![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
Abstract
After publishing a controversial essay on 9/11, Professor Ward Churchill's scholarship and personal identity were subjected to a hostile public investigation. Evidence that Churchill had invented his American Indian identity created vehemence among many professors and tribal leaders who dismissed Churchill because he was not a “real Indian.” This essay examines the discourses of racial authenticity employed to distance Churchill from tribal communities and American Indian scholarship. Responses to Churchill's academic and ethnic self-identification have retrenched a racialized definition of tribal identity defined by a narrow concept of blood. Employing what I term blood-speak, Churchill's opponents harness a biological concept of race that functions as an instrument of exclusion and a barrier to coalitional politics.
Acknowledgement
An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 2007 National Communication Association Conference in Chicago, IL. The author wishes to thank Kristen E. Hoerl, Ronald W. Greene, Kirt H. Wilson, Matthew May, and Daniel C. Brouwer for their helpful commentary on earlier versions of this essay. The author also wishes to thank J. Macgregor Wise and the two anonymous reviewers for their patience, guidance, and helpful criticism.
Notes
1. This essay is reprinted in Ward Churchill, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of US imperial Arrogance and Criminality (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003), 19.
2. See Ward Churchill, “Summary of Fallacies in the University of Colorado Investigative Committee Report of May 9, 2006,” wardchurchill.net/27-Resp_FallaciesofReport_5_20_06.doc (accessed June 11, 2009).
3. The University of Colorado investigating committee report is available at http://www.colorado.edu/news/reports/churchill/churchillreport051606.html. The investigating committee accused Churchill of “plagiarism, fabrication, and falsification.” The committee alleged that in at least six different articles he fabricated stories that the US Army intentionally distributed blankets infected with small pox as a form of biological warfare. The committee also alleged that Churchill wrongly argued that the Dawes Act established the federal blood quantum. In 2007, Churchill filed an unlawful termination lawsuit against Colorado University. In April 2009, a jury found he had been wrongfully terminated for political considerations and awarded him $1 in damages. See Kirk Johnson and Katharine Q. Seelye, “Jury says Professor was Wrongly Fired,” New York Times, April 2, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/03/us/03churchill.html?_r=1&hp (accessed June 11, 2009).
4. Bill Owens, “Governor Owens Letter Calls for Churchill to Step Down,” http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/4151452/detail.html (accessed June 10, 2009).
5. American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council, “Statement of the American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council,” http://www.aimovement.org/moipr/churchill05.html (accessed October 18, 2009); and Jim Adams, “Churchill Controversy on Two Fronts,” Indian Country Today, February 3, 2005, http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096410295 (accessed October 23, 2009).
6. I use the term “American Indian” and “Indian” in the place of other ethnic descriptors. Terms such as American Indian, Native American, First Peoples, Indigenous, among others are the source of much controversy even among activists. Whenever possible, I try to use specific national descriptors, however, given that the subject matter of this essay defends coalitional politics, the use of collective descriptors serves an analytical purpose. AIM founder Russell Means defends the terms “American Indian” and “Indian” “because I know its origins … . As an added distinction the American Indian is the only ethnic group in the United States with the American before our ethnicity. … We were enslaved as American Indians, we were colonized as American Indians, and we will gain our freedom as American Indians, and then we will call ourselves any damn thing we choose.” See Russell Means, “I Am an American Indian, Not a Native American,” http://www.peaknet.net/~aardvark/means.html (accessed December 17, 2007).
7. Kevin Flynn, “The Churchill Files,” Rocky Mountain News, June 4, 2005, 24A, http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/news/churchill/indexDay1.shtml (accessed June 11, 2009); and Suzan Harjo, “Why Native Identity Matters: A Cautionary Tale,” Indian Country Today, February 10, 2005, http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/archive/28171539.html (accessed October 20, 2009).
8. See Vine Deloria Jr. and Clifford M. Lytle, The Nations Within: The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984); Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (Champagne: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Russell Means and Marvin J. Wolf, Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means (London: Macmillan Press, 1996); and Ward Churchill and Glenn Morris, “Key Indian Laws and Cases,” in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed. M. A. Jaimes (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), 13–21.
9. Ward Churchill, Indians Are Us? Culture and Genocide in Native North America (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1993), 333.
10. Ward Churchill quoted in M. Annette Jaimes, “Federal Indian Identification Policy: A Usurpation of Indigenous Sovereignty in North America,” in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, ed. M. A. Jaimes (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), 123.
11. “UKB August Regular Council Meeting Minutes,” Keetoowah News, September/October 2007, http://www.keetoowahcherokee.org/documents/09-07.pdf (accessed April 12, 2010).
