funny breaks
I had a chance to speak very briefly to a close friend of Ward Churchill this weekend, and according to her data, she guessed that CU will probably not pursue inquiries into his racial make-up (perhaps a blatant attempt to cut into their initial buyout offer? No wampum for fake Indian...). While there probably aren't enough American Indians on the faculty from his tribal rolls to even set a benchmark, I gotta confess - once again - some interest in seeing the university go this route, attempting to "pin down" Churchill's identity as an indigenous person. It opens up a whole new can of worms, one that I'm sure any prof or remotely sane group on campus could make serious hay with: would this mean, for instance, that homosexual professors who may have slept with the opposite sex a couple of times in their more "experimental" days would be subject to the same kinds of scrutiny if they pissed off the community enough? Yes? No? Maybe so?
My source said that he'll probably stay on as long as he can - something that the Denver Post pointed out, more than a little ruefully as the controversy they helped manufacture began to wane, that it may take a couple of years to see the whole firing process come to a conclusion.
What interested my source most was just how the allegations of Ward cooking up false connections in his work between the Army and pox-infected blankets would stand up. The Post's first article following up a CU faculty investigation into "Some Push Back" included a rather vague summation of those charges:
...that Churchill falsely characterized historical facts to support arguments in his own work, including whether the U.S. Army purposely distributed smallpox-infected blankets to Indians in the 1800s.
"Falsely characterized historical facts"? Does that mean a poor interpretation? Or a mistaken interpretation? What?
'Cause we're all about the fair and balanced, follow this to what right blog after right blog points to as proof of the prof's intellectual dishonesty. It's a refutation of claims Churchill had made in articles over the last decade (one's here) that posits the command of a U.S. Army post at Fort Clark on the Missouri gave out or intended to give out smallpox-laden blankets to a nearby Mandan band.
Here is mention of the smallpox epidemic via the Mandan tribe webpage. For what it's worth, you'll note that there is no mention about U.S. Army scheming.
This is the only instance of poor or irresponsible work Churchill may or may not have done that's managed to pass muster, at least officially, and it should go without saying that of late there's been a lot of shit thrown around with the intention of seeing what might stick.
BUT - once more, with feeling - none of this has anything to do with the Essay In Question, which no one, save for Bill Maher (of all people) and the always-reliable Amy Goodman have attempted to deal with or debate on it's own merits. Since there's a refusal to address the issue at hand, what then passes for the reasons behind the blood frenzy - stirred up by CU's campus republicans, by the local AM-radio addicts, and the more respectably-dressed flaks in the local media - are revealed as gut-level exercises grudge-bearing and anti-intellectualism, a sort of intervention - everyone standing around and wailing about what makes Ward Churchill (and the kind of traitorous left-wing politics he stands for) so bad for Colorado and America.
And we all know, interventions make for shitty reality TV, especially since Paris still has her show.
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