The Churchill Firing

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/07/30/witherspoon


The Churchill Firing — II
By Gary Witherspoon
Many conservatives believe the firing of University of Colorado Professor Ward Churchill will now reduce liberal politics in academia. Many liberals believe that his firing will uphold high standards of academic scholarship. Both are wrong — because the firing of Churchill reveals a very pernicious kind of exclusionary dogmatism in scholarly research and writing and media reporting. The firing of Professor Churchill for alleged research misconduct ignored evidence to the contrary provided by professors who know his work best, ignored evidence from a committee of scholars who found the investigating committee itself guilty of research misconduct, and ignored all Indigenous evidence and perspectives that are critical of Eurocentric versions of the history of the European invasion of the Americas.

Research misconduct is in the eye of the beholder. Euroamerican teachers and scholars have taught and written for several centuries that Columbus discovered America. That is a more profound and easily provable case of research misconduct than anything of which Churchill has been accused. The Indigenous peoples of the Americas have been here at least 13,000 years and more likely, according to recent DNA research, 50,000 years. This Columbus lie, which is at the foundation of Eurocentric American history, dehumanizes all those who are now called American Indians by discrediting any of their accomplishments as not being human accomplishments. Everyone who has perpetuated this myth over the years should be found guilty of deceit, research misconduct and racism, according to the standards of the investigating committee.

The 1987 edition of the standard American history textbook, American History: A Survey begins by saying, “For thousands of centuries — centuries in which human races were evolving, forming communities and building the beginnings of national civilizations in Africa, Asia and Europe — the continents we know as the Americas stood empty of mankind and its works” The book informed its readers that American history “is the story of the creation of a civilization where none existed.” Now that is a very egregious form of “research misconduct.” That statement bears no resemblance to the truth and serves only to continue to misinform and to indoctrinate students in Eurocentric lies.

The committee should have read the 2005 national best selling book 1491, by Charles Mann, for a thorough critique of the statements quoted in American History, and for extensive support for Churchill’s arguments about the history of the Americas. Summarizing research and writing over the last 30-40 years, Mann shows that in 1491 the population of the Americas surpassed that of Europe, that American cities such as Tenochtitlan were larger than any found in Europe at the same time and, unlike European cities, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens and clean streets. I would add that nowhere in Indigenous America in the areas of my research (North and Central America) have any jails been found, so far as I have been able to determine. The earliest American cities were thriving before the Egyptians built their pyramids, and the feats of Indigenous American agriculture were unparalleled anywhere else. The journal Science recently pronounced the development of corn from its ancient noble grass ancestors as probably the greatest botanical achievement of genetic engineering in human history.

The European invasion of the Americas reduced an Indigenous population estimated by many scholars at nearly 100 million or more by 90-95 percent. Shelburne Cook and Woodrow Borah of the University of California at Berkeley spent decades reconstructing the aboriginal population of central Mexico where they determined the population to have been 25.2 million before Cortez’s invasion. Just 100 years later in 1623 only 700,000 had survived the Spanish conquest which destroyed not only millions of people but amazing architecture, art, culture and science, burning nearly all the books in their extensive libraries. The highly regarded historian Richard White has described the results of the invasion of Indigenous America as “the greatest human catastrophe in the history of the planet.”

Most people think the Churchill problem began with his planned speech in 2005 at Hamilton College — after it was shown that he had written that some of the victims of 9/11 were not entirely innocent (CIA agents housed in the building and some technocrats of Western militarism and financial imperialism according to Churchill’s clarification of what he meant in a later press release) and were instead akin to “little Eichmanns.” My essay is not intended to discuss the appropriateness or validity of his statement or its clarification, but to discuss the attack on Churchill from the perspectives, perceptions and practices of research misconduct as they apply to American history and American Indians. The truth about the beginning of the Churchill controversy is that it began with the right wing attack on Churchill after Churchill and others protested a Columbus Day parade in Denver in October 2004.

The Historical Context

It should be pointed out here that in 1861 Cheyenne leader Black Kettle had been invited to Fort Lyon to negotiate a peace with the the United States. He did so, ceding much of Cheyenne territory to the U.S. and agreeing to live south of Sand Creek. The Cheyenne were given a U.S. flag that they were told they should raise whenever threatened and no one would attack them. In 1864, the Reverend Colonel Chivington led 800 troops of Colorado territorial militia in an unprovoked attack on a sleeping village of mostly women and children at Sand Creek (the younger men were out hunting). The villagers raised the U.S. flag as a sign of peace, but Chivington wanted genocide, massacring the village of 53 older men and 110 women and children, mutilating the bodies of the Cheyenne villagers. They took the Cheyenne scalps and genitalia back to Denver, marching down the streets with Indian genitalia held up on sticks, celebrating their genocidal trophies and their evidence that Indians would never again be able to reproduce.