12. Jodi A. Byrd, “Living My Native Life Deadly”: Red Lake, Ward Churchill, and the Discourses of Competing Genocides, The American Indian Quarterly 31 (2007): 327.
13. See John Fritch, Catherine Palczewski, James Farrell, and Eric Short, “Disingenuous Controversy: Responses to Ward Churchill's 9/11 Essay,” Argumentation and Advocacy 42 (2006): 190–205; C. Richard King, “Some Academics Try to Push Back: Ward Churchill, the War on Truth, and the Improbabilities of Interruption,” Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies 9 (2009): 31–40. Erika G. King and Mary DeYoung, “Imag(in)ing September 11,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 32 (2008): 123–39; David Schultz and Mitchell Reyes, “Ward Churchill and the Politics of Public Memory,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 11 (2008): 631–58; and Catherine H. Palczewski, “When Times Collide: Ward Churchill's use of an Epideictic Moment to Ground Forensic Argument,” Argumentation and Advocacy 41 (2005): 123–38.
14. See Michael Yellow Bird, “On the Justice of Charging Buffalo: ‘Who Stole American Indians Studies?’ Redux,” Wicazo Sa Review 91 (2007)” 91–9; and Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, “Scandal,” Wicazo Sa Review 91 (2007): 85–9.
15. Yellow Bird, “Charging Buffalo,” 92. It is important to note here that Yellow Bird was called as a witness in Churchill's trial. Yellow Bird testified that Churchill's account of the US Army's distribution of blankets infected with small pox was coherent with his nations’ oral history. Yellow Bird is Assistant Professor of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas.
16. Joane Nagel, American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 243.
17. Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press), 173.
18. For an extended history of this line of racial reasoning see Forbes, Africans, 191–207; and Ronald T. Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (London: Oxford University Press, 1990).
19. I am primarily guided by sociological theories of structuration, notably the proposition that human identities are performed within and governed by a priori social structure. For Giddens, human agency is governed by pre-existing social structures, though such structures are impermanent and are reflexively shaped by human action. Bourdieu makes a similar observation when theorizing the notion of habitus: that human agency is shaped by (and shapes) acquired habits that are reflective of internalized and inherited social conditioning. The purpose of this essay is to be reflexive: to explore both enabling and disabling notions of agency and structure. See Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984); and Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Toward a Reflexive Sociology (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984).
20. Karen L. Blu, The Lumbee Problem: The Making of an American Indian People (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
21. Melinda Maynor, “Making Christianity Sing: The Origins and Experience of Lumbee Indian and African American Church Music,” in Confounding the Colorline: The Indian-Black Experience in North America, ed. James L. Brooks (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), 340.
22. See James Clifford, “Identity in Mashpee,” in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, ed. James Clifford (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); and Jack Campisi, “The New England Tribes and their Quest for Justice,” in The Pequots of Southern New England, ed. Laurence J. Hauptman and James D. Wherry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990).
23. Blu, The Lumbee Problem, 4.
24. Kimberely Tallbear, “DNA, Blood, and Racializing the Tribe,” Wicazo Sa Review 18 (2003): 93.
25. Melissa L. Meyer, “American Indian Blood Quantum Requirements: Blood is Thicker than Family,” in Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, ed. Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 241.
26. Melissa L. Meyer, “American Indian Blood Quantum Requirements: Blood is Thicker than Family,” in Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, ed. Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), 241–2.
27. Jack Forbes, “Blood Quantum: A Relic of Racism and Termination,” http://www.mitsawokett.com/BloodQuantum.htm (accessed October 3, 2009).
28. See Eva Marie Garroutte, Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 42; Circe Dawn Sturm, “Blood Politics, Racial Classification, and Cherokee National Identity,” American Indian Quarterly 22 (1998): 230–58; and Rose Cuison Villazor, “Blood Quantum Land Laws and the Race versus Political Identity Dilemma,” California Law Review 96 (2008): 801–37.
29. See Eva Marie Garroutte, “The Racial Formation of American Indians,” American Indian Quarterly 25 (2001): 225; and Angie Debo, And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972).
30. This was the outcome of Waldron v. United States (1905). For an explanation of the facts of Waldron, see Lauren L. Basson, White Enough to be American? Race Mixing, Indigenous People, and the Boundaries of State and Nation (Raleigh: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
31. See James F. Hamill, “Show Me Your CDIB: Blood Quantum and Indian Identity Among Indian People of Oklahoma,” American Behavior Scientist 47 (2003): 267–82.
32. Jane M. Gaines, Fire & Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 200.
33. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1 (New York: Random House, 1906), 282.
34. Jeffery A. Bennett, “Passing, Protesting, and the Arts of Resistance: Infiltrating the Ritual Space of Blood Donation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94 (2008): 23–43.
