|
|
|
|
|
|
|
By a contributor and mim3@mim.org February 22, 2005
As I am writing this, a February 21 opinion piece from The Olympian (WA) appears on the first page of Google News search results for: "Ward Churchill", as well as the first page of Yahoo! News search results for the same: "Other Views: Churchill's claim of American Indian ancestry is bogus," by Gannett News Service columnist George Benge (http://www.theolympian.com/home/news/20050221/opinion/92310.shtml). Benge admits and complains that:
Under the cover of academic freedom, which is a good thing, Churchill can say and do just about anything he pleases, no matter how outrageous, absurd or quasitreasonous, and he still gets to keep his job as a tenured professor of ethnic studies at Colorado.Benge here is slightly better than open reactionary Ann Coulter. Coulter seems to think tenured professors can, or at least should be, fired for the quality of what they say, outside their universities, regardless of the legality of their words.(1)
Within the legal framework already set up, Churchill can't be fired. So, the next step for the reactionaries is to attack Churchill's credibility, which includes the truthfulness of his "Some People Push Back" essay . (And this is what it comes down to: Churchill is being attacked because he is correct , not just because he is unpopular. He is correct even though his essay may not be "scholarly," but more rhetorical. Not only do the detractors and critics treat Churchill's essay as if it were intended to be scholarly, they misrepresent what he said even rhetorically.) This is why it's so damaging when "leftists" go as far as misrepresenting the content of the essay, supposedly for the sake of having a "critical dialogue" with Churchill. Outrageously, some of these individuals even claim to be supporting Churchill in his struggle with the Colorado bureaucrats and the wanna-be bureaucrats, like David Horowitz. There may be a time for critical dialogue with Churchill, but the fools and open reactionaries just could not wait until after the conclusion of the Colorado regents' "investigation" in March.
So, here comes George Benge, whipping up readers' jealousy for the perks of tenured professorship: "Imagine how long many of us would remain in our jobs -- and rightly so -- if we wrote the following, as Churchill did, about the horrific events of Sept. 11, 2001." Benge goes on to take quotes from Churchill out of context, particularly the one talking about the relative "humanitarianism" of the perpetrators of the Trade Center attacks, in a way that betrays either Benge's dishonesty or his incompetence.
Within the current capitalist system, the bourgeoisie usually preaches respect for "contracts" and "predictable expectations." Yet even though U.$. colleges are one of the few "export" sectors of the economy, still competitive on the global market, the bourgeois press is constantly entertaining fixing something to break it--namely tenure for professors.
In contrast, we aim at revolution across the board for education, not just violation of a single contract, as in Ward Churchill's case. We will change the motivations for education by reorganizing society to increase them.
Attacking Churchill's credibility in another way, Benge repeats the same old bullshit about Churchill's indigenous lineage. At the end of his article, Benge remarks: "[Suzan Shown] Harjo and AIM speak for all true American Indian people." This remark would seem strange, but Benge is known to his regular readers as a "member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma."
To Benge's credit, at least he does not tout his own indigenous credentials right in his article (most Google News and Yahoo! News users will not be regular readers of Benge's column) but what he is doing is continuous with others' allegations about Churchill's First Nation identity, as if that had anything to do with his current struggle with the Colorado bureaucrats. Even indulging the arguments questioning Churchill's indigenous identity, it can only be concluded that they emanate from identity politics, racism(2), or both. The latter is often the case for the white nationalists who purport to defend indigenous ethnic purity against Churchill's Cherokee identity.(3) The worst spin and cut job was in the New York Post, which totally obliterated the "associate" versus full member question while making it sound like Churchill claimed to be in a particular database as a full member, when he never did. Careful readers will note there is not any quote from Churchill making any claim.(4)
Anyone who obscures the fact that the North Amerikan white oppressor nation as a whole--excepting a relative handful of scattered individual white proletarians and lumpen-proletarians--is the enemy of First Nations in the united $nakes and Kanada, is doing the propaganda work of the enemy itself. Plain and simple. Regardless of whether they know it or not.
Whether a persyn is indigenous or not does not determine the truthfulness of their statements. It is always possible (in fact common) to find two oppressed nationality individuals who disagree with each other on even fundamental questions--not least because of the profound social differences even within oppressed nations. Those who do not realize this are making inroads for sinister attacks on the anti-imperialist struggle, pitting identities against each other when the real issue is line. The oppressed must have independent institutions, but this does not mean undercutting correct lines by focusing on identity.
