Which is why we took the dog to the vet last month to get its teeth cleaned.
Posted on 02/26/2005 5:08:38 AM PST by billorites
Like a high mountain road posted with danger signs, Ward Churchill's career has been marked by repeated warnings to University of Colorado officials that there could be serious trouble ahead.
CU has been contacted a number of times over the past 20 years by prominent figures within the American Indian community who have raised questions about Churchill's truthfulness, his scholarship and his ethnicity.
Churchill responded Wednesday night that CU had conducted thorough investigations of each complaint over the years.
"I came out as clean as a hound's tooth," he said.
David Bradley, a Santa Fe-area American Indian artist whose feud with Churchill has endured more than a decade, says he told CU a long time ago that Churchill should be fired.
"If his bosses had simply done their jobs, if they had checked him out, if they had started reading his damn writing, they would have said, 'Wait a minute! This falls below our standards,' " Bradley said.
"If they had, he wouldn't have tenure. It was a failure every step of the way."
Churchill has been under fire for an essay he wrote on the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens," Churchill called many of the victims "little Eichmanns" who were complicit in mass murder. The CU Board of Regents has ordered an investigation of Churchill's works and activities.
Bradley says he is the first to have blown the whistle on Churchill, whom he criticizes on many counts, including his belief that Churchill has no legitimate claim to American Indian status. But by the time he contacted CU in 1994, several other Churchill critics had a clear head start in bringing their complaints to CU.
Vernon Bellecourt, an American Indian Movement activist, says he first approached the university with questions about the veracity of Churchill's claim to American Indian heritage in 1986.
"We went out there with a stack of documents to tell them about him," Bellecourt said. "I made a special trip to Colorado and went to the university. I tried to meet with the president of the Board of Regents."
Bellecourt says none of the regents was willing to talk to him, and instead sent an employee to meet with him. He says he gave her all the documentation and never heard from them again.
"We were really frustrated when we left," Bellecourt said. "We said, 'At least we warned them.' "
Claim to be Indian challenged
Bellecourt continued to raise the issue of Churchill's American Indian background over the next few years, contacting the university again in 1994. That year, several others joined him and wrote letters about Churchill to then-CU President Judith Albino, saying that Churchill was fraudulently claiming to be an American Indian.
"We told the university he wasn't Indian and was disruptive in the community," said Carole Standing Elk, a California Indian activist. "We said, 'He doesn't represent us, and how did you put him in the ethnic studies department?' "
Albino referred the matter to former CU Boulder Chancellor James Corbridge. In a letter to Standing Elk, Corbridge said the university had reviewed Churchill's claims to be an American Indian but could not make that an issue in his employment.
"The university has taken your concerns very seriously," wrote Corbridge. "However, given the fact that equal opportunity is the law of the land and that positions in the public sector are to be awarded to all persons regardless of race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and based only on their ability to do the job, the university does not believe that any attempt to remove Mr. Churchill because of his ethnicity or race would be appropriate.
"Even if Mr. Churchill is not an American Indian, as he claims, Title VII protects Caucasians as well as persons of color. Further, it has always been university policy that a person's race or ethnicity is self-proving."
Corbridge went on to say that the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission had taken the position that "observation and self-identification are the most reliable indicators of one's racial grouping."
Meanwhile, other prominent American Indians were challenging Churchill's claim of American Indian ancestry. They insist Churchill would not have his job if he hadn't said he was an Indian.
"I sent a letter to the university in 1992 saying he's not a native person," said Suzan Shown Harjo, president of the Morning Star Institute. She says she received a response from a university official saying Churchill had not been hired because he was an American Indian.
Harjo, the former executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, says that is nonsense.
"He was interviewed and hired because he said he's an American Indian," she said. "The material he used to gain tenure says he's an American Indian. If he were Ward Churchill, white man, they would not have made him chair of ethnic studies."
CU 'aided and abetted his deception'
Harjo says CU is complicit in the uproar over Churchill, since the university has given him a platform that he has used to attack others.
"He's lied to the university and they've passed him off as an Indian," she said. "They've aided and abetted his deception. The university needs to accept its role in this and do something about it."
