By Dianna Deeley

Ward Churchill is a prolific writer, though not in peer-reviewed journals. He is apt to append copious notes, both numbered endnotes, and footnotes within the text. The fact that he appends four hundred footnotes to an essay does not indicate that he is a thorough scholar, but that he is attempting to fatigue his critics. It requires extreme dedication and patience to hunt through that much material, and certainly no first-year student, respecting his teacher, is going to do so.
For example, Churchill’s essay Deconstructing the Columbus Myth, which is no longer than 6 pages, contains 35 footnotes. (See http://www.uctp.org/ColumbusMyth.html, endnotes) How much help they would be to the casual reader is questionable. (I intend, here, to conduct an Amazon search for the titles. I do not anticipate much success, but at this point, I have not done so.)

Evidence for Churchill’s fabrication of evidence is clearly laid out, in excruciating detail, by Professor John P. LaVelle of the Univerity of New Mexico (See http://lawschool.unm.edu/faculty/lavelle/allotment-act.pdf This 52 page article is devastating.). Briefly summarized, LaVelle demonstrates Churchill’s technique; first, M. Annette Jaimes writes an article which flatly states that in the 1887 General Allotment Act the Federal Government created a “blood quantum” standard for who is an Indian, then Churchill escalates the claim. (LaVelle appends the 1887 Act to his article to demonstrate that there is no such definition in the text.) Churchill begins by calling this a “formal eugenics code”, though there is no such thing, then states that Indian tribes conform to this standard. (Indian tribes determine their own membership at all times, and this has never been disputed.) Further, through a twisting of a quote from the work of Patricia Nelson Limerick (The Legacy of Conquest, Patricia Nelson Limerick, New York: W. W. Norton Publishers, 1987.) written about successful Indian resistance to a proposed policy of the Reagan administration, Churchill asserts that the “blood quantum” is a means of statistical extermination (this is Jaimes’ wording) of Native Americans.

As time goes on, Churchill uses this false “blood quantum” standard to attack the Indian Arts and Crafts Act – which incidentally made it impossible for Churchill to sell his own art work as “Indian Art” – as part of an ongoing statistical genocide, carried out by Indians themselves for the oppressive white government. Further, Churchill seizes on Russell Thornton’s work, escalating into a claim that Thornton expresses “a concern about the ‘disappear[ance]’ of ‘Native America as a whole…by the year 2080’ if the ‘imposition of purely racial definitions’ continues.” (See p. 266 of http://lawschool.unm.edu/faculty/lavelle/allotment-act.pdf, and note 60.) Of course, Thornton says nothing of the kind.

As LaVelle demonstrates, Churchill continues to embellish and escalate his claims in his next books, Since Predator Came (1995), From a Native Son (1996), and A Little Matter of Genocide (1997). Professor LaVelle goes into exhaustive detail, and this is beyond the scope of the current work. For one thing, the reader ought to savor LaVelle’s presentation for himself; for another, the present writer’s grasp of the material is tentative. LaVelle has a wonderful grasp of the legal issues at question, and of the scholarly material, with which the writer has only a casual acquaintance.


In the notes, which are very detailed, LaVelle demonstrates for the reader the number of scholars whose work is distorted in Churchill’s work – Patricia Nelson Limerick, Russell Thornton, Janet A. McDonnell and George M. Frederickson, to name only a few – and lays out for side by side comparison a passage written by Churchill and one by Rebecca L. Robbins. (See The General Allotment Act “Eligibility” Hoax, n. 8, p. 283, Spring 1999 Wicazo Sa Review.) This is clear evidence of plagiarism, particularly since the passage in Churchill is not in quotes, and there is, furthermore, no citation of Robbins.

If any scholar has particular cause to complain of Churchill’s distortions, it is Professor Russell Thornton, whose biography may be found at http://iserver.saddleback.cc.ca.us/AP/la/neh/scholars.htm#russ. Dr. Thornton has had two documented incidents of Churchill distorting his scholarship. Not only has Thornton’s demographic work been twisted into saying precisely the opposite of what he intended in support of Churchill’s long-running Dawes Act fabrication, but in an egregious case of blatant academic fraud, Churchill has seized Thornton’s account of a smallpox epidemic in 1837 and fabricated from it an act of biowarfare by the United States Army.

Thomas Brown, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Lamar University (http://hal.lamar.edu/~BROWNTF/Churchill1.htm) has a brief article, Assessing Ward Churchill’s Version of the 1837 Smallpox Epidemic, in which Brown goes back to the original sources and attempts to discover how Churchill might have come to the conclusions he does. The sources do not support any element of Churchill’s fantasy, except that a great many people, most of them Indians, died.

Again, one notices Churchill’s tendency to elaborate and escalate initial claims. The story grows in the telling – though it must be noted that Churchill lowered his initial number of dead from 125,000 to 100,000 – and characters, for whom there is no basis in the record, multiply. Dr. Thornton remarks, ““The history is bad enough—there’s no need to embellish it.” (Scott Jaschik, “A New Ward Churchill Controversy”, Inside Higher Ed, February 9, 2005.)

Near the end, Brown writes: