Bob Black attack on Ward Churchill

Up Sand Creek Without A Paddle Bob Black


In Fantasies of the Master Race,a collection of essays and reviews, Professor Ward Churchill purports to discuss "Literature, Cinema and the Colonization of American Indians" – that being the book’s subtitle. Most of the texts declaim against depictions of Indians in fiction or films which Churchill considers, sometimes correctly, to be deceptive or demeaning. Had he left it at that, this book would have made a minor, if flawed, contribution to separating fact from fantasy in the way pop culture represents the Indians. Unfortunately, Churchill has a more ambitious agenda. A self-proclaimed "indigenist" ideologue, he is out to instituteapartheid in the United states, with approximately one-third of the lower 48 states to be turned over to the less than two million Indians who make up less than one per cent of the American population. Churchill to whom the forced relocation of 17,500 Navajos would be an act of genocide, and who is appalled that 55% of the Cherokees perished on the Trail of Tears, thus calls for the dispossession of at least 20 million people in a holocaust on a scale not seen on this continent since Cortez landed. Harsh retribution indeed for ethnic stereotyping! Churchill cheapens the word genocide by applying it indiscriminately to everything from massacres to missionization, from extermination to education. Mel Brooks and George Armstrong Custer are twins to him. Kevin Costner is just a more insidious Andrew Jackson. To teach an Indian to read is the moral equivalent of killing him. In her introduction, Churchill’s editor (and former girl friend) M. Annette Jaimes quotes his longtime ally Russell Means: "If our culture is dissolved, Indian people as such will cease to exist. By definition, the causing of any culture to cease to exist is an act of genocide. That’s a matter of international law; look it up in the 1948 Genocide Convention" (1). So I looked it up: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or social group, as such: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. Cultural assimilation was deliberately excluded from the Convention’s definition of genocide. And Churchill admitted this in an article first published six years before Fantasies of the Master Race! Indeed, international law subordinates indigenous and tribal peoples to the paramount power of the nation-states in which they live, with the objective of their eventual assimilation into the national societies. A proposed Draft Universal Declaration on Indigenous Rights would secure indigenous peoples against genocide and "ethnicide" (forced assimilation) –reaffirming, by implication, the difference between the two. Look it up. A little pedantry is better than a lot of libel. Whatever else might be said against John Ford’s Westerns, Tony Hillerman’s mysteries, and the New Age hokum of Sun Bear or Carlos Casteneda, they are just not genocide. Conceivably their disinformation might be so deleterious that it promoted genocide, but even a writer as reckless as Churchill does not even try to show this. If non-Indian Americans are engaged in genocide, they’re not very good at it. Although it outnumbers the vanquished by more than 100-1, the Master Race looks less like the S.S. than the Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. If the "Euro-Americans" are Nazis, the Indians must be Hogan’s Heroes. The Indian population has grown in every decade since 1890, with the rate of increase accelerating since 1950. The Indian population is increasing much more rapidly than the white – whites presumably being the most masterful part of the Master Race. "In recent years," wrote Murray L. Wax in 1971, "a variety of advantages – economic, political, and even social – have begun to accrue to those classified as ‘Indian.’" Among the less undeserving objects of Churchill’s ire are the "plastic Indians," whites who make money off imitating Indian religion (215-222). He fails to notice that their very existence refutes his blood libel. How many Germans under Nazism went around pretending to be rabbis – or, as Churchill would say, "plastic Jews"? Although his scholarship is bogus and bigoted, Churchill has wormed his way into a very cozy situation. Since he has tenure, it doesn’t matter that his pseudo-academic writings aren’t acceptable to even the mediocre academic journals, and their standards are not high. Instead he places them in leftist or racial nationalist periodicals. Even the better anarchist publications, such as Anarchy and the Fifth Estate, have published Churchill despite his authoritarian and nationalist politics. Even anarchists are unduly impressed by a professor, an ostensible Indian, and his show of footnotes. Churchill gets flown all over the country to address audiences of white leftists who pay him to guilt-trip them. How sweet the pain! Churchill has enjoyed pretty much a free ride from academics, leftists, anarchists and the disaffected – with the notable exception of his Indian critics. His campus hustle doesn’t matter – as a hustler, if in no other way, he has found a natural home in the academy – but his access to oppositional currents is troubling, and it’s hard to see what to do about it. As Lawrence Jarach says, The trouble with examining any skilled dissimulator (not just Ward Churchill), trying to contextualize their heaps of lies and insinuations, and actually reading their footnotes is that it requires at least as much space (usually more) as they use to spread their crap, resulting in a long and detailed analysis. Two further problems then arise: first is a nearly endless tome which no one would want to publish; second is that the exposer/analyzer would most likely