind. So that it's not an absolutely irrational position to say that it is a possible black op, particularly when you realize that they had people inside the organization

One other thing that needs to be said here is that most of the operational techniques that were considered most objectionable by the Church Committee have been legitimated during the 1980's by Ronald Reagan's executive orders. So the COINTELPRO [COunterINTELligence PROgrams, a blanket name for the often illegal and violent operations the FBI used against various radical groups] stuff is very much an operational reality, insofar it was disclosed in the Church Committee. The big difference between now and then is they have actual pieces of paper emanating from the Oval Office of the White House to say, yeah, we did that, and it's disclosed. It's not been disclosed because it reveals our operational techniques, and we have a right under the Freedom of Information Act to keep those concealed so as not to be able to impair our effectiveness. But, comes the crunch, here's the piece of paper that said it was legitimate for us to do it. If it was wrong, blame Ronald Reagan. You can't blame agents for what the law says they can do. But this is de facto law. It's not statutory law. It's by Executive Order.

Instant: You have spent years writing, researching, and even teaching about the FBI and political repression. I am just stunned that you're able to act politically at all and not be wracked with paranoia.

WC: What's paranoia?

Instant: Being scared to act politically at all out of potential Bureau repercussions.

WC: That's the way they use the word. If they can intimidate you, you're "paranoid." Well, actually, they're on to something, because what they're trying to do is create a context in which there's irrational fear. That's what paranoia is. It's like a ripple. They can throw a rock into the water and then it ripples out.

I've got a somewhat different take. I'm not paranoid. Everything I think they're doing, I know they've done. It's not irrational. And since I don't consider myself irrational, I feel I can assess probabilities with regard to what's going to happen.

Instant: What has been your direct relationship with the Bureau? I know Mark Clark and that whole thing [Clark was Churchill's roommate and a Black Panther Party leader who was murdered by the FBI and the Chicago police] first threw you into the midst of it, and I saw the Minutemen death threat in the book. [in The COINTELPRO Papers, Churchill publishes a postcard addressed to him that contains a death threat by the Minutemen, a violent right-wing group with FBI ties.] Have there been any other real prominent incidents?

WC: Oh yeah. I've got about 800 pages worth of my own FBI files. I can't remember what the total is now. There's a bunch of it withheld for national security.

Instant: It helps you remember what you did back then.

WC: Yeah. I know what all my old license numbers were, where I lived, with whom I was living in common law, all that sort of stuff. I also know they had me confused with somebody, but I don't know who. I'd love to see their file, see if they had them confused with me. There's one whole section of documents that pertains to my activities in Mexico City during a summer when I was in Geneva working at the United Nations, so I assume that they got somebody who was in Mexico City placed in Switzerland. I don't know that for a fact. I know they can fuck up, big time. They're right about a lot of stuff, they're wrong about things. They suspect me of doing things that I had no part of, and at the same time I was doing things that they should have been looking at.

So you can get a few chuckles at that, but that's ancient history. I was targeted for counterintelligence neutralization in 1970, and that may have in fact been their approach to neutralizing me (laughs). I'm not sure what all that was about. I know that they did that. I don't know what else they may have done.

Instant: You've said yourself that - you said this in relation to Mumia [Abu-Jamal, former Black Panther Party leader and journalist who is currently on death row in Pennsylvania], but I'd imagine it holds true for anyone - once you're targeted for neutralization, the targeting doesn't stop until you're neutralized.

WC: That's true. Well, actually, it would probably stop if you stopped. Which I didn't, and I've got a relative degree of ability to assess what I think my risk value is to them. That has some determination as to the sorts of tactic that they will employ to neutralize me.

Instant: "Risk value," meaning you've been public?

