AIM statement regarding Ward Churchill

Here. Read this about Churchill's indian racial background, and
the ongoing conflict with the small group that trademarked the AIM name.
It sounds like a big mess.

http://www.americanindianmovement.org/papers/struggle.html

. . . . about 9/11???

Churchill spoke up, however inartfully (his "little Eichmanns" comment is over the top for me, and confuses the symbolism of 9/11 with the personal tragedies experienced by the victims and their families), for the people who have been victimized over the years by American foreign policy, precisely at the moment, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when it should have been done

meanwhile, AIM only saw it as a chance to diminish a momentous event into a yet another chapter in the petty dispute between AIM and Ward Churchill

an embarassing moment for AIM, siding with the right wing against Churchill, siding with the same kind of people that would have undoubtedly supportied putting Dennis Banks himself in jail, as he eventually was in the early 1980s, and using whatever force deemed necessary to suppress AIM back in the 1970s


--Richard Estes

Dennis Banks solidarizes with the U.S. right wing in attacking Ward Churchill. Whatever differences he or anyone has with Ward Churchill should be secondary to the defense against this blatant attack on our (increasingly limited) freedom of speech.

A few of the basic facts of Churchill's life are not in question. He's:

• An Illinois native who earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Sangamon State University, which is now the University of Illinois-Springfield.

• A Vietnam veteran who says the war completely changed the way he looks at the world.

• A 57-year-old professor at CU who has become a nationally known scholar of American Indian studies.

"He's one of the most recognized Indian scholars on the continent," said professor George "Tink" Tinker, who teaches American Indian culture and religious tradition at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver. "He's won many awards for his writings and been invited as a guest lecturer all over the country."

Others are not so complimentary.

"Ward Churchill tells these huge lies," said Suzan Harjo, president of the Morningstar Institute, a national American Indian-rights organization. "He's notorious, and he's not an Indian. In 15 years of being interviewed and investigated, he hasn't come up with a single Indian ancestor."

In past interviews, Churchill has said he is largely of English and Swiss-German descent but is one-sixteenth Cherokee. His critics within the American Indian community don't believe it.

"He hides behind dark glasses and a beaded headband, but he's an academic fraud," said Vernon Bellecourt, an American Indian Movement activist in Minneapolis who has had a long-running dispute with Churchill.

Churchill has claimed to be a member of the Keetoowah band of Cherokee, but Harjo says that tribe at one time was issuing "associate membership" cards to anyone who asked for one, even designating former President Clinton as a member.

Attempts to contact the tribe Tuesday were unsuccessful.

Harjo, who is Cheyenne and Creek, says that as an American Indian, she was deeply offended by Churchill's comments about the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

"He's besmirched the good name of Native Americans who rushed to ground zero and did ceremonies for the people there and poured money into the relief effort," she said.

For his part, Tinker dismisses the concern with Churchill's American Indian bloodline. "It didn't matter what we thought of (former U.S. Sen.) Ben Nighthorse Campbell's politics, when the Cheyenne accepted him, he was an Indian."

He also believes Churchill's comments have been intentionally distorted.

"His stuff is being lifted out of context as a neo-conservative media sound bite," Tinker said. "What he was saying was, if we really want to deal with terrorism, we should ask, 'Why are all these people angry at the United States?' Maybe we need to pay attention to the violence we've created in the world."

Even the meaning of a picture of Churchill circulating on the Internet is open to question.

The photo shows Churchill wearing a camouflage jacket and cradling an AK-47 assault rifle. An animal-rights Web site, http://www.satyamag.com, carries the picture next to an interview with Churchill where he defends the use of violence on behalf of the oppressed.

On Tuesday, Churchill told his students the photo was taken when he posed for a student art project in 1996, in which he and others dressed up like famous radicals.

"And then (publisher) AK Press put it on the back of one of my books," Churchill said. "I didn't know it was going to end up there."

Meet Ward Churchill

• Birth date: Oct. 2, 1947

• American Indian name: Keezjunnahbeh or "kind-hearted man"

• Tribal enrollment: United Keetoowah Band Cherokee

• Associate degree: Illinois Central College, 1972

• Bachelor's degree: Sangamon State University, 1974

• Master's degree: Sangamon State, 1975

• Honorary doctorate: Alfred University, Alfred, N.Y., 1992

• Employment:

Instructor of studio art and art history at Black Hills State College in Spearfish, S.D., 1975-1976

Lecturer, American Indian studies, film studies and sociology, University of Colorado system, 1978-1990

Visiting professor of American Indian Studies at Alfred University, 1990

Tenured professor of ethnic studies and adjunct professor of communications in the ethnic studies department at CU.