be accused of being obsessed, or of having a vendetta or a personal grudge. Appreciating these problems, I was at a loss what to do about Churchill. It was galling that he should get away with everything just because it was impractical to take him on about everything. I decided I would just take apart a single short Churchill text. That couldn’t establish the legitimacy of his scholarship generally, but if it showed that at least once his scholarship was severely shabby and terribly tendentious, that might post a warning about the rest of it. I might have chosen anything. Instead of choosing something easy, something about metaphorical media genocide, I chose the one essay about a real event. Genocide is a button-pushing word. If Churchill can’t even push this button, it’s a good guess that he’s a pushover. The Sand Creek, Colorado massacre of 1864 has nothing to do with Churchill’s asserted subjects – literature and cinema – but dragging it in associates hyperbolic rhetorical genocide with something more like the real thing. The facts, to which Churchill makes no original contribution, are straightforward. A force consisting mainly of temporarily enrolled cavalry ("hundred-day men"), acting without orders, attacked an encampment of peaceable Cheyennes (and a few Arapahoes) at Sand Creek, Colorado, on November 29, 1864. Three U.S. government inquiries, two in 1865, another in 1867, concluded that there was no justification for the butchery (112-113). Churchill complains that the commanding officer, Col. John Chivington, was not punished, although he acknowledges that the disgrace ended Chivington’s budding political career (113). This, Churchill falsely asserts, was "the only tangible consequence visited upon anyone who had played a major role in the mini-Holocaust" (113). Churchill does not mention that court-martial proceedings against Chivington had to be dropped because he and most of his men had already been mustered out. A murder prosecution would have been fully warranted by the facts, but it would have been an exercise in futility. In 1862, Chivington commanded a Union cavalry force which forced the retreat of a Confederate army invading the Colorado Territory. Now, with the Civil War and an Indian war still raging – the Sand Hill Cheyennes were peaceable, many others were not – a jury of twelve white men drawn from a panic-stricken settler population would have had to agree unanimously to convict a soldier who had saved them from conquest for a capital crime for killing Indians. Whatever Churchill thinks he is doing in "It Did Happen Here," it can hardly be exposing a cover-up. He himself cites 19 books and a few articles which cover the event (113-115). Of the modern volumes which focus on Sand Creek, one he dismisses – correctly I’m sure, but without substantiation – as "lies, distortions and unabashed polemics on behalf of Sand Creek’s perpetrators" (114). Another book, by Donald Svaldi, wins Churchill’s praise for toeing his own whites-as-Nazis line, though not quite explicitly enough for a hardened hater like Churchill (119-120). A third, by Stan Hoig, he praises as honest and accurate, although – Churchill having never engaged in original research on this (or any other) historical subject – he has no apparent reason for thinking so except that its findings suit his political purposes. Thus far, then, what Churchill calls "Euroamerican" historians (he means white historians, but saying so would underscore his own racism) are running 2-1 in favor of the story he thinks is good for the Indians. If "It Did Happen Here," he has Euroamericans to thank for the documentation to make sure we never forget. His attempt to say something important, that is, something vilificatory about "Sand Creek, Scholarship and the American Character" (111) has badly miscarried. It reflects well on the American character, if it reflects on it at all, that Americans have recorded and recounted the shameful facts for over a century. So, half-wittingly aware that he has debunked himself, Churchill goes all out to smear the fourth Sand Creek book as culturally genocidal, although it is just as pro-Indian as two of the other three. The better – I should say, the larger – part of Churchill’s invective is aimed at Month of the Frozen Moon by Duane Schultz. It is, he says, "essentially duplicative" of Hoig’s earlier, superior volume (115) – although, as a full-length book, it is nowhere near as essentially duplicative as Churchill’s own two-paragraph paraphrase (111-112). If, as Churchill fervently feels, this story cannot be told (that is, "duplicated") too often, than any substantially accurate depiction is to be welcomed. Churchill quibbles over a few factual details (115-116), but in calling the book "essentially duplicative" and "vaguely plagiaristic" (115) of the book Churchill endorses, he backhandedly vouches for it. Unless, of course, the hapless Schultz (I am again reminded of "Hogan’s Heroes") has smuggled in gratuitous anti-Indian, crypto-Nazi propaganda. Needless to say, he hasn’t. Needless to say, Churchill says he has (116-118). Schultz is "truly malicious and objectionable" because of his "adoption of the Euroamerican standard of ‘academic objectivity’ which decrees that whenever one addresses the atrocities committed by the status quo, one is duty-bound to ‘balance one’s view’ by depicting some negativity embodies in its victims" (116). Since Churchill himself is an academic, when he voices contempt for academic objectivity, he must be disparaging it, not for being academic, but for being objective. It’s sporting of him to put the reader on notice not to trust anything he says, but it also reinforces the pernicious prejudice that the work of minority-group scholars