WC: Well, I've been public, but how public is that actually, do you think? See, you're free to say anything you want to say in this country so long as nobody, or at least very few people, are actually listening. Mumia's big problem was that too many people in a critical or sensitive context started listening, and so he got himself neutralized. They also had a particular animus towards the Black Panthers that they don't have to me. They have one toward the American Indian Movement to that extent that they would, but the American Indian Movement they consider somewhat passé, and besides, I'm down here in the margins of it.

Instant: I actually wanted to ask you about a couple things related to AIM. First, the split, where now you have the government- and Honeywell-sponsored thing that isn't really even worthy of the name, and then the autonomous chapters.

WC: It's essentially the same thing that happened with the Black Panther Party, except that we don't happen to have a Black Liberation Army [the armed guerrilla wing of the Panthers], or equivalent to that. But if you took the BLA out of the context of the Panthers, which would also mean you'd have to take a good deal of the repression out of the mix; if the Panther split were to happen now rather than in 1970, the evolution of things would be very different than it was then. You probably wouldn't have the BLA in the form that it emerged as a result of that split back in 1970. Our split happened later, and in a somewhat different construction. Frankly, we never really had the cadre base that the Panthers had anyway, and there wasn't any possibility that we were going off in that line, although it was considered at one point. But that one point of consideration was primarily involving Douglas Durham, who of course was an infiltrator trying to get us to move in that direction. That's one. The other is, if you decontextualize the Panther experience to remove the BLA, you've got essentially the same set of dynamics and actors in the AIM split. You've got a basically social service-oriented - and that's it's best side - technically criminal organization. And that's quite acceptable to the Feds. They're not gonna harass it very much. And then you've got the people who are basically still trying to adhere to a agenda of being a national liberation movement, and form and articulate a politics around that, and they're to be discredited, but not necessarily repressed in the way the BLA was. We're not forming clandestine armed groups to conduct operations. Maybe somewhat on the basis of having learned from their experience that the foco theory's [a theory that says small groups of armed revolutionaries can ignite a revolution by engaging in spectacular and prominent guerrilla actions] not gonna be applicable to the United States!

Instant: That brings me to Pacifism as Pathology, which was a wonderful essay, and one which really gave me pause while reading it. One of the things it made me think about was the gun control movement which is so prevalent now. After reading that and what you have to say about the FBI, the last thing that I would want to do is deal with a group like that unarmed.

WC: Absolutely.

Instant: Does that tie in to all the stuff you said about the anti-smoking movement - that it's just a way of increasing the fascistic control over peoples' behavior?

WC: Yeah. We talk about left-right dichotomy in this country - there is no left. There's only a right and a righter. The politics that are on the table in any significant form at all really resemble that CNN program "Crossfire." As you recall, when they started that, they had on the right, if I remember right, Robert Novak. Well, that's truth in advertising. Robert Novak truly is a right-winger. And on the left, they had Tom Brayden, former CIA station chief in Italy who helped subvert the Italian elections. Well, now, there's a real left representative. So you've got the right, and then you've got much further right, and that's the political discourse.

Everything that's coming out of the so-called progressive movement lending credibility to the government by calling on the government to repress various things or to do various things that they consider to be good ideas. Well, that says right off the top that the government is intrinsically credible. All you need to do is tinker and tune and increase its authority and everything will be fixed up. Meanwhile, the concomitant is rampant social repression and disempowerment at every level. The people in the anti-smoking movement are relatively privileged people across the board, almost without exception. Smokers are primarily lower-income communities of color. Now, they got this vast influx of cash to do "good work" off, they always say, the tobacco corporations. Five hundred billion dollars or whatever - we're gonna have day-care centers, and we're gonna have this, and we're gonna have that and they're gonna have new projectors in all the classrooms and the information superhighway's gonna open up to our kids our kids our kids our …Whose kids? The tobacco corporations self-evidently are going to pass along - as they're already doing - all the costs to the smoking population, which is the poorest sector of the population. That $500 billion is going to come out of the very poorest social strata and land squarely on the table of a bunch of fat-cat yuppies so that they don't have to pay higher taxes.

