We've received, via one of our jackbooted thugs, a copy of Professor Ward Churchill's recent Works and Days article "The Myth of Academic Freedom: Experiencing the Application of Liberal Principle in a Neoconservative Era" (published a few scant weeks before Teh Trial began). It is as chockful o'facts as we've come to expect of any Churchill screed, provided that—in this PoMo world—zero still equals zero. We're reading it over the weekend, and we'll post our impressions as time and industry (or our lack of same) permit.

Perhaps most notable in the entire Works and Days article is Churchill's long-awaited (and much-promised) justification for his intentional army smallpox-blanket story (from footnote 258, emphasis ours):

Bernard Pratte, Jr., captain of the St. Peter's—the boat on which the infected items were transported upriver—stated in an interview some thirty years after the fact that they were brought to St. Louis from Baltimore by an unnamed fur company employee whom I've been able to identify as William May. Pratte says May placed the items aboard the St. Peter's itself. An independent source both identifies the infected items as having been blankets, and says that they were towed upriver in a pair of Mackinaw boats. It is confirmed that the St. Peter's was towing such boats. I have also been able to confirm that smallpox was present in Baltimore in late 1836, reaching epidemic proportions in 1837. Citations regarding these matters are being withheld, pending publication of an essay fully devoted to the topic.

"[Charles Larpenteur] exposed a group of forty Assiniboins [sic] to a child in the most highly contagious stage of the disease, them told them to flee back to their home village(s)"

and cites in the accompanying footnote Larpenteur's own Forty Years A Fur Trader as part of his documentation (his other source is the two-volume A History of the American Fur Trade in the Far West by Hiram Martin Chittenden—which, incidentally, Churchill consistently misspells as Chittendon). Unfortunately for Churchill, the text of Forty Years is available on the Internet, and the relevant passage reads thus:

While the epidemic was at its height a party of about 40 Indians came in, not exactly on a trade, but more on a begging visit, under the celebrated old chief Co-han; and the word was, "Hurry up! Open the door!" which had been locked for many days, to keep the crazy folks in.

Nothing else would do ­ we must open the door; but on showing him a little boy who had not recovered, and whose face was still one solid scab, by holding him above the pickets, the Indians finally concluded to leave. Not long afterward we learned that more than one-half of the party had died ­ some said all of them.

Clearly, Churchill would have the reader believe Larpenteur's actions were consciously malicious toward the Indians, while the text is far less self-accusatory. More importantly, the immediately preceding sentences give the reader a very different perspective on the incident:

"[...] for immediately on the landing of the [steamer] we learned that smallpox was on board. Mr. J. Halsey, the gentleman who was to take charge this summer, had the disease, of which several of the hands had died; but it had subsided, and this was the only case on board. Our only apprehensions were that the disease might spread among the Indians, for Mr. Halsey had been vaccinated, and soon recovered. Prompt measures were adopted to prevent an epidemic. As we had no vaccine matter we decided to inoculate with the smallpox itself; and after the systems of those who were to be inoculated had been prepared according to Dr. Thomas' medical book, the operation was performed upon about 30 Indian squaws and a few white men. This was done with the view to have it all over and everything cleaned up before any Indians should come in, on their fall trade, which commenced early in September.  The smallpox matter should have been taken from a very healthy person; but, unfortunately, Mr. Halsey was not sound, and the operation proved fatal to most of our patients. About 15 days afterward there was such a stench in the fort that it could be smelt at the distance of 300 yards. It was awful ­ the scene in the fort, where some went crazy, and others were half eaten up by maggots before they died; yet, singular to say, not a single bad expression was ever uttered by a sick Indian. Many died, and those who recovered were so much disfigured that one could scarcely recognize them."

That Larpenteur was not only not maliciously intent on infecting Indians with smallpox, but rather, was trying desperately to save them (even observing in admiration their courage in the face of certain death), Churchill does not note in his "history," probably because it interferes with—the uncharitable might say baldly contradicts—his narrative. Count us among the uncharitable.

Churchill notes that Larpenteur was a fur company employee who filled in as post surgeon at Fort Union "while Denig was recovering from a very mild case of the pox" and cites Barton H. Barbour's Fort Union and the Upper Missouri Fur Trade as the source for this assertion, but Barbour himself only notes that Denig "was stricken with an unidentified violent fever, probably a mild case of the disease." (emphasis ours)

By the way: Larpenteur's account (being, as it is, one told by someone who was there and completely involved in the events) offers what we'd call pretty substantial proof that the smallpox epidemic started with the infected white trader, Mr. J. Halsey. One would think that to contradict such a straightforward recounting of events as witnessed by a participant with a tale of malicious and intentional infliction of smallpox by the US Army would require at least a similarly first-person account of same. One, of course, would be wrong. Churchill need offer no such proof; he need only note that he has seen said proof. He is, after all, Ward Churchill.


Churchill's "That Depends On What The Meaning of 'Is' Is" Moment
From the section entitled "Self-Citation of Ghostwritten Material" (page 168):

At issue here is the question of whether my citation of what the investigative panel described in their report as "two apparently independent third-party sources" (emphasis in original)-i.e., material I myself had ghostwritten-constitutes a "form of evidentiary fabrication" which was "part of a deliberate research stratagem to create the appearance of independent verifiable claims that could not be supported through existing primary and secondary sources. Elsewhere in the report, the panelists elaborated further, claiming that such citations allowed me "to create the false appearance that [certain of my] claims are supported by other scholars when, in fact, [I am] the only source for such claims" as were involved in my interpretations of the General Allotment Act and the Indian Arts and Crafts Act.

While the P&T reviewers addressed this matter only collaterally, observing that it "contributed" to the supposed failure to comply with established standards regarding author names on publications involved in my ghostwriting of the Robbins and Jaimes essays, they did state that my practice in this regard "seems inherently deceptive" and at odds with "what we take to be accepted standards by large components of the academic world" (emphasis added). Once again, the conflation of "established standards"-which, as was shown in the preceding section, do not exist-with "accepted practices" is obvious. So, too, the sheer vacuity of the phrase "what we take to be," used as it was to define such practices, accepted by equally nebulous, but nonetheless "large," "components" of the academic world" as I am alleged to have deliberately transgressed.