concerning their own groups must be dismissed out of hand for inherent bias. Here is Schultz’s offending passage: [B]efore there were whites to rob and plunder and steal from, the [Indians] robbed and stole from each other. Before there were white men in the country to kill, they killed each other. Before there were white women and children to scalp and mutilate and torture, the Indians scalped and mutilated and tortured the women and children of the enemies of their own race. They made slaves of each other when there were no palefaces to be captured and sold or held for ransom, and before they commenced lying in ambush along the trails of the white man to ambush unwary travelers, the Indians of one tribe would set the same sort of death traps for the Indians of another tribe (116, quoting Schultz at 16). That is all Schultz has to say which might possibly evidence the sort of contrived equalization Churchill purports to deplore. All the rest of the book is about the massacre of unoffending Indians by racist whites. The appropriate objection is not that the passage is untrue but rather that it is banal. Except for scalping, an Indian invention, most peoples worldwide have engaged in these practices at one time or another. Anglo-Americans engaged in them all in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries at Indian expense. But one platitudinous paragraph doesn’t cancel out a bookful of uncomfortable history. Any white who seizes on this paragraph to marginalize the Sand Creek massacre would find another pretext in the unlikely event he read the book in the first place. And this suppositious "settler" – another of Churchill’s absurd anti-white epithets – is as unlikely to read Churchill as he is to believe him. But this is not what Professor Churchill says. He says it’s a flat-out lie: "None of this is substantiated, or even substantiable [sic]. It instead flies directly in the face of most well researched and grounded understandings regarding how the Cheyennes did business [!] in pre-contact times as well as the early contact period" (117). None of it, mind you, is or ever could be substantiated. Churchill elides the fact that the offending paragraph refers to Indians in general, not Cheyennes in particular. Not even a propagandist as cheeky as Churchill has the effrontery to allege that there was no war and no theft in pre-Columbian North America. Not-so-adroitly changing the subject – not that this will save him, as we shall see – Churchill as self-appointed defense attorney for the Cheyennes asserts that his clients are innocent of all charges. His denials are not, however, "substantiated." Most of Schulz’s assertions are not only true, they are substantiated by a source approved by Churchill himself, George Bird Grinnell (113). The Cheyennes Robbed and Stole from Other Indians In The Fighting Cheyennes, first published in 1913, George Bird Grinnell, who’d dealt with Plains Indians as early as 1874, related the story of Cheyenne warfare from their point of view. Referring to the period prior to contact with the Americans, he stated: "The Kiowas and Comanches made frequent raids into the country of the Mexicans, in Texas and South of the Rio Grande, and from these forays brought back great herds of horses. These in turn were taken from them by the Cheyennes and the Arapahos, from whom again they were captured by the Pawnees and by other tribes still farther to the north." As Grinnell observed in another of his books: "[Some Cheyenne] men went to war for the sole purpose of increasing their possessions by capturing horses; that is, they carried on war as a business – for profit." So the Cheyennes did rob and steal from other Indians – or as Churchill would say, that is how they "did business." The Cheyennes Killed Other Indians To say the least! The tribe was "almost constantly at war with its neighbors," as Grinnell said, and it was the aggressor – against the Assiniboins (northern Dakotas), Pawnees and Shoshones, and also against "the Kiowas, the Comanches, and the Crows, all of whom they gradually expelled from the country they had invaded." As their friend Grinnell put it, the Cheyennes were "a people whose chief occupation was war." To deny the Cheyennes their glorious martial heritage is cultural genocide if anything is. Churchill finds fault with the American national characer. How do the Cheyennes compare? A contemporary anthropologist writes: "Part of the Cheyenne national character was to invade the central plains, expel other tribes, and hunt there exclusively. They claimed such new territory by right of conquest." Sounds familiar. The Cheyennes Scalped, Mutilated and Tortured Other Indian Men, Women and Children Of course they did. My impression is that, in general, Indians when at war did not target women, children and old men to anything like the extent the Euro-Americans often did. But at times Indiand, including Plains Indians, did. Nor did they have to learn how from the whites. At Wolf Creek in 1838, the Cheyennes butchered twelve or thirteen Kiowa women. In 1819, the Cheyennes attacked a Crow camp in which, like the Cheyenne camp at Sand Creek, "there were no fighting men, only middle-aged and old men, so there was not much fighting, but everyone in the camp was killed or captured." In 1856 they attacked two small wagon trains, killing several men, three women and two children. The Cheyennes routinely scalped their victims, celebrating afterwards with scalp dances. Other mutilations of enemy dead were also common. In 1838 they cut up the bodies of eight slain Pawnees, "disjointing their bones." After the Custer Fight, "the women and children went up to the battleground, and as usual there was mutilation of the dead." An old