• Family: Married to fellow CU ethnic studies professor Natsu Saito; one stepdaughter

http://www.insidedenver.com/drmn/local/article/0,1299,DRMN_15_3516107,00.html

Ward Churchill's high school chums in Elmwood recall him as a friendly teen who liked to argue politics.

He's still doing the latter, but his detractors would call his writings anything but friendly.

Now a professor at the University of Colorado, the 57-year-old Churchill is engaged in a firestorm of controversy regarding an essay he wrote about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Headlines nationwide continue to follow an academic imbroglio that has led one school to cancel him as a speaker and the Colorado governor to demand Churchill's resignation.

By Wednesday, news of Churchill's troubles had reached Elmwood High School, from which he graduated in 1965.

"He's always been a friend, and we've always liked to argue (politics)," says Harry McFall, a member of the school's Class of '62 who teaches social studies there.

McFall says that during their spirited political debates, Churchill invariably would tilt left.

"Sometimes he has a ... flair for the dramatic," McFall says. "Sometimes what he says or writes is to elicit response from other people."

He's achieved that end with an essay he penned the day after the terrorist attacks, "Some People Push Back" (viewable at http://www.passionbomb.com/words/push_roost.htm).

Much of the lengthy piece echoes the theme of many far-left treatises. He says the 9-11 assailants weren't terrorists but combatants in a war started decades ago by U.S. foreign policy in the Mideast - especially bombings of Iraq's infrastructure that left a half-million children dead.

But it's his incendiary turns of phrase that have raised eyebrows and blood pressures. Churchill, a Vietnam War veteran, called the victims of Sept. 11 no "innocent civilians."

Rather, he described those slain in the Pentagon as "military targets." And he called the Twin Towers victims "little Eichmanns," a reference to Adolf Eichmann, who organized Nazi plans to exterminate Europe's Jews.

His essay states, "As to those in the World Trade Center, well, really, let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimmee 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."

Despite the bombast, his essay garnered little attention until recently, just before his scheduled appearance at Hamilton College in New York. The school, pounded by more than 100 threats, this week canceled Churchill's speech.

Meanwhile, the governor of Colorado has denounced Churchill's views as "at odds with simple decency" - and asked Churchill to resign his teaching assignment.

Churchill, who has tenure, has declined. However, after receiving numerous death threats, he has stepped down as chairman of the school's ethnic studies program.

"The present political climate has rendered me a liability in terms of representing either my department, the college or the university in this or any other administrative capacity," Churchill said in a statement. He did not return a Journal Star call for comment.

According to the Rocky Mountain News, Churchill's heritage is as debated as his essay. Though Churchill holds high his ethnicity as a Cherokee, the paper cited American Indian groups holding

polarized views of the man. One calls him "one of the most recognized Indian scholars on the planet." Another group raps him as an "academic fraud" who holds no true claim to Indian ancestry.

But certain aspects of his background are indisputable: His roots in central Illinois.

His family moved to Elmwood when he was a boy. He graduated from Elmwood High School in 1965.

Later, Churchill attended Illinois Central College, where he received an associate's degree in general education in 1973. In 1974 and 1975, he received bachelor's and master's degrees from Sangamon State University in Springfield, now known as the University of Illinois at Springfield. For both degrees, his field of study was "communications in a technological society."

Churchill's Class of '65 at Elmwood High School had 55 students, including Cathy Meyers.

"He was a great guy, fun to be around," says Meyers, now an English teacher at the school. "He was very quiet in some respects - very shy around the girls.

"He was an average student. He was an underachiever. (But) you knew he was brilliant. He always had answers in class - a lot of times, answers the straight-A students didn't have."

By Wednesday afternoon, Meyers was looking for Churchill's essay online.

"It bothers me if people are getting mad about him expressing his views. That's what America is all about," Meyers says. " ... He hasn't done anything like blow something up."

http://www.pjstar.com/stories/020305/PHI_B5FT8BIF.049.shtml