There's one. And if you get upset about that, make sure you're disarmed, too. These gun control freaks, with their nice, wholesome little Ben & Jerry's smiles about how it would be nice to "clean up" society, are not talking about disarming police.

Instant: Right. They're not talking about SWAT teams.

WC: Never talking about disarming the police. All social violence, it's all a matter of the disempowered having access to weaponry, never the state. But I think some of these little fucks advocating it, who are also the cadres for the other social repression things, like with the cigarettes and stuff, have this holier-than-thou, sanctimonious, absolutely vacuous health agenda on their hands.

Instant: And a racist attitude, you point out as well.

WC: Well, some of these guys who are getting repressed and can't go sit in the neighborhood diner or their corner bar, where no yuppie would ever go, and have a cigarette, because it's now been outlawed, may just take the chickens back to roost on the correct branch, which is the over-privileged yuppie that imposed that on them in a sort of Cotton Mather moment, and shoot that cocksucker instead of the cop! (laughs) I really think that there's that kind of self-interest involved for a lot of them, and I know a bunch around here. They're concerned they're gonna get shot, so they want to make sure this guy down the street whose life they're getting ready to rearrange for him because they know better how he ought to live than he does, and how he ought to act - and they don't want to bear the burden of his health care, or whatever - that he may just one day go off the deep end of getting fucked with and come up and shoot one of them. He probably should.

Instant: You've written for years about environmental and land-use issues as they effect native people. I was wondering what your take is on the new official acceptance of "environmental racism." I know here in Massachusetts we even have a government office devoted now to it, and it's a buzzword that's more or less accepted in political circles. What does that mean, and why did that happen?

WC: It's more cosmetics than anything else. That's an acknowledged fact. You don't have to have a college degree to realize that you're living in a slum where they have never done a damn thing about what they've understood destroyed the mental capacity of children, that being lead-based paint, the forty years they've known about that - that there's a disequilibrium in terms of attention to the environmental context of your health. Lots of poor people understand that, and are resentful of it. There's a whole bunch of other examples, but that's right there in their houses.

When something becomes ubiquitously evident, then they make some sort of a response. So they acknowledge it. That's the first thing - you have to acknowledge it. They put a name to it, say, "Yeah, you're right. There is this problem. Here's what we'll call it." Then they start the whole process over again, in study groups, participation sessions, all these sorts of things where people sit around endlessly discussing the obvious rather than doing something about it.

It's a way of putting a lid on a resentment that has attached itself to too much factual base. It's interesting you bring that up. I got an e-mail just Wednesday of this week from the new hotshot they hired for that very purpose in the Denver office of the EPA.

Instant: So it is spreading throughout the country, then.

WC: Yeah. He's putting out e-mails to people within his area. Who are the people who have had the biggest mouths about this in your area? Send them an e-mail asking them what the problems are, like you don't know. Now we're going to have a five year fact-finding thing. Everyone's gonna get suckered in to participating in it. See, once you're participating, rather than being marginalized, you feel better.

Instant: Even if the participation process ultimately leads nowhere.

WC: Well, yeah. Participation is a solution for the status quo in its own right. They figured that one out with Martin Luther King.

Instant: I wanted to ask you, changing tacks completely: the Ghost Dance, which you wrote about, and the war that it led to [after being robbed of their land and seeing their population reduced by over 90 percent by the 1870's, the Northern Cheyenne developed the Ghost Dance, the belief that, as Churchill writes, "if certain rituals were performed with sufficient devotion, the whites would disappear, while the buffalo and other dead relatives would be reborn." The army used the existence of the dance as an excuse to attack the tribe yet again], seems to me to be the most emblematic thing of the entire Indian experience in this country.

WC: How so?

Instant: It was done as the only response they had left to being completely dispossessed, and it was just a cause for another war.