Cheyenne recollected the time he and others killed a Crow horse thief: "After he was dead, we cut off his hands and feet and head. It looked funny to see his body lying there without any hands or feet or head. Even now, when I think of him I have to laugh." Such fun! On occasion the Cheyennes sacrificed captives. All this is more than enough to establish that Churchill’s denials are not only false, they are laughable. To deny that the Cheyennes, like able soldiers everywhere, set ambushes for their enemies is not to defend them, it is to defame them. As for torture, so popular among all the Plains Indians, there is no point bothering to discuss it. Now the pop historian Schultz did misspeak himself in several respects. The Cheyennes had no institution properly called slavery, nor did they trade in captives, although in the 1870s an observer mentioned Leon, a Mexican "who had been a prisoner among the [Cheyenne] Indians almost like a slave from the time he was a boy." They kidnapped many women and children from other tribes (and occasionally from the whites), not to enslave them in an economic sense, but to incorporate them into their own tribe at the expense of their enemies. It was, in other words, forced cultural assimilation, what Russell Means and Ward Churchill call genocide – except when Indians do it. It is, in fact, the only form of so-called cultural genocide which counts as genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention. But then Schultz never accused the Cheyennes specifically of all these practices, although he could have. If they were not slaveholders and slave-traders, other North American Indians were. Southeastern Indians such as the Creeks and Cherokees – dubiously claimed as ancestors by Churchill – already formed class-stratified societies in pre-contact times. They enslaved other Indians in prehistoric times, and after white slaveholders established themselves along their borders, they borrowed from them the practice of black slavery. When the Cherokees walked the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma, they brought their black slaves along. During the Civil War, they allied with the Confederacy. As for the slave trade, in the 17th and 18th centuries, northeastern Indians kidnapped hundreds of Anglo-Americans, mostly women and children, torturing a few of the men to death for the fun of it, adopting some captives, ransoming others, and selling the rest to the French in Canada. It Did Happen Here – In 1325 A.D. Sand Creek was the slaughter of peaceable Indians, most of them defenseless, most of them women and children, carried out by panicky, paranoid amateur soldiers with deep-seated anti-Indian prejudices. It was, according to contemporary opinion and the settled judgment of history, inexcusable. And yet, for Churchill it is emblematic of the "American Character." Nothing could more clearly mark the moral divide between the "settlers" and the Plains Indians than the Sand Creek massacre. Right? Wrong. It did happen here – long before Custer, Chivington, Columbus or Cortez – and not all that far from Sand Creek. Around the year 1325 A.D., at least 486 Arikara Indians – men, women, and children, some 60% of its population, were exterminated at the Crow Creek Village in south-central South Dakota. The "young adult females" are underrepresented, probably because they were kidnapped. It is impossible to identify the assailants with any particular Plains tribe of historic times, although the cranial samples are most similar to the Pawnee -- ancient enemies of the Cheyennes. Scalping and mutilation were already in vogue: "There are many mutilations on the bones. Scalping, skull fractures, evulsions, and decapitations are common." The perpetrators were likely not Cheyennes, who were then probably living a semi-sedentary life along the shores of the western Great Lakes or the upper tributaries of the Mississippi. But precisely which Plains Indians exterminated which other Plains Indians in pre-contact times (with no inspiration or encouragement from Europeans) is beside the point. The point is that Schultz is mostly right (albeit by accident) and Churchill is mostly wrong (undoubtedly by design) about prehistoric red-on-red violence on the Great Plains. What All This is Really About How is it possible for Churchill to pass off his racist fantasies as scholarship? And how did he ever gain the credibility of a tenured faculty position at the University of Colorado at Boulder? And without a Ph.D? These are more interesting questions than any Churchill falsifies the answers to. It’s not that I accord reflexive respect to academic credentials. I have four degrees myself, and I have had plenty of opportunity to see how little degrees can mean. I’d consider it entirely appropriate if an American Indian tribal elder or shaman were made a professor of American Indian Studies as Churchill has been – not to the exclusion of academically trained anthropologists, historians and sociologists but to complement, and where necessary to correct, their understanding of the Indian experience. Moreover, professionally trained Indian academics are making prominent contributions to Indian scholarship, among them sociologist/demographic historian Russell Thornton (Cherokee), historian James Riding In (Pawne), and economist Ronald L. Trosper (Flathead). Churchill’s is another story. He took a political shortcut to the podium. Although Churchill is confused about the definition of genocide, he’s had some hands-on experience committing it – in Vietnam: "Churchill was airborne-qualified and in a 4th Infantry Division LRRP [long range reconaissance patrol] in the highlands region in 1968." Following his stint as a baby-killer, Churchill next turned up