In 1864 The Rocky Mountain News, one of the Denver papers that convicted Churchill in the press and called for his termination, described the massacre of 110 women and children and 53 older men by 800 Colorado volunteers this way: “Among the brilliant feats of arms in Indian warfare, the recent campaign of our Colorado volunteers will stand in history with few rivals, and none to exceed it in final results.... Among the killed were all the Cheyenne chiefs, Black Kettle, White Antelope, Little Robe, Left Hand, Knock Knee, One Eye, and another, name unknown. Not a single prominent man of the tribe remains, and the tribe itself is almost annihilated.... All acquitted themselves well, and Colorado soldiers have again covered themselves with glory.” History has shown the account of this massacre to be a gross case of research and journalistic misconduct.

One historian called Sand Creek the American My Lai. Former Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell called Sand Creek “one of the most disgraceful moments of American history.”

One of the participants in this massacre was David Nichols who was honored by the University of Colorado by having a dormitory on campus named after him. In the 1980s my daughter and other First Nations students at UC protested this name, and the name was eventually changed in 1989 to Cheyenne Arapaho Hall. This local history is not irrelevant to understanding how Colorado to understanding the protests of the Columbus Day parades in Denver, and how Colorado has dealt with Churchill his termination or extermination.

Angry over the acquittal of Churchill and the other protesters of the Columbus Day parade, the right wing searched Churchill’s writing for something with which they could destroy him. That is when they found and publicized his comment, written in 2001, about some victims of 9/11 not being totally innocent. Later they discovered that it would be difficult to fire him on the grounds of his unpopular essay, so they went after his scholarship, looking for something they could call “research misconduct.” Forty-four pages in the “official investigation” (or shall we call it an inquisition) are devoted to trying to disprove Churchill’s contention that U.S. agents deliberately gave Indians small pox invested blankets in 1837-1840, while this represents only three paragraphs in any of Churchill’s 12 books and represents less than a thousandth of one percent of the genocide inflicted on Indigenous peoples. This attack on his position is all done from Eurocentric perspectives, biases and paradigms, totally discounting Indigenous perspectives and oral traditions. Yet universities like Colorado hypocritically claim to support and cherish diversity and dissent while denying validity to non-Euroamerican perspectives and traditions.

University officials said their deliberations did not consider Churchill’s essay about the causes of the 9/11 attack in which a short phrase found in one sentence has been used to indict and convict Churchill in the press. That position is, to say the least, not credible, and is being put forth simply to position the university in the upcoming court battle. Churchill’s attorney, David Lane, says that in order to show that Churchill’s First Amendment rights were violated all he has to do is show that Churchill’s unpopular phrase in that essay was a factor in his dismissal, not the whole cause. Everyone knows that without the publicity surrounding that phrase promoted by the right wing, there would never have been any investigation of his scholarship, which in the previous 30 years the university had found exemplary and worthy of promotion and reward.

Those who deny or ignore the American Holocaust are not being investigated. The scholars and journalists who perpetuate the Eurocentric biases disguised as American history are not being investigated for research misconduct, and are not being fired from their teaching or their positions in the media. The protestations of the university about preserving academic and research integrity ring hollow. The firing of Churchill is itself a form of research misconduct and represents a clear attempt by the right wing to silence Indigenous perspectives and to deny the American Holocaust.

Gary Witherspoon is a professor of anthropology and American Indian studies at the University of Washington.

Ward Churchill Interview

a good interview with Ward Churchill from the msnbc website


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20001571/site/newsweek/page/0/

Ward Churchill Interview

a good interview with Ward Churchill on the msnbc website.
definitely worth checking out.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20001571/site/newsweek/page/0/

Eco-Junk

taken from www.zmag.org

Eco-junk
Green consumerism will not save the biosphere

by George Monbiot
July 26, 2007
Guardian
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It wasn't meant to happen like this. The climate scientists told us that our winters would become wetter and our summers drier. So I can't claim that these floods were caused by climate change, or are even consistent with the models. But, like the ghost of Christmas yet to come, they offer us a glimpse of the possible winter world we'll inhabit if we don't sort ourselves out.
With rising sea levels and more winter rain (and remember that when the trees are dormant and the soils saturated there are fewer places for the rain to go) all it will take is a freshwater flood to coincide with a high spring tide and we have a formula for full-blown disaster. We have now seen how localised floods can wipe out essential services and overwhelm emergency workers. But this month's events don't even register beside some of the predictions now circulating in learned journals(1). Our primary political struggle must be to prevent the break-up of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets. The only question now worth asking about climate change is how.