WC: Well, it was a pretext. My view of the Ghost Dance is that for Indians it a pretty forlorn kind of thing. It makes me very sad, actually. It's sad in its own right, forget Wounded Knee and the rest of the repression. That doesn't make me sad so much as it makes me furious.

But there is a positive dimension in the Ghost Dance insofar as it posits an alternative vision which is constructive. You can't just dance that into being, but at least it engenders the vision, and you can work with that. So long as people are having some sort of an attachment to the Ghost Dance, it means they haven't abandoned the vision of an alternative which is viable and positive and so forth. The translation from the refusal to relinquish that vision on the one hand and some sort of concrete means of attaining it is something else again. The great danger with that sort of sensibility of attaining the vision through a spiritual process is that you begin to come up with spiritual remedies to concrete realities, and you end up with something like the Naropa Institute as a result, or plastic medicine men running around selling sweat lodges and Germans holding Sun Dances in the Black Forest and all that other crap.

Instant: Which you have written about extensively. Now, seemingly everyone but you who writes about people like that, and things like Dances With Wolves and Black Robe and the Tony Hillerman books, no matter what they think, always uses the words "good intentions" - oh, they have good intentions. I was wondering why that's so common.

WC: I wonder how many times you gotta fuck somebody - badly - out of those intentions before those intentions stop being good.

Instant: That's the thing. They're obviously, on their face, just not.

WC: Yeah. The process is, you've got this hegemonic historical interpretation of things, and you start to argue that that's not so. First thing is, they suddenly abandon the master narrative and start demanding examples. So you start to give them examples, and each example gets dismissed as being an anomaly. If you carry this out far enough, you've got so many anomalies that's constituted with the history. I want to know when the anomalies become the norm, and what they're articulating as the norm is either anomalous or non-existent. There doesn't seem to be any line over which you go. You amass enough exemplary evidence that you should have long ago displaced the master narrative, but they cling to it.

Instant: Right. You've done that, David Stannard [author of American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World] has done that, over and over.

WC: Yeah. That's the same principle that adheres here, with the films and books. You do something. Maybe the first time you do it, you actually are misguided enough to believe it's gonna have a result other than what it has. Maybe your intentions are good. But once it's been demonstrated that the results are different from the expectations, it's a little more difficult to argue that the intentions were good when you repeat the process. At about the fifteenth or sixteenth iteration of this, it's beyond the realm of plausibility that your intentions are still good. You must have some other set of interests in doing it this way. But of course, no one's gonna say, "I'm doing it this way because I'm a pig, and I feel myself entitled to whatever it is that this poor disadvantaged group may have left because I want it." No, they're gonna articulate some noble set of reasons, so they're always coming up with this "intentions."

Now, you have to make an objective assessment of that, which is difficult with something like intentionality. That's a very subjective consideration, so they can always resort to that argument, "Well, how can you know what the intentions are?" Ultimately, my argument is, either you're saying that you're brain-dead, incapable of understanding anything - in which case you weren't capable of producing this thing like "Dances With Wolves" or this text or whatever - or your intentions were something other than what you're trying to claim, or, as an apologist, what you're trying to attribute to Kevin Costner or Baba Ram Dass or Gary Snyder or whoever. Yeah, Gary Snyder can write Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry, but he's too goddamn dumb to know it was an appropriation of this exercise that he was engaged in?! Gary Snyder's a literary genius, but he can't figure out that there's something wrong with going to Japan on an extended vacation and coming back in the voice of a Zen Buddhist monk, and finding that there's not that great a market for that anymore because we've gotten past the 60's and early 70's, and so he re-emerges in the voice of a North American native shaman. He just can't figure that out. I mean, duh. He ain't that dumb, but you're either that dumb or you're mendacious as hell to even suggest that's true.

Instant: By my watch, it's almost October, and in mid-October comes everyone's favorite holiday. You called Columbus "the quintessential European." I was wondering if you could explain that.

