In a revealing article today, The Denver Post takes a closer look at Ward Churchill’s scholarship:

University of Colorado officials reviewing Ward Churchill’s writings and qualifications will find questions about his scholarship and accuracy dating back at least eight years.

“If he is going to get fired, it is going to be for making up data, and that’s one thing you can’t get away with in the academic community,” said Thomas F. Brown, who holds a doctorate from Johns Hopkins and is an assistant professor of sociology at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas.

Brown is one of two professors at different universities who have published or have sought to publish detailed critiques of Churchill’s work. Others have questioned his work in interviews.

University of New Mexico law professor John LaVelle in 1996 published a seven-page essay in the journal American Indian Quarterly questioning the basis of Churchill’s theories and the underlying scholarship behind them.

“In view of America’s entrenched ignorance of the legal and political concerns of Indian tribes, the publication of a grossly misleading and misinforming book like (Churchill’s) ‘Indians Are Us?’ constitutes a regrettable setback in Indian people’s struggle for social justice,” LaVelle wrote.

That work apparently was never requested or considered by CU officials as they transferred Churchill’s tenure from the communications school to ethnic studies in 1997, appointing him chairman of that department.

[…] two of his opinions, often repeated in his works, have drawn much of the attention: His assertion that the U.S. government established criteria that would force Indians out of existence, and his claim that the government intentionally introduced smallpox to the Plains Indians.

Even in the occasionally bare-knuckled world of academic criticism, LaVelle’s 1996 essay on Churchill stands out. LaVelle, an enrolled member of the Santee Sioux Tribe, is particularly offended by Churchill’s view that the various tribes have, through the establishment of membership policies, contributed to Indian problems.

In the essay, LaVelle deconstructs Churchill’s collection of commentaries, “Indians Are Us? Culture and Genocide in Native North America.”

Contained in that collection is a statement by Churchill that the U.S. government, through a piece of legislation called the General Allotment Act, sought to require proof that an Indian was of one-half or more Indian blood before providing a land grant to that person.

Such a requirement would have forced Indians to procreate only among themselves, or eventually their recognized existence would end. Trouble is, LaVelle’s 1996 essay says, the U.S. government never made such a requirement in that law.

“Churchill’s asserted General Allotment Act ‘standard’ does not exist anywhere in the text of the Act,” wrote LaVelle. “Rather, that Act – like nearly all federal legislation in both history and modern times – defers to membership in an Indian tribe as the core criterion for triggering the law’s applicability to individuals.”

Churchill declined to respond to LaVelle’s charge for this story but provided a response to the American Indian Quarterly at the time.

Then-editor Morris W. Foster of the University of Oklahoma said he declined to publish the response because he considered it potentially libelous.

Brown, of Lamar University, complains in print about Churchill’s claim that smallpox-tainted blankets were intentionally distributed by U.S. officials to Indians.

In a brief filed with the Denver court in an effort to have charges of disrupting the 1992 Columbus Day parade dismissed, and in a later essay, Churchill cites UCLA anthropologist Russell Thornton as the source of his assertion that “the U.S. Army distributed smallpox-laden blankets as gifts among the Mandan (Indians).”

But Thornton actually wrote that smallpox was likely accidentally spread by deckhands with the disease as they unloaded merchandise among the Mandan.

“Churchill’s tale of genocide by means of biological warfare is shocking,” Brown writes in a paper he is preparing for publication. “It is also entirely fraudulent.”

Churchill’s defenders point to his meticulous use of footnotes that can stretch for pages after an essay.

“He’s impeccable on his sources and known for his empirical and archival-based methodologies,” said Arturo Aldama, a professor with Churchill in the CU ethnic-studies department. “Whether you agree with it or not, it’s always been praised for academic rigor. He has 400 footnotes per chapter.”

But the footnotes themselves are not always praised.

“By researching those copious endnotes, however, the discerning reader will discover that, notwithstanding all the provocative sound and fury rumbling through his essays, Churchill’s analysis overall is sorely lacking in historical/factual veracity and scholarly integrity,” LaVelle wrote.

And from Ann Coulter (Feb 9), an examination of Churchill’s Native American bona fides:

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.” Maybe we should ask John Kerry to help Churchill fill out a form 180.

In one of his books, “Struggle for the Land,” Churchill advances the argument that one-third of America is the legal property of Indians. And if you believe Churchill is a real Indian, he also happens to be part owner of the Brooklyn Bridge.