Dozens of new books appear to provide an answer: we can save the world by embracing "better, greener lifestyles". Last week, for example, the Guardian published an extract of the new book by Sheherazade Goldsmith, who is married to the very rich environmentalist Zac, in which she teaches us "to live within nature's limits"(2). It's easy: just make your own bread, butter, cheese, jam, chutneys and pickles, keep a milking cow, a few pigs, goats, geese, ducks, chickens, beehives, gardens and orchards. Well, what are you waiting for?

Her book also contains plenty of useful advice, and she comes across as modest, sincere and well-informed. But of lobbying for political change, there is not a word: you can save the planet in your own kitchen - if you have endless time and plenty of land. When I was reading it on the train, another passenger asked me if he could take a look. He flicked through it for a moment then summed up the problem in seven words. "This is for people who don't work."

None of this would matter, if the Guardian hadn't put her photo on the masthead last week, with the promise that she could teach us to go green. The media's obsession with beauty, wealth and fame blights every issue it touches, but none more so than green politics. There is an inherent conflict between the aspirational lifestyle journalism which makes readers feel better about themselves and sells country kitchens and the central demand of environmentalism: that we should consume less. "None of these changes represents a sacrifice", Sheherazade tells us. "Being more conscientious isn't about giving up things." But it is: if, like her, you own more than one home when others have none.

Uncomfortable as this is for both the media and its advertisers, giving things up is an essential component of going green. A section on ethical shopping in Goldsmith's book advises us to buy organic, buy seasonal, buy local, buy sustainable, buy recycled. But it says nothing about buying less.

Green consumerism is becoming a pox on the planet. If it merely swapped the damaging goods we buy for less damaging ones, I would champion it. But two parallel markets are developing: one for unethical products and one for ethical products, and the expansion of the second does little to hinder the growth of the first. I am now drowning in a tide of ecojunk. Over the past six months, our coatpegs have become clogged with organic cotton bags, which - filled with packets of ginseng tea and jojoba oil bath salts - are now the obligatory gift at every environmental event. I have several lifetimes' supply of ballpoint pens made with recycled paper and about half a dozen miniature solar chargers for gadgets I don't possess.

Last week the Telegraph told its readers not to abandon the fight to save the planet. "There is still hope, and the middle classes, with their composters and eco-gadgets, will be leading the way."(3) It made some helpful suggestions, such as a "hydrogen-powered model racing car", which, for £74.99, comes with a solar panel, an electrolyser and a fuel cell(4). God knows what rare metals and energy-intensive processes were used to manufacture it. In the name of environmental consciousness, we have simply created new opportunities for surplus capital.

Ethical shopping is in danger of becoming another signifier of social status. I have met people who have bought solar panels and mini-wind turbines before they have insulated their lofts: partly because they love gadgets, but partly, I suspect, because everyone can then see how conscientious (and how rich) they are. We are often told that buying such products encourages us to think more widely about environmental challenges, but it is just as likely to be depoliticising. Green consumerism is another form of atomisation - a substitute for collective action. No political challenge can be met by shopping.

The middle classes rebrand their lives, congratulate themselves on going green, and carry on buying and flying as much as ever before. It is easy to picture a situation in which the whole world religiously buys green products, and its carbon emissions continue to soar.

It is true, as the green consumerists argue, that most people find aspirational green living more attractive than dour puritanism. But it can also be alienating. I have met plenty of farm labourers and tenants who are desperate to start a small farm of their own, but have been excluded by what they call "horsiculture": small parcels of agricultural land being bought up for pony paddocks and hobby farms. In places like Surrey and the New Forest, farmland is now fetching up to £30,000 an acre as city bonuses are used to buy organic lifestyles(5). When the new owners dress up as milkmaids then tell the excluded how to make butter, they run the risk of turning environmentalism into the whim of the elite.

Challenge the new green consumerism and you become a prig and a party pooper, the spectre at the feast, the ghost of Christmas yet to come. Against the shiny new world of organic aspirations you are forced to raise drab and boringly equitable restraints: carbon rationing, contraction and convergence, tougher building regulations, coach lanes on motorways. No colour supplement will carry an article about that. No rock star could live comfortably within his carbon ration.

But such measures, and the long hard political battle required to bring them about, are, unfortunately, required to prevent the catastrophe these floods predict, rather than merely to play at being green. Only when they have been applied does green consumerism become a substitute for current spending rather than a supplement to it. They are harder to sell, not least because they cannot be bought from mail order catalogues. Hard political choices will have to be made, and the economic elite and its spending habits must be challenged, rather than groomed and flattered. The multi-millionaires who have embraced the green agenda might suddenly discover another urgent cause.