WC: Well, he was presumptive. He presumed an entitlement. That was his predication for going. He presumed an entitlement for his people to the property of others for profit, for benefit, to create what Boulder yuppies would call "quality of life" at the direct expense of others. That's the fundament of the manifestation of Europe. Now, Europe's a state of mind more than anything else. It has no geographic reality.

What they call "Europe" is essentially nothing more than a pair of peninsulas sticking off the Asian land mass. It has no Eastern boundary, no cultural integrity, and it had to colonize itself in order to synthesize a culture. The very word is a corruption of Greek meaning "darkness and ignorance." You've got these peoples who are essentially the barbarians, the savages, the unenlightened folks of the north, outside the boundaries of civilization both physically and intellectually, who had a massive inferiority complex culturally anchored, that have been trying to compensate for it in the manner that I'm talking about ever since. All this was Columbus' project, was to go out and inaugurate a process of material acquisition that would allow for that compensation to accrue. I doubt that he was visionary enough to see it as a way of translating Europe's relative disempowerment vis a vis Islam and Eastern Orthodoxy and so forth into a position of global dominance, but he at least wanted to significantly alter the material circumstances of the society. And for himself, not coincidentally. And for his family. I mean, he did write this things that would be in perpetuity. He was looking at creating a situation for his family of being the hereditary aristocrats.

Well, during the Columbian quincentenial celebration, you had Ben Nighthorse Campbell…[an Indian Senator from Colorado and a nemesis of Churchill's]

Instant: Your favorite person.

WC: Yeah. "The Nightmare," seated right next to an Admiral in the Spanish Navy. The reason for the position is he's a direct lineal descendant of Christopher Columbus. He's the eldest male of his generation, and consequently he inherited the title. He's Admiral of the Ocean Sea.

Instant: Speaking of Nighthorse Campbell, in doing research, I noticed you're an artist. Now, I hope you're not in violation of the Indian Arts and Crafts law! [a 1990 law that makes it a crime for anyone not federally recognized as "Native American" to sell artwork that "suggests it is Indian produced". Churchill has been exceedingly critical of the law.]

WC: Actually not, as it turns out. So my arguments about all of that stuff really, contrary to what a whole lot of folks would like to have everybody believe, David Bradley [founder of the Native American Artists Association and a major force in getting the law passed] first among them, has nothing to do with my personal circumstance. First off, I haven't been a practicing artist since about 1982. It's not required that I meet some criteria in order to be a writer. But I haven't made or marketing a piece of art since way before this goddamn act came up. So there's no personal anything involved in here. And if I decided to, I am an associate member, enrolled, of Keetoowah Cherokee. That's not what makes me anything, other than not subject to being prosecuted on the basis of violation of the Arts and Crafts Act. I'm clean on these arguments, my man.

Instant: Great. Your first book was Marxism and Native Americans [a collection of essays by both Native Americans and Marxists, edited by Churchill]. I read your stuff, and I leafed through a couple of the Marxist things, and a lot of what they wrote was just simply mean-spirited or evasive or condescending to you and to Russell Means' speech…

WC: And basically to native people.

Instant: Yeah, in general. I was wondering what that experience taught you.

WC: What I already knew. That if you take a coin, and you analyze one side of it, you flip over, you analyze the other side of it, it looks different on the surface, but it's just two sides of the same coin.

Instant: You're referring to Marxism and capitalism?

WC: Yeah. They're both Eurosupremacist. And Marx, though he never…well, yeah he did kind of come right out and say that.

Instant: With the "underdeveloped" language.

WC: It's the whole notion of historical materialism. That as you progress, as you evolve as a culture, you have material signifiers of that progression, and Europe, of course, in terms of its productive capacity, was the most evolved on the planet at the time Marx wrote. Consequently, you could make that translation that he's saying that Europe is the superior culture. From that, you could then adduce the reasoning - well, he's fairly clear, you don't have to adduce it, either, he spells it out - of why "backward" countries must be colonized in order to provide them the base of productive relations that will allow for a socialist transformation of social order to occur. You've got to have that material basis. You've got to have that set of productive relations. The relations of production will determine what's possible in terms of social transformation.

