Defense of Ward Churchill by Colleague at UCB

[struggle4progress]

The Report On Ward Churchill
by Tom Mayer

... The report claims that Professor Churchill engaged in fabrication and falsification. To make these claims it stretches the meaning of these words almost beyond recognition. Fabrication implies an intent to deceive. There is not a shred of evidence that the writings of Ward Churchill contain any assertion that he himself did not believe. The language used in the report repeatedly drifts in an inflammatory direction: disagreement becomes misinterpretation, misinterpretation becomes misrepresentation, misinterpretation becomes falsification. Ward may be wrong about who was considered an Indian under the General Allotment Act of 1887 or about the origins of the 1837-1840 smallpox epidemic among the Indians of the northern plains, but the report does not establish that only a lunatic or a liar could reach his conclusions on the basis of available evidence.

The charges of fabrication and falsification all derive from short fragments within much longer articles. The report devotes 44 pages to discussing the 1837-1840 smallpox epidemic. One might think that Ward had written an entire book on this subject. In fact this issue occupies no more than three paragraphs in any of his writings. In each of the six essays cited in the report, all reference to this epidemic could have been dropped without substantially weakening the argument. To be sure, the account given by Ward is not identical to that found in any of his sources, but it is a recognizable composite of information contained within them. The committee peremptorily dismisses Churchill's contention that his interpretation of the epidemic was influenced by the Native American oral tradition. This is treated as no more than an ex post facto defense against the allegation of misconduct. The committee also discounts Native American witnesses who support Churchill's interpretations as well as his fidelity to oral accounts. The centrality of the oral tradition is evident in many of Churchill's writings. His acknowledgments frequently include elders, Indian bands, and the American Indian Movement. He often integrates Native American poetry with his historical analysis. Three of his books with which I am familiar, Since Predator Came (1995), A Little Matter of Genocide (1997), and Struggle for the Land (2002) all begin with poems. As a thirty-year veteran of the intense political struggles within the American Indian Movement, Ward Churchill could not avoid a deep familiarity with the oral tradition of Native American history ...

http://www.swans.com/library/art12/zig094.html