Churchill Plagiarizes Self (And No, This Is Not Parody)



The list of Ward Churchill's apparent perfidies, lies, and fraud grows exponentially every day. He's currently accused of being a race fraud, an academic fraud, an art fraud, and a plagiarizer. Ah, plagiarism. Plagiarism, it seems, even to the point of plagiarizing himself. Attend:

Here is a portion of an interview with Ward Churchill conducted by Jodi Rave in 1993 (the underlined text is Rave's questioning, the non-underlined text is Churchill answering):

What is then, one of the most difficult moments or situation?

Waking up in the morning in what was called Indian Country in 1968 and finding out I was a member of the 7th Calvary. Not literally, there was a 7th Calvary.

 Waking up?

In the morning in what they called Indian Country, this is what hostile territory is called in Viet Nam, yaa know, I figured I was a member of the Calvary and not the Indians.

 Ooh. Ok.

That experience kind of changed my life.

 in which way?

I decided to get on the right side, which isn't with the Calvary, it wasn't with the United States. And just about everything I've done since then was drawn from that experience and all kinds of things have added on. But everything has been very, I can make sense of it, [i]t's been very consistent in that way.

Then, I'm always engaged, I never stop, I'm never unplugged.

Now, here is a portion of Ward Churchill's review of the 1996 book Strong Hearts, Wounded Souls, Native American Veterans of the Vietnam War, by Tom Holm:

Or, as another veteran, a Creek-Cherokee, put it: "I went into the army and to Vietnam because I’d seen the same John Wayne movies as everybody else and thought I was doing an honorable thing, that war was the ‘Indian way’. And, of course, the government was saying at the time that we had this treaty—the SEATO treaty—to uphold. So I went... But when I got to Vietnam, I found that my job was to run missions into what everybody called ‘Indian country’. That’s what they called enemy territory... I woke up one morning fairly early in my tour and realized that instead of being a warrior like Crazy Horse, I was a scout used by the army to track him down. I was on the wrong side of everything I wanted to believe I was about... Then I found out the SEATO treaty never even required the United States to do what it was doing in Southeast Asia. It was all a total lie. Besides, by then I’d figured out that even if it did, it didn’t matter. Why was I fighting to uphold a U.S. treaty commitment halfway around the world when the United States was violating its treaty commitments to my own people and about 300 other Indian nations?... I was fighting the wrong people, pure and simple, and I’ve never gotten over it."

Our question, of course, is this: Is Churchill quoting from Strong Hearts (we don't have a copy; if you do, let us know if the quoted text above is in it), or is he merely engaging in a bit of self-referential whimsy? Or did Churchill already have an advance copy of Strong Hearts when he did the Rave interview, and decide to thrill her with a little harmless appropriation of someone else's Vietnam experience? We vote for self-plagiarism, although we realize that in the grand scheme of things, accusing Churchill of self-plagiarism is as meaningless as accusing a serial rapist of what used to be discreetly referred to as "self-abuse." But really, Ward, have you no shame?