The original genocide of the white man against First Nations is still playing out in cases like Ward Churchill's. The hard truth is that First Nations across North America are locked in debates over blood quantums, because the white man so decimated the First Nations. Some First Nation people favor higher blood quantums and others emphasize culture. Neither blood nor cultural identity can provide firm bases for decisions the type of which Stalin referred to in his objective description of nation-hood. MIM has stressed that in some circumstances the identity may be more important than the blood where the blood does not correspond with cultural upbringing. Adding to the complications is the reality that members with greater blood percentages may nonetheless decide to leave national territories and even take up non-First Nation spouses--regardless of how the debate settles out on blood vs. culture--thanks to the sugar-coated bullets and power of integration in the empire.
Even when MIM comes to power, the terrible truth of genocide will still be with us. Nothing from Karl Marx's genius helps to waive a wand and make that problem go away. There will be difficult decisions to make about First Nations in the future, starting with who should count as members.
The white man's media has taken advantage of the division of opinion within the First Nations over the impossible bind that the First Nations exist in thanks to the genocide wiping out most of the full-blooded members. Ward Churchill has done absolutely nothing wrong on the identity question and never made any claim regarding ethnic origin that cannot be backed. It is the media taking advantage of public ignorance regarding the blood vs. culture issue in the surviving First Nations people, which is intractable because of the original genocide.
To be sure, there are those opportunists such as Dennis Banks and others willing to inject the identity issue where it does not belong--a discussion of 9/11. It would not change the fact that Ward Churchill made no claim to full-blooded or even full membership status in the band of Cherokee he chose to affiliate with. Nor would it change the fact that the more important issue is whether his speech is right or not and whether we should allow this state to regulate his speech.
If any motivations should be in question, it should be the motivations of those attacking Ward Churchill on 9/11. It is obvious that people angling for jobs or grants from Uncle $am may feel they are getting on politicians' good side by slandering Ward Churchill and diverting discussion to blood quantum questions the public knows nothing about. A brief investigation by MIM shows that as with most First Nations bureaucrats, in the Cherokee Nation there is a continuous search for federal grant money(5) that could lead us to question the motivations for attacking Ward Churchill's identity!
Identity politics is basically one big, continuous and systematic error of ad hominem reasoning. Some learn to avoid ad hominem logical fallacies and some never do. On the flipside, those guilty of the "argument from authority" are also wrong and encourage ad hominem errors as well. Both ad hominem fallacy and argument from authority logical fallacy rest on the identity of the speaker, not the speaker's argument. Those who realize that 2+2=4 no matter who says it can defeat identity politics.
The past few decades, more and more people are "identifying" as First Nation people even though the blood quantum is obviously not going up. If Ward Churchill's appearance in the media causes even more people to claim First Nation ethnic status, that is a separate issue and can be discussed after the firing question and what to do to make sure there is not another witch-hunt like this again.
Notes
1. Ann Coulter, "Liberals can't draw a line between themselves and Churchill?," Pasadena Star-News, February 20, 2005, http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/Stories/0,1413,206~11851~2722994,00.html
2. As David Peterson, for instance, points out in: "Ward Churchill," February 20, 2005, http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=30&ItemID=7283
3. "The blood quantum criterion, as historically tainted as tribal enrollment, is the pseudoscientific negative of the kind of racist thinking that created the one drop rule whereby one drop of negro blood makes you a negro. Blood quantum erases indigenous people by making Indians technically not Indian. Bellecourt-style identity policing, ignoring logic, history, and his movement's supposed ends, does anything but reinforce native sovereignty." Faith Attaguile, "Why do you think we call it struggle?," http://www.coloradoaim.org/why.html (accessed February 21, 2005)
"The truth is that Churchill's genealogy has been checked out by two separate Cherokee researchers, both of whom have concluded that he is indeed of Cherokee descent. Further, Ward has been formally and repeatedly recognized as an Indian by significant sectors of the Denver and Boulder Indian communities. The last I heard, naming your relatives and community recognition were still respectable ways of verifying Indianness...or are things done differently up there in Great Lakes country?" Bob Robideau, "Open Letter to Paul DeMain," 1994, http://www.coloradoaim.org/history/1994RobideauslettertoPaulDemain.htm
4. http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/39967.htm
5. http://www.cherokee.org/Phoenix/2003/images11/Nov03.pdf, p. 6.