35. See Uli Linke, Blood and Nation: The European Aesthetics of Race (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
36. Garroutte, “Racial Formation,” 225.
37. Garroutte, “Racial Formation,”.
38. See Melissa Nobles, Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); Steve Russell, “The Racial Paradox of Tribal Citizenship,” American Studies 46 (2005): 172; and C. Matthew Snipp, “Who are American Indians? Some Observations about the Perils and Pitfalls of Date for Race and Ethnicity,” Population Research and Policy Review 5 (1986): 237–52.
39. See Kimberle Crenshaw, “Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law,” Harvard Law Review 101 (1988): 1331; Ian F. Haney Lopez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: NYU Press, 2006); Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, ed., Critical Whiteness Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2007); and Mark Lawrence McPhail, The Rhetoric of Racism Revisited: Reparations or Separation? (New York: Rowen & Littlefield, 2002); and The Rhetoric of Racism (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994).
40. Ian F. Haney Lopez, “The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice,” Harvard Civil Rights—Civil Liberties Law Review 29 (1994): 3.
41. Ian F. Haney Lopez, “The Social Construction of Race: Some Observations on Illusion, Fabrication, and Choice,” Harvard Civil Rights—Civil Liberties Law Review 29 (1994): 3., 3.
42. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994), 56, original emphasis.
43. “Tribal Citizenship in Crisis,” Indian Country Today, September 18, 2009, http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/opinion/editorials/59728202.html (accessed May 5, 2010).
44. Fay A. Yarbrough, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).
45. See Circe Dawn Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002); and Tiya Miles, Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006).
46. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, “Literary and Political Questions of Transformation: American Indian Fiction Writers,” Wicazo Sa Review 11 (1995): 48.
47. Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior, Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee (New York: The New Press, 1996), 136–7.
48. Yellow Bird, “On the Justice,” 92.
49. Joane Nagel, “False Faces: Ethnic Identity, Authenticity, and Fraud in Native American Discourse and Politics,” in Identity and Social Change, ed. Joseph E. Davis (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000), 81–108.
50. Nagel, Ethnic Renewal, 5; and Stella U. Ogunwole, “The American Indian and Alaska Native Population: 2000,” Census 2000 Brief (February 2002), http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/c2kbr01-15.pdf (accessed October 18, 2009).
51. Colorado University News Center, “Report on Conclusion of Preliminary Review in the Matter of Professor Ward Churchill” (March 24, 2005) http://www.colorado.edu/news/reports/churchill/report.html (accessed August 18, 2010). This report was submitted to the Colorado University Board of Regents to explain that Churchill's hiring, tenure, and promotion were premised on the assumption that he was an American Indian. Churchill's position was a “special opportunity” hire designed to increase faculty diversity. Therefore, Churchill included a UKB tribal enrollment number on his Curriculum Vitae.
52. Jack Hitt, “The Newest Indians,” New York Times, August 21, 2005, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/21/magazine/21NATIVE.html?pagewanted=all (accessed October 23, 2009); and Philip Jenkins, Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
53. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 2 (2005): 3.
54. Casey Ryan Kelly, “Women's Rhetorical Agency in the American West: The New Penelope,” Women's Studies in Communication 32 (2009): 203–31.
55. See Renee Ann Cramer, “The Common Sense of Anti-Indian Racism: Reactions to Mashantucket Pequot Success in Gaming and Acknowledgement,” Law & Social Inquiry 31 (2006): 313–41.
56. Kent A. Ono and John Sloop, “The Critique of Vernacular Discourse,” Communication Monographs 62 (1995): 20.
57. See John M. Sloop and Kent A. Ono, “Out-law Discourse: The Critical Politics of Material Judgment,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 30 (1997): 50–69; and Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California's Proposition 187 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002).
58. See Dilip Gaonkar, “The Idea of Rhetoric in the Rhetoric of Science,” in Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, ed. Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 25–85.
59. Circulation figures were retrieved from the Project for Excellence in Journalism, “Native and Arab American Media,” 2008, http://www.stateofthemedia.org/2009/narrative_ethnic_nativeandarabamerican.php (accessed October 18, 2009); and “Who Reads Indian Country Today,” Indian Country Today, 2006, http://www.indiancountry.com/who_reads_ict.cfm (accessed October 18, 2009).
60. I acknowledge that Indian Country Today is a mainstream newspaper that frequently omits radical and dissenting voices. Nonetheless, I approached this text because it embodies the strongest mainstream Indian backlash against Churchill and therefore features the type of preeminent voices I seek to critique. I am not suggesting these voices represent all of those in Indian Country, simply that the newspaper provides an exemplary showcase of public Indian intellectuals as they distance themselves and American Indian scholarship from Ward Churchill.
61. Fernando Delgado, “When the Silenced Speak: The Textualization and Complications of Latina/o Identity,” Western Journal of Communication 62 (1998): 425.