in the authoritarian terrorist Weatherman faction of SDS. He was a suspect in the 1970 bombing at Camp McCoy, Wisconsin. Thus he made his political debut as a Marxist, not a nationalist – but we need look no further than Russia or Serbia to see how trifling the difference can be. His modest proposal for the ethnic cleansing of one-third of the United States is on the scale of Stalin’s population relocations and surpasses Hitler’s. He refers to "’totalitarian’ Third World countries like Cuba and Libya" in quotation marks – implying that they are not really totalitarian, or it doesn’t matter if they are – and compares their incarceration rates favorably to that of the United States. A review of the Weatherman program establishes the extraordinary continuity in Churchill’s, for lack of a better word, thinking. The Weathermen were white anti-white racists. According to their half-baked mongrel Maoism, only the colonized Third World peoples within and without the Third World could be revolutionary. The white working class could not be revolutionary, although white youth (namely, themselves) might play an auxiliary role. As one of them put it, "All white babies are pigs." Weatherwoman Bernadine Dohrn – now a lawyer – waxed ecstatic over the killings by the Manson Family. The white proletariat had been bought out, according to the privileged children of the parents who must have done the buying. These vanguardists supposed that they could escape the self-contradictory implications of their crude class analysis by the blustering vehemence of their unsolicited solidarity with the Third World. Considering the variation on this theme which Churchill was later to make a career out of, it is a fine irony that Black Panther Fred Hampton condemned the Weathermen as "custeristic." The 1970s were years in which the left both declined (in its following) and decomposed (into various racial, sexual and ideological special-interest groups. Ex-Weathermen were even less popular than Vietnam veterans. It took Churchill awhile to find his way from the warpath to the career path. He became a staff writer for Soldier of Fortune magazine. Finally he discovered, or invented, his Indian heritage. In 1978 he took on the new role of professional Indian. By 1983, he was "director of Planning, Research and Development for Educational Opportunity Programs at the University of Colorado/Boulder." In plain English, he was an affirmative-action bureaucrat, a paid racemonger. He made the most of the gig, and very possibly wrote himself a job description to jump into academia. So he is now, without even possessing a doctorate, a tenured ethnic-studies professor at the university in the posh resort town of Boulder. (Does he still think all white babies are pigs? That might have some bearing on the JonBenet Ramsey case.) Along the way, Churchill has been inconsistent about his own ethnicity. In 1983 he was claiming to be "Creek/Cherokee." By 1992, he more modestly claimed to be "Creek/Cherokee/Metis" (303). This too is misleading, but we are finding the range. Strictly speaking, Metis are Canadians of mixed French and Indian ancestry – which Churchill is not – but in a broader sense, a Metis is someone of mixed white and Indian ancestry. Churchill thus qualifies, but only barely. The expression "Creek/Cherokee/Metis" is both odd and deceptive. Odd, because it is like saying someone is "African-American/mulatto," a mulatto being someone who is African-American/white, so an African-American/mulatto is an African-American/African-American/white, and a Creek/Cherokee/Metis is an Indian/Indian/white. Do I detect some reluctance on his part to include the W-word in Churchill’s heritage? Besides being bizarre, the identification is deceptive. It leaves the impression that Churchill is mostly Indian, whereas he is mostly white. By his own estimation, which may be generously self-serving, he claims he is one-sixteenth Creek and Cherokee. That means Churchill is four generations removed from even one Indian ancestor. By 1996, however, Churchill reverted to full dishonesty, again calling himself Creek/Cherokee. In any sense of the word that makes any sense, Ward Churchill is not an Indian. He is not an enrolled member of any tribe. He did not grow up on, and has never resided on a reservation, the only place where anything like traditional Indian culture persists. He prefers life in the tony, almost all-white resort town of Boulder ("you don’t get older in Boulder," the locals like to say – JonBenet sure didn’t). He draws a good salary from the State of Colorado, whose volunteers carried out the Sand Creek massacre; to qualify for it, he took an oath to uphold the Constitutions of the United States and the State of Colorado. He disparages "the stark, pathetic emptiness" of Western religions, but he nowhere hints in any of his writings that he practices any Indian religion. Thus he is not an Indian in any political, cultural or lifestyle respect. The only criterion he might satisfy is a racial one. Except that he doesn’t. Tens of millions of whites, blacks and especially Hispanics have more Indian ancestry than Churchill (I may be one of them) but they do not consider themselves Indians and neither does anybody else. Tom Giago, an enrolled Oglala Sioux born and raised on the Pine Ridge reservation, the publisher of Indian Country Today, considers Churchill a "white profiteer, a police agent and a terrorist." The infiltration of New Left/New Age ersatz Indians like Churchill has bitterly divided the American Indian Movement, an organization which, despite its small size, the U.S. Government once genuinely feared. Churchill was expelled in 1993, but continues to bill himself as Co-Director of Colorado AIM and as "a