Ward Churchill at Evergreen State College

This has been a problem since the sixties, when it was trendy for hippies to imagine that they were the new Native Americans. There are still hippies in America, and they still do this. You can support Indian causes without trying to BE one. If white people really need to get their "indigenous" freak on, they need to go back to Europe, Marcus Garvey style.

"... what if identity is conceived not as a boundary to be maintained but as a nexus of relations and transactions actively engaging a subject? The story or stories of interaction must be more complex, less linear and teleological. What changes when the subject of history is no longer Western?"
Clifford

"Identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead, of identity as a 'production' which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation. This view problematizes the very authority and authenticity to which the term 'cultural identity' lays claim."
Hall


"Trickster hermeneutics is the interpretation of simulations in the literature of Survivance, the ironies of descent and racialism, transmutation, third gender, and themes of transformation in oral tribal stories and written narratives. Trickster stories arise in silence, not scriptures, and are the holotropes of imagination; the manifold turns of scenes, the brush of natural reason, characters that liberate the mind and never reach a closure in stories. Trickster stories are the postindian simulations of tribal Survivance."
Vizenor


"The search for a foundational subject, as history teaches, tends to lead either to a mysticism wherein the existence of the self is assumed but cannot be demonstrated or to skepticism concerning the whole enterprise," notes Paul kerby in Narrative and the Self. The self is a narrative construed "not as a prelinguistic given that merely employs language, much as we might employ a tool, but rather as a product of language."
Vizenor

Ward Churchill may not really be Native American and certainly didn't grow up on the rez, but REAL Native Americans can't deny he's one of the most important scholars of Native American history and genocide EVER!!! Furthermore, he NEVER said that everyone who died in the WTC attacks were "little eichmans". He specifically described a small group of the victims who inhabited the top floors of the building who were literally many of the economic architects of the New World Order which means they play an essential role in carrying on the systematic genocide of poor and indigenous peoples that is the FOUNDATION of this countries so called democracy, thus RIGHTLY described as little eichmans. so, you must have more of a problem with Ward's message of Justice for the world's indigenous and poor than with the legacy of genocide this countries govt. (and who's populace passively accepts) continues to carry on throughout the world. your statements are INNACCURATE regarding his insensitivity. those who believe the problem lies in someones scholarship are INSENSITIVE TO THE ABSOLUTELY URGENT STRUGGLE FOR THE WORLDS POOR AND INDIGENOUS TO STRUGGLE AGAINST THIS IMPERIALIST BEAST BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY!!!

While Ward was in town for his Reed college appearance, I had the opportunity for a quick interview with him. In this 30 minute interview, he explains and defends those comments which led to his recent notoriety.
Ward says that many people have written to him and remarked, by way of criticizing his stance on free speech, that free speech has consequences, insinuating, I suppose that he should be fired for his explanation of why the World Trade Center was attacked on September 11, 2001. "I would point out that if it has consequences, it's not free; by definition. They've got no conception of it; they've got no conception of critical engagement; they've got no conception of the right to express and opinion; they do have a conception of order-an order to maintain business as usual, period."
When asked about his calling those who lost their lives in the WTC attack "little Eichmans," Ward stressed that they were "little," that "they were what was symbolized by Eichman, that is, people who engage in pursuit of structural efficiency and perfection, of structure, of system, of process that generates human carnage as a result. They do so knowingly, amidst rationalization, justification, prevarication and so forth, in order to further their own interest irrespective of the cost and consequence to others.
If you can engage in that, if you can rationalize it, if you can moralize it to a justification, if you can do what ever is necessary in order to participate irrespective of the cost and consequence, then yo are symbolized by Eichman, because that is after all, what he excelled at. He was the consummate technician, bureaucrat of genocide. He was not a killer. He didn't kill anyone himself, he just made the killing not only possible ultimately efficient, to further the interests of the system in which he found himself"
When asked if this could be extended to consumers of that society, Ward said that "it could, it doesn't necessarily. One consumes by virtue of existence and you are in the structure. The question is not whether or not you consume or whether you adopt particular postures and stylistic gestures in terms of lifestyle, it's a question of whether you deliberately and in all consciousness do what you can do to oppose and transform the system that generates these results. You will participate, by virtue of breathing, the question is whether you offset that participation with opposition, and the people in the Trade Center that I was referring to were a sort of technocratic core of Empire, were not in opposition in any sense at all. They were vested in furthering and maximizing the efficiency or maximizing the profit, which symbolizes the efficiency of that system."
And this is just the first 4 minutes of the interview. Ward continues describing the machinations of the U.S. Empire, in the Far East, in the Middle East, in South America, and closer to home, the holocaust visited upon the Indigenous populations of the American continent and U.S. complicity in the African slave trade.

April 16, 2005 Ward Churchill Interview, REAL PLAYER

April 16, 2005 Ward Churchill Interview, MP3

So no real, valuable criticism of his politics or what he has to say. No instead, just a bunch of very questionable remarks about his ancestry and how he identifies, based almost souly on his defensive reaction. I don't blame him for getting offended and razzed about being asked such intrusive and irrelevent questions.

This sort of behavior, eating alive every shread of imperfection or percieved imperfection of public figures, is exactly the kind of behavior that keeps any radicals from daring to speak publicly on their views. The kind of response recieved by opposition is tea and crumpets when compared to the friendly fire. This kind of destructive, petty, socially retarded behavior should be discouraged, not featured.

I think Ward should just dump the intelligentsia altogether. Those people are too priviledged to actually change anything anyway. They're too into armchair intellectualism and the dictatorship of the inteligentsia as presented by Plato and other white authors that they like you to pretend were the inventors of philosophy and humanities. They live out of books and not true experience, like bookworm versions of couch potatoes. Ward should stick to what he's best at. He has a class consciousness like I have never heard in another speaker. No other speaker that I've heard up to now speaks straight to my heart like he does. I wish he would focus more on working class communities and just finally give the finger to the university brats once and for all.