The strange case of Ward Churchill
If Ward Churchill loses his job teaching at the University of Colorado, he could end up giving Howard Dean a real run for his money to head the Democratic National Committee.
Churchill already has a phony lineage and phony war record -- just like John Kerry.
Churchill's claim that he is an Indian isn't an incidental boast, like John Kerry pretending to be Irish. It is central to his career, his writing, his political activism. Churchill has been the co-director of the American Indian Movement of Colorado, the vice chairperson of the American Indian Anti-Defamation Council, and an associate professor and coordinator of American Indian Studies at the University of Colorado.
By Churchill's own account, a crucial factor in his political development was "being an American Indian referred to as 'chief' in a combat unit" in Vietnam, which made him sad. This is known to con men everywhere as a "two-fer."
In addition to an absence of evidence about his Indian heritage, there is an absence of evidence that he was in combat in Vietnam. After the POW Network revealed that Churchill had never seen combat, he countered with this powerful argument: "They can say whatever the hell they want. That's confidential information, and I've never ordered its release from the Department of Defense. End of story."
In Churchill's most famous oeuvre, the famed 9/11 essay calling the 9/11 World Trade Center victims "little Eichmanns," he said "Arab terrorists" -- his quotes -- had simply "responded to the massive and sustained American terror bombing of Iraq" by giving Americans "a tiny dose of their own medicine."
Having blurted out "Iraq" in connection with 9/11 in a moment of pique, Churchill had to backpedal when the anti-war movement needed to argue that Iraq had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Arab terrorism.
Churchill has gone from claiming he is one-eighth Indian "on a good day" to claiming he is "three-sixteenths Cherokee," to claiming he is one-sixty-fourth Cherokee through a Revolutionary War era ancestor named Joshua Tyner. A recent investigation by The Denver Post revealed that Tyner's father was indeed married to a Cherokee. But that was only after Joshua's mother -- and Churchill's relative -- was scalped by Indians.
Churchill is not in the tribal registries kept since the 1800s by the federal government. No tribe will enroll him -- a verification process Churchill dismisses as "poodle papers" for Indians.
In 1990, Churchill was forced to stop selling his art as "Indian art" under federal legislation sponsored by then-representative -- and actual Indian -- Ben Nighthorse Campbell, that required Indian artists to establish that they are accepted members of a federally recognized tribe. Churchill responded by denouncing the Indian artist who had exposed him.
If he's not an Indian, it's not clear what Churchill does have to offer a university. In his book, "A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present," Churchill denounces Jews for presuming to imagine the Holocaust was unique.
In response to the repeated complaints from Indians that a phony Indian was running CU's Indian Studies program, Churchill imperiously responded: "Guess what that means, guys⢠I'm not taking anyone's job, there wouldn't be an Indian Studies program if I wasn't coordinating it. ... They won't give you a job just because you have the paper." This white man of English and Swiss-German descent apparently believes there are no actual Indians deserving of his position at CU.
As long as we're all agreed that there are some people who don't deserve jobs at universities, why isn't Churchill one of them?
Ann Coulter, a lawyer and political analyst, is a columnist for Human Events.
