Ward Churchill's Chickens Come Home To Roost

There was something distastefully cowardly about Eastern Washington University’s disinvitation of University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill. After a public outcry arose and university donors threatened to close their wallets, EWU President Stephen Jordan withdrew Churchill’s invitation citing “safety and security” issues. Jordan would have us believe that Churchill would provoke such right wing indignation that public order might be threatened.
I really wish that President Jordan had the courage to say that Ward Churchill simply falls far beneath the standards of discourse that EWU wishes to maintain. Although welcoming a porn star (Ron Jeremy) to speak complicates making that case.
Churchill breathed notoriety into an otherwise undistinguished academic career by publishing on September 12, 2001, an essay titled, “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.” He argued that the victims of the previous day’s terrorist attacks had it coming for serving the some role for the United States that Adolf Eichmann performed for Nazi Germany.
Of those who worked in the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center that morning, he said, “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 – and they did so both willingly and knowingly.”
For their contribution to America’s prosperity, he dubbed them “little Eichmann’s,” comparing them to the administrator of Hitler’s death camps.
He later compounded this insult by arguing that one slaughter was insufficient. “One of the things I’ve suggested is that it may be that more 9/11s are necessary.”
Ward Churchill has every right to say these things. After all, this isn’t Europe, where people get arrested for speech that deviates from the permissible. But no one is obligated to provide him with a forum. And, we “little Eichmann’s” certainly should not be forced to fatten his wallet.
I’m confident that President Jordan would have no difficulty denying a podium and a microphone to someone who preached hatred for Muslims or blacks. Although, to be honest, if he did give a megaphone, a soap box and an honorarium to a speaker who advocated killing Jews, he would not be the first college president in recent years to do so.
And, there’s another good reason to slam the door in Churchill’s face. The man is a fraud. He prospers in an academic environment in which the extravagance of one’s anti-American rhetoric counts for more than genuine scholarship. Ward Churchill gained fame within the “ethnic studies” field by inventing tales such as the one about the Mandan Indian “genocide” of 1837.
According to Churchill, the Mandans were mostly exterminated when the US Army gave the tribe smallpox infected blankets. The problem is that it never happened and the very references that Churchill cited in his work prove it. Churchill was wrong on nearly every historical point (the exception being that the Mandans were decimated by a smallpox epidemic in 1837), but because his “scholarly” works are judged for attitude and venom rather than accuracy, the man has ascended to the chairmanship of his department at the University of Colorado.
Ward Churchill seems to have gotten his job and his celebrity by convincing radical and gullible palefaces that he was an authentic voice of indigenous Americans. To accomplish this, he has falsified his own ancestry. He claims to be a member of the Keetoowah Tribe of Oklahoma. But he is not listed in the tribe’s registry and so far back as anyone can trace his lineage, not a drop of Indian blood can be found.
He claims an affiliation with the American Indian Movement, but they disavow him and condemn his hateful rhetoric. “The sorry part of this is Ward Churchill has fraudulently represented himself as an Indian, and a member of the American Indian Movement…”
The Indian Country Times gets right to the point, with a story headlined, “Ward Churchill’s No Indian.” In the story they remind their readers that a crew of Mohawk ironworkers were among the first on the scene after the Trade Center attacks and risked their lives saving those whom Churchill slurred as, “little Eichmann’s.”
Judging by the opinions expressed by Indian Country Times and the American Indian Movement, his views are as authentically Indian as his genealogy.
At long last, Churchill’s chickens have come home to roost.