member of the governing council of the American Indian Movement." As Carole Standing Elk, a Dakota and director of the San Francisco Bay Area AIM chapter, says: "It’s obvious he has no spiritual base. He’s trying to subvert the movement." David Bradley, a Chippewa artist, observes that Churchill "is a white man, posing as an Indian" who "is victimizing Indian people, politically, morally and spiritually." According to Carole Standing Elk, Churchill is out "to exploit the American Indian Movement in order to further his personal career objectives." AIM should shoulder some responsibility for opening opportunities for interlopers like Churchill. The Indians who founded AIM in the 1960s were detribalized urban radicals emulating the white New Left and adopting its strategy of staging media spectacles. One of these, the occupation of Alcatraz Island, came off very well. Another, the occupation of Wounded Knee, turned into a bloody shambles. These American Indians were much more American than Indian. There were no indigenists in 1492. Indigenism is an ideology invented in the 20th century by Mexican intellectuals of Spanish descent. It’s a form of nationalism, a European invention. As often as not, national identities – even the ones that take root – originate in the minds of disgruntled intellectuals, not as an upwelling of solidarity among the Volk. As Maurray L. Wax relates, "’Indians’ were not entities who were present in pre-Colombian times, . . this social identity emerged in relationship to the invasions of Europeans." It is precisely the detribalized Indians like Churchill and Means who assert, in their own interest, a pan-Indian identity alien to how Indians traditionally understood themselves: The American Indian Movement held the most headlines in the late sixties and seventies, a romantic inversion of racialism, and praise for generic cultures. These urban radicals were tribal simulations with dubious constituencies, and their stoical poses, tragic and lonesome, were closer to photographic and video images familiar to a commercial culture; these ersatz warriors were much closer to the invented tragedies of a vanishing race than were the crossbloods who endured the real politics and weather on reservations. The definition of group identity is at once the crux of identity politics and its fatal flaw. It is necessarily a process of exclusion. To mention two real-life examples, when Koreans decided to be Korean, they decided not to be Chinese, and when Lithuanians rather recently decided to be Lithuanian, they decided they were not Polish or Russian. But what if what one group excludes, the group they are excluding continues to include? Some Russian nationalists consider Ukrainians to be Russian; most Ukrainians disagree . If every group’s membership is determined by the group, than groups can arrive at contradictory determinations about the same people. Identity politics provides no principle for resolving these jurisdictional disputes. If the identification – or rather, the construction – of group identity is fundamentally arbitrary, fortuitous and even manipulable, identifying a group’s individual members adds another dimension of confusion and potential contestation. Politically organized groups like nation-states or hierarchic religions like Roman Catholicism can determine definitively who is a citizen or a communicant. But no authority can decide with any finality who is a punk, an anarchist, a Wiccan, a homosexual, etc. part 2 dentity politics is especially treacherous for Indians because Indian identity is so confused and complicated. The clearest definition of an Indian is a political one: enrolled members of Federally recognized tribes, or those eligible for recognition, are Indians. These tribes determine their membership by criteria of their own choice (and Federal law defers to their decisions). While this standard settles most cases of Indian identity, and most Indians satisfy it, everybody agrees that it is underinclusive. Some people who rightly regard themselves as Indians are left out. Some tribes are, rightly or wrongly, unrecognized. Some people with some aboriginal North American ancestry (maybe not much, but maybe as much as some tribally recognized Indians) have significant cultural, religious and social connections with other Indians, and if they have these ties and identify themselves as Indians, they’re Indians. But that makes for a gray area available for infiltration by fast-talking, well-funded palefaces like Ward Churchill whose red racist rhetoric occludes the fact that, though he’s a Red, he’s not a red man. If Churchill’s indigenism is the radical threat he says it is, why does the government pay him to propagate it? When Churchill first surfaces, he is killing indigenous people for the U.S. Government. Next he is a member of the agent-ridden Weatherman SDS; then a staff writer for Soldier of Fortune; and then a sachem in the agent-riddled American Indian Movement. Next, notwithstanding this unsavory background, he works as a bureaucrat for a state university, from which gig he is bootstrapped into a tenure-track faculty position for which he has no qualifications, and soon he is tenured. His noisy presence in the Amerindian nationalist movement helps to splinter it. For Churchill, the test of indigenist orthodoxy is simple: you pass it if – but only for so long as – you promote Churchill’s career. Thus, as recently as 1992 it was politically incorrect to disagree with the International Indian Treaty Council (137), but now that these bona fide Indians have had the temerity to criticize Professor Churchill, by 1994 they are "hang-around-the-forts, sell-outs and ‘nickel’ Indians . . . " Is Churchill, as many suspect, a police