The Verdict is in: WARD CHURCHILL WINS !

What a foolish statement, you should be ashamed of making such a brazen racist statement in public. Who are you to act as arbiter of someone’s identity and, most stupidly of all, to demand “proof”? Why don’t you prove who you are, instead of hiding behind an anonymous identity like another in the legion of cowards who use the Internet to fire off lies and slander against people like Churchill.

Trust me, there is far more pride to be had in associating with Churchill, than to be found in the same league as the right wing racist nuts like yourself.

Now you can go back to dreaming about the day there are no longer any Natives in North America, and take your white sheet with you, scumbag.

Ordinarily, I might have apologized, but this is how I write when I am utterly disgusted. The comment ultimately resorts to a racist basis, and I simply cannot accept that on this blog. The “proof of Indian identity” concept, aimed at someone who is not seeking membership in a federally recognized tribe, strikes me as a fairly clear instance of genocide-via-definition, almost as if one should be surprised that there is anyone left who can be identified as “Indian.” Ward Churchill has been through his roots endless times; anyone demanding more proof is simply engaging in harassment.

You are asking me to go back through what has already been established in this trial, which I have already covered to a great extent, and has been covered to an even greater extent by the sources I listed in each of my posts.

I do not think your questions are naive. Instead I think they are quite deliberately chosen. What you have not done, however, and this may perhaps be the naive part, is to explain and justify that choice of questions, and why after all that has been said and learned, why those are even the significant questions. That is especially true now that a jury has waded through masses of minute detail and concluded, quite plainly, that there was no justification for the firing of Ward Churchill.

Regarding your questions:

(1) The question should have been if he knowingly propagated a false story, and whether there is any such thing as a “true” story surrounding those events. One professor on the CU investigative committee and witness for CU’s defense, Jose Limon, expressed a very jejune view that there is only one truth, and no alternate interpretations are permissible. He is wrong, a professional social scientist who is more naive than you claim to be. There is truth, which in itself is an interpretation of reality.

(2) He cited his own work. That is normal practice. That he cited it as “independent verification” suggests that you were inside his head, and you impute an intentionality that I do not believe was there.

(3) Given my answers, my final answer is: YES.

Cheers.

I have in fact linked to the discussions with Bethany Newill via Westword in a subsequent post:

http://blogs.westword.com/latestword/2009/04/juror_bethany_newill_talks_abo.php

I base my comments on that, and I think the jurors did an excellent job.

Also, do not be so quick to presume that I would “blow my top.” I did not think your questions were naive, I just thought that they were the wrong questions.

Finally, I really don’t think that any of these issues are significant, and I do not intend to repeat the unfair assessments or reopen an already very lengthy and very detailed process.

Even if the charges were true, I think that anyone who bases their characterizations of Ward’s work based entirely on the seven so-called examples of misconduct that CU unearthed, is automatically open to the charge of falsification, since his track record in writing vastly exceeds those examples, and the argument would also be an illogical one (to make a generalization about his work from some very minor and isolated incidents.)

Back to your first point — he is not only allowed to cite work he has written, but also if it has been published under another name he has absolutely no choice but to provide the formal publication details of that item.

Yes, ghostwriting does happen, and we anthropologists know of at least several classic anthropological novels written under different names. The point of ghostwriting is that you do NOT reveal your actual name. No, CU does not prohibit that — so I am sorry to hear that where you work you would be fired for it.

Finally…what does any of this have to do with CU violating Ward Churchill’s civil rights? Don’t you think, even for a moment, that is the far more important, far more serious issue to be discussing rather than some minor, pedantic details about some footnote?

I am glad, of course, that the jury had a clearer mind than to fall for such games. If you want to discuss the important issues, I am here. Otherwise I have no intention nor the desire to go through all that petty muck again.

As an after thought: if Jane Hill’s The Everyday Language of White Racism is being properly represented here, I am not sure I want to bother reading it. One might sound “cavalier,” but one might also be wound too tight and produce overwrought melodrama. I find it very troubling that one has to go into technical elements of writing style, as if everyday racism were not abundant enough to not have to go and check if an Anglophone got all his Spanish accents right. It seems petty, unfair, and a bit wild. More than that, it seems to be an extremely weak case for the presence of racism, one that does not deserve to be treated seriously because it focuses on the superficial, and does not take into account some pretty mundane constraints that have absolutely nothing to do with racism.

Thanks George, and that is why this issue is so complicated, because both principles of self-identification and self-determination have been marked as critical indigenous rights especially in international agreements worked on by indigenous representatives themselves, such as the UN Charter on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The problem is that in practice the two principles can be set in opposition to one another.

Not everyone has retained the right to be a member of a tribe, thanks to termination, denial of recognition, etc. In some cases, self-identification is what leads to recognition and then self-determination as a tribe.

There is nothing unusual about Churchill’s situation. The “fake Indian” allegation is typically one used to minimize Indian numbers, and thus Indian rights to land, which is part of genocide-by-definition. In this sense, Churchill’s opponents make themselves into data proving his thesis. What Churchill has done, that many have not, is to prove Indianness through practice, beyond the facts of birth, by developing an Indianist perspective and through decades of work as an Indian rights activist. Not only that, he has self-identified, given some details of his genealogy, and been accepted by one tribe. AIM also had no problem with his Indianness until the split in the organization, and then, looking for the cheapest possible low blow, and a racist one at that, National AIM started to call Churchill a “fake Indian,” added to some other extremely wild allegations that makes them look quite bad, I cringe to read some of the hyperbole and conspiracy theory on their site, they look insane. So as a non-Indian I do not challenge Churchill to “prove” his Indianness, and to prove it for a white audience. There is some fundamental racism there, and I reject it for that among other reasons.