62. Bernadette Marie Calafell and Fernando Delgado, “Reading Latina/o Images: Interrogating Americanos,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21 (2004): 6.
63. For an explanation of veracity and fragmentation in Native texts, see Jason Edward Black, “Native Resistance Rhetoric and the Decolonization of American Indian Removal Discourse,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95 (2009): 66–88.
64. Jim Adams, “Colorado U Caught in Fracas Over Professor's Remark,” Indian Country Today, March 16, 2005, A2.
65. Suzan Harjo, “Why Native Identity Matters: A Cautionary Tale,” Indian Country Today, February 10, 2005, http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/archive/28171539.html (accessed October 20, 2009).
66. Adams, “Colorado U.”
67. Adams, “Colorado U.”.
68. “Churchill's Identity Revealed in Wake of Nazi Comment,” Indian Country Today, February 3, 2005, http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/archive/28171694.html (accessed October 26, 2009).
69. Suzan Harjo, “Identity, Part Deux,” Indian Country Today, April 13, 2005, http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096410704 (accessed October 21, 2009).
70. Patti Jo King, “Questionable Identity and Questionable Scholarship,” Indian Country Today, March 2, 2005, http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096410417 (accessed October 26, 2009).
71. “The Churchill Episode: Two Unfortunate Currents,” Indian Country Today, February 16, 2005, http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/archive/28171554.html (accessed October 26, 2009).
72. Indian Country Today, “Nazi Comment.”
73. Harjo, “Cautionary Tale.”
74. King, “Questionable Identity.”
75. King, “Questionable Identity.”.
76. Harjo, “Cautionary Tale.”
77. Sturm, Blood Politics, 110.
78. American Indian Movement Grand Governing Council, “Statement.” It is important to note that this statement was reprinted in Indian Country Today on February 4, 2005 (accessed via Lexis Nexis Academic on November 6, 2009).
79. Harjo, “Cautionary Tale.”
80. Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 118.
81. Nagel, Ethnic Renewal, 239.
82. Indian Country Today, “Nazi Comment.”
83. Indian Country Today, “Churchill's Identity.”
84. James Fenelon, “The Problem of Ward and ‘Indian’ Issues,” Indian Country Today, March 23, 2005, A3 (accessed via Lexis Nexis Academic on April 26, 2007).
85. See Troy Johnson, Joane Nagel, and Duane Champagne, ed., American Indian Activism: Alcatraz to the Longest Walk (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997).
86. This was a slogan embraced by members of the National Congress of American Indians in the late 1960s. See Smith and Warrior, Like a Hurricane, 37.
87. See Richard Morris and Philip Wander, “Native American Rhetoric: Dancing in the Shadows of the Ghost Dance,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 76 (1990): 165; John Sanchez and Mary E. Stuckey, “The Rhetoric of American Indian Activism in the 1960s and 1970s,” Communication Quarterly, 48 (2000): 120–36; and Mary Ann Weston, Native American in the News: Images of Indians in the Twentieth Century (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1996), 140–7.
88. Indian Country Today, “Nazi Comment.”
89. Indian Country Today, “Nazi Comment.”.
90. Harjo, “Identity.”
91. Harjo, “Identity.”.
92. Harjo, “Identity.”.
93. Harjo, “Identity.”.
94. Harjo, “Identity.”.
95. Harjo, “Identity.”.
96. Harjo, “Cautionary Tale.”
97. Harjo, “Identity.”
98. Harjo, “Identity.”.
99. Harjo, “Identity.”.
100. Harjo, “Identity.”.
101. Harjo, “Identity.”.
102. King, “Questionable Identity,” A3.
103. Harjo, “Identity.”
104. Deloria, Custer, 270–1.
105. Duane Champagne, “Is American Indian Studies for Real?” Wicazo Sa Review 23 (2008): 81.
106. Russell Means quoted in Nagel, Ethnic Renewal, 244.
107. Rob Capriccios, “Immigration Law Rattles Indian Studies Group,” Indian Country Today, May 7, 2010, http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/home/content/93068064.html (accessed May 8, 2010).
108. Paul E. Frye, “Section 1813 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005: Implications for Tribal Sovereignty and Self-Sufficiency,” Tulsa Law Review 42 (2007): 75.
109. Suzy Khimm, “The Brains behind Arizona's Ethnic Studies Ban,” Mother Jones, May 14, 2010, http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/05/brains-behind-arizona-ethnic-studies-ban (accessed July 28, 2010).
110. Scott Richard Lyons, “The Termination and Removal of Ward Churchill,” Indian Country Today, February 17, 2005, http://www.indiancountrytoday.com/archive/28171329.html (accessed October 30, 2009).