agent? Nobody’s said it better than Churchill himself: "You don’t have to be a cop to do a cop’s work." Postscript: Ends and Means Churchill has no closer collaborator than perennial publicity hound Russell Means, who proclaims that Churchill’s "reputation for unflinching commitment as an American Indian leader is impeccable." For a fact, they are two of a kind. For Russell, the ends justify the means: Russell Means. A Sioux (Lakota) Indian of mixed ancestry, Means is the finest showman the American Indians have produced since Sitting Bull joined Buffalo Bill Cody’s road show. Not as athletic as Jim Thorpe or Jack Dempsey, not as pretty as Pocahontas or Jay Silverhills, not as funny as Will Rogers or Ward Churchill, Means is more versatile than any of these more-or-less Native Americans. Means first made the scene in the 60s as a leader of the American Indian Movement which, as noted, put on a good show at Alcatraz, but the sequel bombed at Wounded Knee. As the winds of fashion shifted, Means turned traditionalist, adding New Age spirituality to his act. Consistent with his rediscovery of traditional values, in 1984 he ran for Vice-President on a ticket headed up by Hustler publisher Larry Flynt. In 1987, Means sought the Presidential nomination of – get this – the Libertarian Party! It was my privilege to observe, ostensibly as a journalist, the LP nominating convention in 1987. As usual, Means lost – this time to ex-Republican Texas Congressman Ron Paul. Libertarian palefaces are afraid of persons of color, especially if, like Means, they open every campaign speech with a prayer, in Lakota, to the Great Spirit. None of them knew that Means does not speak Lakota. Means brought along a picturesque Indian entourage, but I saw a lot more Indians in the bar across the street from the hotel. In Fantasies of the Master Race, wherein Ward Churchill approvingly quotes Russell Means (1), the author denounces all cinematic representations of Indians as colonialist, even if they feature Indians as actors, including Dances With Wolves (231-241). One gropes for a suitable Indian-style name for Ward Churchill. Chief Standing Water? Shitting Bull? Dances With Tax-Free Foundations? Only a film glorifying contemporary Indians (whom might Churchill have in mind?), he insists, could be anything but counter-revolutionary. Around the time Churchill’s book came out, so did a movie, The Last of the Mohicans, co-starring an Indian – an experienced actor – as Churchill would say, "a cross between Mike Hammer and Tonto." His name? Russell Means. Letter to Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #46 Anarch Lords, I’m sure all readers of the Bob Black tribute issue of Anarchy share my satisfaction that ersatz Indian Ward Churchill pledges to fight again no more forever in its pages. Here and here alone he has been treated with equality, putting him at a cruel disadvantage. He hits the trail in search of happy hunting grounds where they haven’t found out about him yet. It was unfair of me to confuse the Professor with complex mathematical operations, such as addition and subtraction. He is an artist, not a number-cruncher: "as a turd is to a bucket of cream" is pure poetry. I first realized that Churchill was innumerate, not just stupid, when he referred to my book of 282 pages, Friendly Fire, as a "little booklet." He was unable to follow my demographic calculations because he ran out of fingers. Let me restate the point so simply that even Jon Bekken just might understand it. 21 million non-Indians now reside within the boundaries of Churchill’s proposed sovereign Indian State. Even if every Indian in the rest of the United States relocated there – a ridiculous prospect -- less than 10% of the population of the Indian State would consist of people who now consider themselves Indians. "Some" non-Indians, Churchill allows, might choose to go native. Since they never chose to do so before – and these Westerners tend to be the most anti-Indian elements in the white population – in most cases their self-Indianization would be opportunistic and in bad faith. If even 10% of the non-Indians faked it, they would outnumber the original Indians, and, if this Indian State was a democracy, they could and would rejoin the United States, or as Churchill would say, "the rotting hulk of [Euro]American empire." (Notice that Churchill is content to leave the rest of us, 240 million people or so, to languish within this rotting hulk. Once that, with their support, he’s plundered the oil, the gold, the silver, the uranium, the timber and the rest of the wealth of the American West, he has no further use for his fellow whites.) Then again, what if – as would surely happen -- the overwhelming majority refused to go along with the partition? What if, as would surely happen, most people refused to become Indians because, after all, they’re not Indians and don’t want to be Indians? Being an Indian is fine if -- unlike Ward Churchill --you are one, but there’s nothing anti-Indian about not wanting to be an Indian, especially if you’re not one. These are many millions of real people, individually innocent of anti-Indian oppression (whatever prejudices some of them hold), with homes, farms, families, communities, with lives. What about their right to self-determination? Remember, the Indian State is, as Churchill has grudgingly admitted, a State. It is not an anarchist permanent autonomous zone where different peoples and cultures coexist by mutual tolerance and without acknowledging a paramount authority. Therefore it matters (in Lenin’s phrase) "who governs" and how. Do members of the non-Indian majority have rights? Can they vote? Can anyone vote? Does anyone have rights? Once again we must resort to a