Well, given that, we know that the attitudes that are manifested vis a vis "others" by Marxists has to be simply a variation of the theme of the attitude manifested to "others" by European capitalists. The formulation was, capitalism ushers in the set of material preconditions necessary to allow for socialist transformation. Consequently, if you have not arrived, in our nice little linear evolutionary scheme, at the level of capitalism, you are to that extent, necessarily, retrograde. We have to be made capitalist, before we can become what we're supposed to become, by virtue of the iron law of history.

Instant: Which is the perfect socialist man.

WC: Yeah. Well, shit, I can get that from Adam Smith. I can get that from William F. Buckley, too. They're gonna couch it different, and they're gonna want to arrange the distribution of the material product of the social labor process in a different way, and maybe you can say that the Marxist is more equitable than what it is Buckley has in mind, but that's a narrow thing when you don't want that kind of production to be occurring at all.

Instant: One of the essays you wrote explained Western versus non-Western conceptualization and how people in the academy who are indigenous and progressive...

WC: Christ, you've read a lot of stuff, man. You're connecting dots all over the place. You don't need me to talk about my stuff. I think you've got it down pretty well yourself. What am I doing here?

Instant: I appreciate it. Now, people who are indigenous within the academy have to attempt to get this conceptualization into people, and almost act as a fifth column within the academy. I was wondering how you might attempt to teach non-Western conceptualization within this very Western context, and probably to largely to people who grew up in Western culture.

WC: As you know, another thing I said in that essay was that this approach has some commonality with Marxists and their ideas about dialectics. You get close enough approximation to the mode of understanding manifested in indigenous cultures that we could at least talk about it. This notion of dialectics as a relational system of understanding, as opposed to a linear system.

Now, the problem with that, as I also tried to point out, is that most Marxists, while they like to bandy around that word "dialectics," have no clue what it means, and they certainly don't operate in a methodological/analytical sense in that mode. But if you can give them something that is reasonably familiar, give students something they could attach themselves that has some basis of familiarity from their own experience that you could make the translation. I don't really attempt to go full-bore into teaching indigenous ways of amassing knowledge. I try to make those connections, help people understand how they can connect dots and see the whole of things, how the things relate one aspect to another. And that if you take out one of the pieces, you can't understand the whole. Or if you are led to misunderstand one of the pieces, then you are necessarily going to misunderstand the whole - that kind of analysis. So I'll target certain things which are profoundly misunderstood and try to reinterpret them to revise their overall understanding of things.

But , problem is, how are we going to define indigenous here within the academy? Because it's not like the academy, when it says it wants indigenous people within it, wants people doing this kind of thing. No, it's basically like a bean count. They want people of the right melanin content or genetic structure to come in and say exactly the same goddamn thing that they've been saying all along, and to that extent reinforce and validate the nature of their own oppression or the supplanting of indigenous knowledge with this sort of linear view that's acceptable to European practitioners.

Instant: How do you get around that while teaching at the University of Colorado?

WC: In the way that I was talking about, and by trying to get other people who approach things in the same way in. It's an infiltration of the system or of the structure. But that's kind of a hard fight. They've been owing me a position for years, and I haven't been able to fill it, because they always need another British historian or whatever, and I'm gonna have to have a major cataclysm, I think, in order to get it. That's not really how I want to spend my time and energy, but at a certain point, I'm going to have to, and they're imposing that.

Instant: Really?

WC: Sure. You've got to set priorities. You get resistance at every level, and from every direction, and it's a question of where you're going to put your time and energy in order to get the most bang for your buck. In a way that becomes an individual choice when there's relatively few of us. It's not like there's this big collective process here. There's three Indians in the entire faculty of the University of Colorado, one of whom is continuously gone, writing her novels, the other of whom is retiring at the end of this semester, and me. So it's not exactly like we sit down and come up with this collective strategy of what we need to do (laughs).