In his 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. He later attached an “Addendum” to the essay saying that the 9/11 attack was not only payback for Iraq, but also for various other of this country’s depredations especially against “real Indians” (of which he is not one).

In light of the fact that Churchill’s entire persona, political activism, curriculum vitae, writings and university positions are based on his claim that he’s an Indian, it’s rather churlish of him to complain when people ask if he really is one. But whenever he is questioned about his heritage, Churchill rails that inquiries into his ancestry are “absolutely indefensible.”

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. (At least he’s not posing as a phony Indian math professor.) 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.

By now, all that’s left of Churchill’s claim to Indian ancestry is his assertion: “It is just something that was common knowledge in my family.” (That, and his souvenir foam-rubber “tommyhawk” he bought at Turner Field in Atlanta.)

Over the years, there were other subtle clues the university might have noticed.

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. (Hey, does anybody need 200 velvet paintings of Elvis playing poker with Crazy Horse?)

In the early ‘90s, he hoodwinked an impecunious Cherokee tribe into granting him an “associate membership” by telling them he “wrote some books and was a big-time author.” A tribal spokeswoman explained: He “convinced us he could help our people.” They never heard from him again — yet another treaty with the Indians broken by the white man. Soon thereafter, the tribe stopped offering “associate memberships.”

A decade ago, Churchill was written up in an article in News From Indian Country, titled, “Sovereignty and Its Spokesmen: The Making of an Indian.” The article noted that Churchill had claimed membership in a scrolling series of Indian tribes, but over “the course of two years, NFIC hasn’t been able to confirm a single living Indian relative, let alone one real relative that can vouch for his tribal descent claim.”

When real Indians complained to Colorado University in 1994 that a fake Indian was running their Indian Studies program, a spokeswoman for the CU president said the university needed “to determine if the position was designated for a Native American. And I can’t answer that right now.” Apparently it was answered in Churchill’s favor since he’s still teaching.

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 the chapter titled “Lie for Lie: Linkages between Holocaust Deniers and Proponents of the Uniqueness of the Jewish Experience in World War II,” Churchill calls the Third Reich merely “a crystallization” of Christopher Columbus’ ravages of his people (if he were an Indian).

His research apparently consisted of watching the Disney movie “Pocahontas,” which showed that the Indians meant the European settlers no harm. (That’s if you don’t count the frequent scalpings.)

Even the credulous Nation magazine -– always on red alert for tales of government oppression –- dismissed Churchill’s 1988 book “Agents of Repression” about Cointelpro-type operations against the American Indian Movement, saying the book “does not give much new information” and “even a reader who is inclined to believe their allegations will want more evidence than they provide.” If The Nation won’t buy your anti-U.S. government conspiracy theories, Kemosabe, it’s probably time to pack up the old teepee and hit the trail of tears.

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. (No wonder the Indians aren’t crazy about him.)

In my various posts to date on the Ward Churchill controversy, I’ve tried to make clear that my “defense” of Churchill’s right to free speech extends only to his academically legitimate (if hackneyed and predictable) explication of 911 causality—specifically, the “blowback” theory, which posits that years of US malfeasance and global heavy-handedness not only provided the impetus for the terrorist attacks of 911, but made them all be inevitable.  Firing Churchill for such speech—odious though that speech is—would, I’ve suggested, wind up hurting conservative scholars in the short term, and scholarship generally in the long term—an irony that would likely manifest itself slowly and, for the most part, under the media’s radar.

Instead, I’ve argued that any dismissal of Churchill should be the result of professional misconduct or academic fraud, a solution that would serve the dual purpose of ridding the University of Colorado of a PR cancer while maintaining important protections for legitimate, unpopular academic speech that might conceivably come under attack from motivated populists whose aim it is to influence university curricula to fit their own agendas. 

And now it seems that the scrutiny Churchill invited with a series of vigorous and public defenses of his now-infamous 911 piece will provide just such grounds for that dismissal—by way of a high-profile “deconstruction” of the persona and revisionist histories he’s spent years developing.

In the end, I think the University of Colorado—against its own wishes—will dismiss Churchill. But they will do so for legitimate reasons—specifically, what looks more and more like the intentional misrepresentation of fact in his scholarly work, and for lying about his ancestry (which would likely prove a breach of any moral turpitude clause in his university contract).

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(h/t Ace)