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Ward LeRoy Churchill (born October 2, 1947) is an American writer, activist, controversial speaker, and academic. He is a professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and author of over a dozen books and many essays.

Background

Early life and education

Churchill was born and grew up in a blue-collar family in Elmwood, Illinois. His parents, Maralyn and Jack Churchill, divorced while Ward was still a toddler. In March 1950, his mother married Henry Carlton Debo, an employee of Caterpillar in downstate Peoria, as a result of which Churchill has two half-brothers, Tom and Danny, and a half-sister, Terry. When he enrolled in Elmwood High School, Churchill went by the name Ward Debo, taking his stepfather's surname, but when he graduated in 1965, he was listed in his yearbook, the Ulmus, as Ward L. Churchill.

He was drafted by the U.S. Army and saw active service in the Vietnam War from 1966 to 1968. Military records through the Freedom of Information Act show he was trained as a projectionist and light truck driver. Radio host Bob Newman published these military records to dispute alleged 1987 claims by Churchill that he had served as a paratrooper trained in reconnaissance.Template:Inote Churchill later received his B.A. and M.A. in Communication from Sangamon State University, now the University of Illinois at Springfield.

In 1990, he joined the University of Colorado at Boulder as an assistant professor and was granted tenure the following year.

Writing

As a scholar, Churchill has written on Native American history and culture, and is particularly outspoken about the genocide inflicted on the indigenous peoples of North America by European settlers — repression that continues to this day.

In Fantasies of the Master Race (1992), Churchill examines the portrayal of Native Americans and the use of Native American symbols in popular American culture. He focuses on such phenomena as Tony Hillerman's mystery novels, the film Dances with Wolves, and the New Age movement, finding examples of cultural imperialism and exploitation. Churchill calls author Carlos Castaneda, who claims to reveal the teachings of a Yaqui Indian shaman, the "greatest hoax since Piltdown Man."

Churchill's Indians 'R' Us (1993), a sequel to Fantasies of the Master Race, further explores Native American issues in popular culture and politics. He examines the movie Black Robe, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation killings, Leonard Peltier, sports mascots, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990, and blood quantum laws, calling them tools of genocide. Churchill is particularly outspoken about New Age exploitations of shamanism and Native American sacred traditions, and the "do-it-yourself Indianism" of certain contemporary authors.

Struggle For The Land (reissued 2002) is a collection of essays in which Churchill chronicles the U.S. government's systematic exploitation of native land and the killing or displacement of the Native Americans who once inhabited it. He details Indian efforts in the 19th and 20th centuries to prevent defoliation and industrial practices such as surface mining.

Churchill's A Little Matter of Genocide (1998) is a survey of ethnic cleansing from 1492 to the present. He compares the treatment of North American Indians to a number of genocides in history, such as those in Cambodia and Armenia, and those of the Gypsies, Poles, and Jews by the Nazis.

In Perversions of Justice (2002), Churchill argues that the U.S. legal system was adapted to gain control over Native American people. Tracing the evolution of federal Indian law, Churchill argues that the principles set forth were not only applied to non-Indians in the U.S., but later adapted for application abroad. He concludes that this demonstrates the development of America's "imperial logic," which depends on a "corrupt form of legalism" to establish colonial control and empire.

In Agents of Repression (1988), co-authored by Jim Vander Wall, the authors describe "the secret war" against the Black Panther Party and American Indian Movement carried out during the late 1960s and '70s by the FBI under the COINTELPRO program. The COINTELPRO Papers (reissued 2002), also with Jim Vander Wall, examines a series of original FBI memos that detail the Bureau's activities against various leftist groups, from the U.S. Communist Party in the 1950s to activists concerned with Central American issues in the 1980s.

Activism

Churchill has been active since at least 1984 as the co-director of the Denver-based American Indian Movement of Colorado, an autonomous chapter of the American Indian Movement. In 1993, he and other local AIM leaders—including Russell Means, Glen Morris, Bob Robideau, and David Hill—broke with the national AIM leadership, including Dennis Banks, Clyde Bellecourt and Vernon Bellecourt, claiming that all AIM chapters are autonomous. The schism continues, with the AIM claiming that the local AIM leaders are tools of the government being used against Indians.

Churchill has been a leader of Colorado AIM's annual protests in Denver against the Columbus Day holiday and its associated parade. These protests have brought Colorado AIM's leadership into conflict with some leaders in the Denver Italian-American community, the main supporters of the parade. Churchill and others have been arrested while protesting for acts such as blocking the parade.

Initially, some local American Indian support and advocacy organizations in the Denver metro area believed that the activities of the Colorado AIM chapter damage the work of the Colorado Indian Commission and Denver Indian Center. This was back in the early 90's. Since then, thousands of local indians annually particpate in the protest.

In April 1983, Churchill traveled to Tripoli and Benghazi as a representative of the AIM and the International Indian Treaty Council to meet Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi of Libya while a U.S. travel ban to that country was in place. The visit was intended to seek support from al-Qaddafi regarding the U.S. government's violation of Indian treaties.