Churchill has insisted in interviews that he is at least one-sixteenth Cherokee and Creek, but family tree researchers have verified only white branches. Since 1974 he has been an associate member of the Tahlequah, Okla.-based Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians. The tribe has said that his membership was honorary and required no proof of Cherokee heritage.
In a prior interview with the News, Churchill bristled when asked about those who question his lineage.
"Suzan Harjo is no more entitled to interrogate me on that score than your average fellow bureaucrat," Churchill said. "And my non-responsiveness to her specific questions, when she tries to conduct her inquisitions, has been basically 'Kiss my ---.' It's a typical ad hominem attack. And the question is, what has it got to do with anything?"
Bellecourt and Harjo say Churchill's belligerent speeches and writings are evidence that he is not of American Indian descent. They say Indians usually avoid the confrontational behavior Churchill is known for.
"You've seen his demeanor, his arrogance; that's not the Indian way," said Bellecourt. "We're a compassionate people, that's always been a trait of Indians."
Harjo met Churchill at a conference in 1990 and says she was immediately suspicious of his background.
"There was nothing in his manner or appearance or his way of relating that made me think I was dealing with an American Indian," she said. "He's not a native person. He's a white man."
The issue of whether Churchill is really an American Indian is important, Harjo says, because the point of programs like American Indian studies is to give voice to a community that has long been neglected.
"We're trying to get authentic voices heard and read," said Harjo. "Churchill tries to co-opt our history. He lifts stuff from native cultures and passes it off as his own."
She says Churchill is known in the Indian world for his bitter attacks on prominent people in their community.
"He's attacked me in his books," said Harjo. "He's been burning and slashing through Indian country. Talk about chickens coming home to roost."
Deceased wife's sister among critics
Bradley, a Chippewa, said there are several reasons he and Churchill clashed. One is that Bradley landed a post at the Institute of American Indian Arts as an instructor and guest artist in residence from 1990 to 1992. It was a post for which Churchill had interviewed, said Bradley.
Also pivotal to the Bradley-Churchill feud is Bradley's support for the 1990 American Indian Arts and Crafts Act, which prohibits an artist who is not American Indian from representing his or her work as American Indian art when trying to sell it.
In 1994, Bradley contacted CU, lodging his complaint with Evelyn Hu-De-Hart, then director for CU's Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America.
"I made the same argument it's always been," Bradley said. "One, that he's a fake Indian. Number two, he's a bully and a terrorist, and number three, he's writing ugly lies and slander about me, and the school is giving him a power base to publish these lies about me.
"He probably wouldn't even get that stuff published if he didn't have that cloak of credibility as a professor. They're enabling him, in other words."
Hu-De-Hart's assistant, Bradley said, "told me that complaints were being taken, and that's about it. Nothing of substance was told to me."
Rhonda Kelly, 41, of Winnipeg, the older sister of Churchill's deceased third wife, Leah Renae Kelly, also contacted CU.
Leah Kelly was hit by a car while walking on Arapahoe Road near the couple's home east of Boulder the night of May 31, 2000. She was found to have a blood alcohol content of 0.35, more than three times the level of legal intoxication in Colorado.
Churchill later published a book of Kelly's writings, In My Own Voice. In a lengthy preface, he contended that the American Indian woman's alcoholism and other personal troubles could be traced back to her parents' having been forced, like many indigenous people, into "residential schools" or "Indian schools" intended to speed their assimilation into white culture.
Rhonda Kelly, a second-year law student, has produced a 15-point brief of inaccuracies she said she has found in Churchill's preface. She has asked the book's publisher to remove it from circulation, and to ask a man writing a screenplay based on the book to desist.
Kelly's complaints include her contention that only her father was educated at a residential school and Churchill's misstating the name of the Denver hospital to which Leah Kelly's body was taken.
Churchill, she said, never contacted family members to verify biographical family details included in his preface.
But Churchill said Wednesday evening that it was Rhonda Kelly who wasn't clear on the facts. He said Rhonda Kelly "never had time to come out and visit" her sister. He said he "finished the book living with her parents" and "talked at great lengths" with both of them. If anything was incorrect, they were "small errors," he said.