Instant: Speaking of school, in high school, I took a class. It was called Genocide and - I don't know, they had some other word in the title, I forget exactly. But it only talked about mass murder, only by the Nazis in World War II, and only to the Jews. I suppose you're not surprised by that.

WC: Hell no. That's what I wrote that book about. Well, in part. I mean, that's what I said they were doing. You just gave me a textbook illustration. So, no, I wouldn't be surprised. I wasn't creating a strawman (laughs). I'm talking about objective reality there.

Instant: Just switching tacks for a moment here - you write a lot about prisons and prisoners. I was wondering - you wrote about the hideous, 23 1/2 hour-a-day lockdown paradigm...

WC: Well, that's becoming ubiquitous.

Instant: So what do you think the latest advances are in prison building, technology and policy, and who do you think are likely to be the next batch of political prisoners?

WC: To tell you the truth, my anticipation right now would be that the next batch are going to be these militia guys and white supremacists. To a certain extent, they've already gone in there. I don't agree with their politics, but that doesn't make them apolitical. And there's exceptions to the other side. Them cutting the FALN [Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional, a Puerto Rican independence group] people loose sort of pointed to that, but a whole batch went in just as they were releasing those guys from Chicago, so it's kind of ironic. They're cutting the FALN people loose as they're putting a new crop into prison.

Instant: In the reporting of the FALN people, there was no mention made of the COINTELPRO against them and the independista movement generally.

WC: Absolutely not. You won't find any in the Church Report, either. When they do their count of COINTELPROs, the COINTELPRO gets the CP [Communist Party], SWP [Socialist Workers Party], Black liberation movement, and so on. There isn't even an acknowledgment that there was a COINTELPRO directed against the Puerto Rican liberation movement.

Instant: Or AIM, for that matter.

WC: Well, AIM comes after COINTELPRO, so that's not formally designated a CONTELPRO. I simply did that. That's simply a continuation. And I use that little wedge there that [Athan] Theoharris [of the Church Committee] said, well, we had indication that there were three different essentially COINTELPRO operations ongoing at the time, but he never specified what, at the time that they had done their study in Congress. But he didn't specify what they were, so I simply filled in the blank for him, and said, oh, here's one.

Instant: You never heard from that guy after the publication of The COINTELPRO Papers, right? Or did you? Because I know you wrote that book partially in answer to his review [Theoharris wrote a critical review of Churchill's previous book about the FBI, Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, in the Washington Post].

WC: I never heard another word from him. We're actually in a movie together, but they did the interviews on the same topics at different locations and times, so we never encountered each other. Interestingly enough, he said almost the same thing I did. So they edited the thing out so we were in juxtaposition, reinforcing each other all the way through it. But no, I never heard any more from him.

Instant: You wrote that book partially because he and a lot of other people didn't believe Agents of Repression, despite the thousands of notes.

WC: Theoharris is a containment man. He worked for the Church Committee. He understood what his role was very well. I don't believe it would be accurate to say that he disbelieved what was articulated in there, but it was his mission to make it seem implausible to a large number of people. He's an active participant in that process.

Instant: So then it was a disinformation exercise more than something he legitimately believed?

WC: Yeah. Which gives him standing. See, he's actually a consultant to the FBI. His protégé, who wrote that book Racial Matters, Ken O'Reilly, says that straight up. I did a couple of gigs with him. We did one in Compton, me and him and Bobby Seale and somebody else, and another conference on the counterintelligence stuff, mostly black-related but not entirely so, up in Maine. He was the keynote, and he says, I framed my argument in such a way, given that I'm in the academic heir apparent to Nathan, and I will be the next in line to fulfill his role with the FBI, which is as their advisor in these areas. If you put that out as a stated objective, it says, clearly, what the parameters of your findings are going to be. You can find they were misguided, you can find that they erred, you can find that they're anomalous things which are no longer happening. That was bad, but that was then. This is now.

