Update: Ward Churchill, Stanley Fish and the Mandan

Affidavits were filed May 20 by several prominent Native people and scholars in objection to the possible rehiring of former professor Ward Churchill at the University of Colorado-Boulder. A jury recently determined he was wrongfully terminated. The jurors linked the dismissal to a controversial essay written by Churchill about victims who died in the World Trade Center bombings in New York. Churchill’s future now rests with a Denver judge who must decide if CU should rehire him.

First, here is the University of Colorado opposition brief, a 131-page document, with affidavits and more. The school makes several arguments against Churchill’s reinstatement.

Churchill is a former professor of mine, prompting me to first write about him while a CU journalism student. The story appeared in 1993 (transcripts of interview) in the Colorado Daily. I’ve written about four columns about Churchill in the last decade.  This one was written February 2005. And this one June 2006. And  here’s the latest.

Readers may be interested in the big Stanley Fish blog — a 2,181 word piece — in the New York Times in which he comes across as an ardent supporter of Churchill. But in the very last paragraph, Fish writes: “I am not competent to judge Churchill’s writings and I express no view of them. And I have no doubts at all about the integrity of the committee members. They just got caught up in a circus that should have never come to town.”

Meanwhile, I’ve posted the complete set of affidavits below from scholars and experts who are qualified and  “competent to judge Churchill’s writings.”

Here are all 10 of the affidavits:

Robert Trepp
Tom Holm
Chief Chad Smith
David Bradley
Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
John P. Lavelle
Patricia Jo King
Rhonda Kelly
Suzan Harjo
Thomas Brown.

Also, read this article, “Truthiness v. Scholarship,” by Brown in which he discredits Churchill’s writings on the Mandan and smallpox. Here’s an excerpt: “Churchill now holds that when he said that the Mandan tribe had been deliberately infected, he used the word ‘Mandan’ not to refer to the actual Mandan tribe, but instead to refer to all Indian tribes in the Northern Plains, extending across the border into Canada.”

I guess this type of “scholarship,” flies in the academic world, according to Fish, the professor at Florida International University. Fish describes playing “fast and loose” with the facts “standard stuff,” in academia.

I didn’t know that.

In reality, to call every tribe on the Northern Plains a Mandan is a gross factual error. And it’s but a small example of why Churchill was fired for fabrication, plagiarism and academic misconduct. I’m a Mandan, an enrolled tribal citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation in North Dakota. I grew up on the Northern Plains. It’s incomprehensible that any one would describe all Northern Plains tribes as belonging to a single tribe. In one broad stroke, Churchill wiped out the Crow, Hidatsa, Oglala, Minneconjou, Santee, Northern Cheyenne, Assiniboine, Gros Ventre, Hunkpapa. And what about all the tribes in Canada? Mandans, everyone, according to Churchill.

For those unfamiliar with Churchill, a big part of his trial focused on his fabrications about smallpox and the Mandan. In getting his facts wrong, he made a literal mess of our oral tradition. Who is going to fix it?

A court hearing is set for July 1 in Denver to determine if Churchill lands back in the teaching pulpit.

One key area the court isn’t addressing is Churchill’s fabricated identity. Many non-Natives dismiss this fact. They should read the affidavits written by American Indians to understand why Churchill is harmful to Indian Country, Native studies and Indian scholars.

If anyone’s interested in full online file about Churchill, check out Pirate Ballerina.

And here’s a blog post where I’m called “vichy” for writing about Churchill, a post by someone who describes themselves as an “afrocentric, anti-bias educator.”

Jodi Rave