Churchill disputes allegations
Rhonda Kelly said she "would like to see this book removed from circulation just because it is an inaccurate portrayal of my family. It makes spurious, false allegations about my father and my people. It is inexplainable why this happened."
Kelly, who is Ojibway, said her sister, a May 2000 graduate of CU, told her that she suffered "psychological abuse" during her marriage to Churchill. She described him as exhibiting "very controlling behaviors."
But Churchill said people who know both he and his late wife "know exactly the opposite is true."
"I don't see how it would have been humanly possible for that relationship to have been any more the exact opposite of that description," he said.
He said his wife was a victim of acute alcoholism and that he "fought a long and lonely battle to save her."
Churchill, in the wake of Leah Kelly's death, established a fund at CU for Rhonda Kelly's two children and contributed $200. Rhonda Kelly last summer wrote a letter to CU's financial aid office asking that the money be earmarked for a "promising native woman who was or is involved in an abusive relationship. I wish that such an award can assist a woman to leave an abusive relationship before her spirit is broken, as was the case of my sister Leah.
"My sister Leah Renae Kelly had so much promise, but she was involved in an emotionally and mentally abusive marriage, and as a result of feeling that she could not seek real help for fear of having others know of her predicament, she instead turned to alcohol to escape the torment and humiliation in her marital home."
Rhonda Kelly never received an acknowledgment from CU of that letter or her request.
CU financial aid officials Wednesday said they could not comment on Rhonda Kelly's letter.
Write one.
I've written a few letters in my time and they're not bad letters. I try to arrange my facts and also try not to be too mean-spirited. However, they just kind of lay there on the page and don't excite anybody. Their impact is nil, sort of like the comment Mark Twain said about naked people. He said, "Clothes make the man. Naked people have no influence on society."
Which is why we took the dog to the vet last month to get its teeth cleaned.
Well if you're here on this tread and riled up about this guy, I've seen that people here have offered to help you in you letter writing if you think you need some added zest. Do it!
That's the money line in the whole article. Do UC-B's genetics & anthropology profs subscribe to this "theory"? If so, poor UC-B has a lot more problems than some middle aged whitie playing dress-up as an Indian with a bad case of rabies. I'll say it again, the people who need to be fired by the people of Colorado are the idiots who hired, promoted & continue to defend this frothing-at-the-mouth lunatic at the expense of the reputation of their institution.A UC-B degree is a joke now - literally! Just check out all the "How many UC-B grads does it take to set up a tepee" type of stuff making the e-mail rounds these days. Should Coloradans blame the sociopathic nutjob living in an infantile fantasy world, or should they blame the spectacularly incompetent fools who hired him and turned a blind eye to his diploma-mill credentials, his bogus claims of minority status,the blatant plagiarism of his peers, falsified research citations & all the other blazing red flags that this guy wasn't qualified to teach at a Sylvan Learning Center, let alone at a presumably legitimate university with any aspirations at all for academic prestige?They are the ones ultimately responsible for bringing such discredit to the state of Colorado's entire university system.They should be tossed out on their self-proving a**es.
It's not hard to write letters to the editor; that is actually the fun part, the easy part. The difficult part is organizing people. Letters have to be accompanied by phone calls, lots of phone calls, door-to-door campaigning, trips to the state legislature, fund-raising for mailings, etc. Hey, we're talking about politics.
Yes, I'd say that's all you're doing.
;-)
You're right. We have to start somewhere.
Newspapers.com lists three newspapers for Boulder, CO. Do we write to just these, or to every newspaper in Colorado?
Daily Camera
Boulder , CO USA
http://www.thedailycamera.com/
Serving Boulder County.
Boulder Weekly
Boulder , CO USA
http://www.boulderweekly.com/
An alternative newspaper in Boulder.
Colorado Daily
Boulder , CO USA
http://www.coloradodaily.com/
The Colorado Daily serves the Boulder and University of Colorado communities.Its Monday-Thursday circulation is 18,000, and Friday circulation is 29,000.
I wonder what's the fastest way to ping everyone on this and the past 10 or so threads on this weasel to this info of yours?