Instant: Which you write is the central myth of the FBI. Now, in addition to Theoharris, who I guess you would expect it out of, even The Nation's review of Agents of Repression is absolutely dismissive of the GOON squads[Guardians of the Ogala Nation, an FBI-backed death squad used to attack the American Indian Movement], and the Progressive's review of one of your books said, well, he's good, but he goes a little too far sometimes.

WC: I always liked to be one of those who went a little too far. Well, the review in The Nation, which was of Agents of Repression, just said flatly, the FBI would not have done this because of A,B,C, and D. So when Duane Brewer, the #2 GOON in the whole Pine Ridge, finally did the interview that gave concrete examples of them doing exactly what the hell we'd said they'd done - some of them were examples that we'd used, others were examples we hadn't even brought up - on a first-hand basis, confirmed the entirety of what we were saying, in some detail - we sent them that and said, now, are you going to write a retraction to that review? Absolute silence.

Instant: Why would The Nation do that? You enumerate the body count from the GOONs.

WC: The Nation's basically a white boys' club. White guys in charge of interpreting everything. Alex Cockburn, Christopher Hitchens - Christopher Hitchens has said that we should celebrate the Columbian quincentarry with "vim and vigor and considerable gusto" because, after all, had it not been for Columbus, people like me wouldn't be here, and I'm important. Victor Navasky and those guys are still running around trying to defend the Rosenbergs! That's FBI repression. And it was FBI repression. But if you acknowledge the nature and dimension of other forms of FBI repression, what happened to the Rosenbergs - and Julius after all was, in fact, a spy; he was framed, but he was a spy - a lot of what the FBI was saying about these guys was true. The weird part is, the FBI actually knew it at the time, but they couldn't talk about how they knew it.

If you can see that this other stuff is true, then what it is that they take to be the center of their own validation - that is, the extent to which the FBI repressed them arbitrarily because of the threat of the politics that they adhere to, you just demoted them. Acknowledging that, they demote themselves, saying other peoples' struggles are more threatening, and are repressed more severely, and are therefore more significant in the context of struggle for transformation of power relations in the United States, than are ours, so we're not in the driver's seat anymore. It's kind of a political, kind of a psychological thing. So that's how you get that. They did the same thing with the Panthers. "The Panthers were bringing it on themselves" - Christ, you could hear John Mitchell between the lines of these left progressives!

Instant: The final thing that I wanted to talk to you about was - you've mentioned that the US has been - it's not a matter of, well, if we just continue on this line, we will eventually become a police state. It's a matter of, we have been a police state since 1950...

WC: At least.

Instant: At least, yeah. Did you pick that date because of NSC 68 [the document that established the CIA]?

WC: Well, there's NSC 68, there's the general purge of all deviationist politics, which was going on. I could backdate it to 1919, but this was much more pervasive.

Instant: How can that be stopped?

WC: The first aspect of stopping it is get the people cognizant of the fact that that's the way it is. As long as we're sitting around our little tables, jerking off about "the threat that it might become" rather than acknowledging the reality that it is, it's going to simply be a self-administering process.

That changes the context considerably. You got little elements out in society that are pretty well aware of it, both on the left and the right, but you've got this vast mass of people who, because it would be really inconvenient to cognate it, and in part because...well, they're both uninformed and ignorant. Ignorance is a word that kind of gets used to mean "uninformed," but they don't mean the same thing. Uninformed is because people don't necessarily have information available in the form needed in order to be able to make sense of the overall pattern. So we try to make information available and take care of the problem of being uninformed. But the larger problem, then, is ignorance. Ignorance is to have the information available and ignore it. They always use ignorance to imply that people don't know nothing. Well, that's not true. That's not even what it means. People out in Pittsburgh are uninformed. People in Washington, DC are ignorant.

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