George Monbiot has been awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Essex and an honorary fellowship by Cardiff University.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Eg James Hansen et al, 2007. Climate Change and Trace Gases. Philiosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - A. Vol 365, pp 1925-1954. doi: 10.1098/rsta.2007.2052. http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2007/2007_Hansen_etal_2.pdf

2. Sheherazade Goldsmith (Editor in chief), 2007. A Slice of Organic Life. Dorling Kindersley, London.

3. Sarah Lonsdale, 19th July 2007. Take the online test to find out your footprint. Daily Telegraph.

4. See http://shop.tangogroup.net/PDF/H-Racer%20002.pdf

5. See http://www.lawsonfairbank.co.uk/pony-paddocks.asp

Another Churchill Piece

this is a good article about the current situation unfolding with Ward Churchill.
The defensive tactics are over and were over this morning. Now the offense begins until the fight is complete.

http://mwcnews.net/content/view/15678/26

Another Churchill Piece

this is a good article about the current situation unfolding with Ward Churchill.
The defensive tactics are over and were over this morning. Now the offense begins until the fight is complete.

http://mwcnews.net/content/view/15678/26

Last night i met David Suzuki

So last night i had this dream in which i was walking down a street in vancouver, british columbia, canada and across the street i saw the one and only David Suzuki cruising with a coffee on his way to work. Dont know if this street really exists and hell maybe i wasnt even in vancouver. It was a dream. So i found the David Suzuki Foundation building in which he had entered so i cruised in myself. Inside were a couple different rooms all covered with posters, shelves of books, models on rivers, oceans, forests and diagrams of maps all over the place. People hard at work at the DSFoundation. I inquried about a book in which i bought and told the fellow who was helping me out how much of an incredible human being i think Mr. Suzuki is. Then the dude disappears and brings out ole David himself. Stoked. I played it cool. Said "hello", shook his hand and that was pretty much that. For more information on David Suzuki please follow this link.

davidsuzuki.org

THE FIGHT AGAINST WARD CHURCHILL

The University of Colorado Regents fired Ward Churchill yesterday(Tuesday July 24th/07) due to a 8-1 vote against him.
For those of you familiar/ or not familiar with Churchill he is by far the most radical, leftist leading voice when it comes to indigenous struggles here in the US/ Canada.

He has written books such as
-On the Justice of Roosting Chickens
-Little Matter of Genocide
-Pacifism as Pathology
-Struggle for the Land
-Fantasys of the Master Race
-Acts of Rebellion
-The COINTELPRO Papers
-Kill the Indian, Save the Man
and a couple others plus some spoken word CD's

Churchills troubles started due to his book entitled "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens".In this book he compares some of the victims in the 9-11 to nazi war criminals. He also brings into questions the "innocence" of some of the lives lost.

Some of us look forward to getting out of high school, going to the institutions of the University to continue our education and educate ourselves on what we are really interested in. This case here is another case in point which proves that these institutions are just that. Institutions. Keeping in line with the bigger picture and keeping this system of brutality rolling on its chosen path.
If the institutions which are teaching our future do not have academic freedumb/ free speech then where does this leaad the future. More "support your troops" magnets on the back of our hyrbrids?

For further reading check out the link below. Its from Al Jazerra but theres many out there. Just google "ward churchill"

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D55A03F2-F986-471C-B7A5-C380A20F8362.htm

CADENCE WEAPON/ PHILLY

so i am here just outside of philly where i am with a couple fellows from the great white north of canada. Rollie and Eric who make up a hip-hip outfit by the name of Cadence Weapon. We are currently held up in the luxurious super 8 outside of philly. I am out with these fellows helping them with the driving, settling of shows and just making sure we make it to everyshow and everything runs smoothly. I love hanging with the foreigners. Yes i am canadian but dont get to hang out with many canucks these days due to my location (my location is changing soon though) so even hanging out with my own people i somewhat consider them foreigners. We were driving today and the dudes were just commenting on all of the "american shit" that is everywhere in this country. People with their flag stickers, huge trucks with huge graphics of eagles/ flags covering their whole rear windows, support your troop stickers, flags painted on warehouses, and on and on and on. You dont see these things in other countries. Not at all. At least not this magnified.

my first blog

so seeing how this is my very first "blog" i think the best thing to do would be to leave a webpage address for a website, group that is truly worth checking out. (my opinion of course)
www.wri.org
WORLD RESOURCE INSTITUTE