Should we also write to the alumni of CU without whose contributions the university probably couldn't exist, and how do we get a list of these people?
A conservative newspaper:
Colorado Springs Gazette
Colorado Springs , CO USA
http://www.gazette.com/
Gazette.com is a full-service news website offering continuous daily updates of news, sports, entertainment and other dynamic content.
Largest circulation newspaper in Colorado:
Denver Post
Denver , CO USA
http://www.denverpost.com/
online site for The Denver Post, the newspaper of Denver and the Rocky Mountains region
Email addresses for the rest of the newspapers in Colorado can be found at:
http://www.newspapers.com/usamap.asp?Number=25&title=null&City=null&cid=1&Country=USA&rid=null&SortOrder=title&State=CO
Regarding the Ward Churchill controversy, "the people who need to be fired by the people of Colorado are the idiots who hired, promoted & continue to defend this frothing-at-the-mouth lunatic at the expense of the reputation of their institution.A UC-B degree is a joke now - literally! Just check out all the "How many UC-B grads does it take to set up a tepee" type of stuff making the e-mail rounds these days.
Should Coloradans blame the sociopathic nutjob living in an infantile fantasy world, or should they blame the spectacularly incompetent fools who hired him and turned a blind eye to his diploma-mill credentials, his bogus claims of minority status,the blatant plagiarism of his peers, falsified research citations & all the other blazing red flags that this guy wasn't qualified to teach at a Sylvan Learning Center, let alone at a presumably legitimate university with any aspirations at all for academic prestige?"
Dear Editor:
How do we get in touch with Ward Churchill’s booking agent?
Our group is looking for a sharp, slick operator who is not afraid of controversy to make a speaking appearance before our local group, Whitey Needs Help. Some of us have been looking for easy work on campus and could use advice in filling out those tricky forms where you get extra credit for not being White.
We can’t pay much, but we have taken up a collection of food stamps plus we will have on hand an assortment of ethnic food, hardly any of it spoiled and we can’t wait to hear how he did it.
His example is an inspiration to everybody who wants to learn how to beat the system, and we could sure benefit from his experience in this field. Go, Ward!
"Reminds me quite a lot of HRC!"
yes, I wonder if he shared her grief at her beloved Yankees loss last year!
Why do parents send their offspring to these leftist universities? If they unknowingly send their offispring to one, pull their kid out and ask for their money back. Are there NO universities in America that are not communist bastions?
CU has an entire center dedicated to this stuff - and THEY can't figure it out? Time to dump this doofus before things really get ugly...
"Are there NO universities in America that are not communist bastions?"
There are some, but not too many.
I'll tell you what I think, as a parent of a kid in college, for most kids college is just BS. I mean kids in the humanities, not the so-called hard sciences. Some few will become scholars, almost all will see through the BS of those like Big Chief Churchill, if not now in the future. For most it will be a way to get a "credential" that society craves nowadays and (this is what I hope for my kid) a network of collegues who can be helpful in the future and possibly a spouse, or at least the knowledge to discern the qualities important in a spouse.
Some blog (maybe it was 'the corner' on NRO) had a good comment from a reader, basically he said keeping people like Ward Churchill employed at colleges was a great idea, otherwise they'd be out and about blowing stuff up and being "revolutionaries". I actually think he may have a good point. Because you know then we'd have to arrest them, try them, put them in prison, and they'd do even LESS work than they do today.
Although in this guy's case, I don't think he'd last too long, he seems to have a real knack for p*ssing people off, I'm sure the hardened criminals would also find him most annoying. And you really don't want to be doing that!
It was on another thread on Churchhill on this forum. I will try to find it and ping you to it. Her sister was trying to do something about him and CU didn't respond.
I am sorry, it is on this very thread in the original article. I got befuddled!
"My sister Leah Renae Kelly had so much promise, but she was involved in an emotionally and mentally abusive marriage, and as a result of feeling that she could not seek real help for fear of having others know of her predicament, she instead turned to alcohol to escape the torment and humiliation in her marital home."
If any person would be a pain to live with it would seem to be this arrogant angry p.o.s., Professor Psych Ward Churchill.
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