complex mathematical operation – subtraction – to figure out what copyright cop Mr. Professor Churchill is really after. Although Jon Bekken (another copyright cop), unlike Ward Churchill, has a Ph.D., I sincerely hope against hope that even he can keep up with my sophisticated argument. The sovereign Indian State, says Churchill, is not anarchy (an understatement). By definition and by process of elimination, then, the Indian State has to be one of the following: a monarchy, a dictatorship, an aristocracy, an oligarchy, a democracy, or some compound of the foregoing. National socialist that he is, the nutty Professor, true to his Marxist heritage if nothing else, scratches "formally democratic" government from the list, leaving only the authoritarian varieties, one-man or elite rule. Perhaps Churchill aspires to be a monarch like Montezuma or Powhatan, or to play grand vizier or shogun to a puppet like Russell Means. Or maybe he’d settle for dominating a small Indian (or self-styled Indian) Central Committee, a leftist oligarchy. Either way it means authoritarian rule for the non-Indian majority and probably for the Indian minority too. And either way it means wealth and power beyond the wildest dreams of Cortez or Pizarro for the new Caucasian conquistador, Ward Churchill. Looking at his map (where did he get the crazy idea you can copyright a doodle on a poorly traced map of the United States?), I cannot help but be struck by the fact that centrally located Boulder, Colorado is ideally situated to serve as the seat of empire. Now this line of argument implicates the sticky question, who is an Indian? I’m not the one who concluded that Ward Churchill is not an Indian. Indians – people Churchill himself acknowledges to be Indians – taught me that Churchill is not an Indian asshole, just an asshole. Carole Standing Elk, Clyde and Vernon Bellecourt, Gerald Vizenour, John La Velle, Fern Mathias, Tim Giago, David Bradley, David Cornsilk and others have denounced Churchill’s careerist imposture. I erred in allowing Churchill’s confusionist quibbling about the size of AIM membership (very low by any estimation) to obscure the more important fact that even AIM expelled him five years ago, although he continues to impersonate an AIM official, just as he continues to impersonate an Indian. I’ve seen more authentic Indians standing very, very still outside of cigar stores. Indian identity, in Churchill’s windy words, "is determined by cultural/intellectual/political attributes," but he is careful not to identify what these attributes are, for if he did, it would be obvious that he doesn’t possess them. "Doesn’t [there] have to be some sort of relationship between theory, practice and the personal integrity of authors" (asks Churchill) for their writings to be of value? The short answer is, obviously, no, but look who’s asking! Consider Churchill’s practice. As a University of Colorado faculty member, he was required by statute to take an oath of allegience to uphold the Constitution of the United States, "the rotting hulk of [Euro]American empire," and he did. (His buddy Jon Bekken swore the same oath, for the same reason, in New York State, but Bekken bumbled his bid for the kind of cushy academic gigs scored by Ward Churchill and Murray Bookchin.) At Churchill’s own insistence, then, let us further consider his practice. We first find him killing indigenous people, the Montagnards, on long-range reconaissance while serving in the U.S. Army in Vietnam. He became a staff writer for Soldier of Fortune. Next he turns up as a looney-tunes Maoist in the terrorist Weatherman SDS. His activities during the 70s, when his future ally Russell Means became Hustler publisher Larry Flynt’s vice-presidential running mate before flirting with the Moonies, are shrouded in secrecy. There is no known evidence that he yet claimed to be an Indian; I’d love to see Churchill’s earliest documentation for this claim. In the early 80s he somehow became an affirmative-action bureaucrat at the University of Colorado (Boulder) and then, despite having no qualifications, a tenured professor. Meanwhile he infiltrated AIM, where his machinations split an organization which the U.S. Government seems to have genuinely feared before he disrupted it. He sided with the CIA-sponsored contras in Nicaragua. By the early 1990s, there was a strong and growing backlash against Churchill among Indian activists, and he was, as I mentioned, expelled from AIM in 1993. Churchill has made death threats against his Indian critics such as David Bradley. In 1994, California AIM Director Carole Standing Elk, an Indian grandmother and Churchill critic, attended a Churchill press conference in San Francisco. Non-Indian Churchill’s non-Indian (Chicano) girl-friend M. Annette Jaimes beat up Mrs. Standing Elk, and then --when it seemed safe – heroic warrior Ward Churchill spit in her face. In his final expectoration in these pages, Churchill criticizes police snitch Jim Hogshire for not murdering me when he had the chance, and hopes that Hogshire will not repeat his mistake, "a posture it would behoove others to adopt before rather than after the fact." In other words, he urges everybody to shoot me on sight, the same way this "airborne-qualified" killer dealt with the Vietnamese. What more convincing way to answer criticism than to kill the critic? And on what better note than his own to usher offstage this lying, careerist, opportunist, homicidal, racist, fascist, leftist, nationalist, statist, authoritarian police agent? You’d have to be awfully stupid, even by lax anarchist standards, not to notice that this guy has always had "agent provocateur" written all over him. Yours in Slack, Bob Black PO Box 3142 lbany, NY 12203-0142