Artwork

Apart from his academic position and writing, since the 1970s, Churchill has attained a certain notoriety as a visual artist. Works by Churchill, such as lithographs, woodcuts, and drawings are fairly widely exhibited in galleries of the American Southwest, and to some degree elsewhere. As with the work "Winter Attack", discussed below, Churchill frequently takes as subject matter of visual compositions historical photographs or other past works, particularly ones associated with Native American figures. Screen prints and other signed works by Churchill are often available on eBay. The online journal Artnet mentions Churchill's artwork.

9/11 essay controversy

The essay

Churchill wrote an essay called "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens" about the September 11, 2001 attacks, in which he argued that American foreign policies provoked the attacks, describing the "technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire" working in the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns."

Churchill argued that the impact on the population of Iraq of decade-long economic sanctions, together with the Middle East policies of President Lyndon Johnson, and the history of Crusades against the Islamic world, had contributed to a climate in which 9/11 was what he called a "natural and inevitable response."

The "roosting chickens" phrase comes from Malcolm X's comment about the assassination of U.S. president John F. Kennedy that Kennedy "never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon."

Churchill explained what he meant in a February 2005 interview with Democracy Now!:

If you want to avoid September 11s, if you want security in some actual form, then it's almost a biblical framing, you have to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. As long as you're doing what the U.S. is doing in the world, you can anticipate a natural and inevitable response of the sort that occurred on 9/11. If you don't get the message out of 9/11, you're going to have to change, first of all, your perception of the value of those others who are consigned to domains, semantic domains like collateral damage, then you've really got no complaint when the rules you've imposed come back on you.

In an allusion to Hannah Arendt's depiction of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann as an ordinary person promoting the activity of an evil system, Churchill referred to the "technocrats" working at the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns." He wrote:

As for those in the World Trade Center, well, really, let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire, the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved and they did so both willingly and knowingly.

He wrote that the victims were:

... too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.

Churchill compared the American people to the "good Germans" of Nazi Germany, claiming that the vast majority of Americans had ignored the civilian suffering caused by the sanctions on Iraq during the 1990s, which he characterized as a policy of genocide.

The essay was later expanded into a book, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, which won Honorable Mention for the Gustavus Myer Human Rights Award in 2004.

Imbroglio

National attention was drawn to the essay in January 2005, when Churchill was invited to speak at Hamilton College as a member of a panel during a debate entitled "Limits of Dissent".

The text of the essay was quoted on the January 28, 2005 edition of the Fox News Channel program The O'Reilly Factor. Bill O'Reilly initiated a campaign against Churchill, imploring his viewers to e-mail the college to cancel Churchill's invitation. A flood of 6,000 e-mails resulted. In the ensuing uproar, the lecture was changed to a larger venue, but was ultimately cancelled by the college's president, Joan Stewart, because of what were called "credible threats of violence". Churchill has written that he received threats against his life as a consequence of the news coverage.

In response to what he called "grossly inaccurate media coverage concerning analysis of the September 11, 2001 attacks," Churchill clarified his views:

I am not a "defender" of the September 11 attacks, but simply pointing out that if U.S. foreign policy results in massive death and destruction abroad, we cannot feign innocence when some of that destruction is returned. I have never said that people "should" engage in armed attacks on the United States, but that such attacks are a natural and unavoidable consequence of unlawful U.S. policy. As Martin Luther King, quoting Robert F. Kennedy, said, "Those who make peaceful change impossible make violent change inevitable."

He continued:

It is not disputed that the Pentagon was a military target, or that a CIA office was situated in the World Trade Center. Following the logic by which U.S. Defense Department spokespersons have consistently sought to justify target selection in places like Baghdad, this placement of an element of the American "command and control infrastructure" in an ostensibly civilian facility converted the Trade Center itself into a "legitimate" target. Again following U.S. military doctrine, as announced in briefing after briefing, those who did not work for the CIA but were nonetheless killed in the attack amounted to no more than "collateral damage". If the U.S. public is prepared to accept these "standards" when they are routinely applied to other people, they should not be surprised when the same standards are applied to them.

On January 31, 2005, Churchill resigned as chairman of the Ethnic Studies department at the University of Colorado, but remains a tenured professor.

Colorado Republican governor Bill Owens and other Democrat and Republican state lawmakers publicly called for Churchill's dismissal. The Colorado House of Representatives, with unanimous support from Republicans and Democrats, adopted a resolution condemning Churchill's statements.

The Board of Regents of the University of Colorado, meeting in executive session on February 3 2005, adopted a resolution apologizing to the American people for Churchill's statements, and ratifying interim chancellor Phil DiStefano's review of Churchill's actions. DiStefano was directed to investigate whether Churchill had overstepped his bounds as a faculty member, whether his actions were cause for d