Questions stoke
Ward Churchill's firebrand past
Sunday,
February 13, 2005
He is inspirational or,
perhaps, controversial enough to draw 1,000 mostly admiring people at a
moment's notice for a speech last week.
At the same time, he is so
polarizing that a pair of fellow academics and several Indian leaders devoted
countless hours to debunking his ancestry and his scholarship long before he
became famous for demonizing the victims of Sept. 11.
Today, the debate over Ward
Churchill's contentious essay on the terror attacks has mushroomed into clearly
divergent camps of those who find his writing, philosophy or scholarship
repugnant - including families of Sept. 11 victims - and those who defend his
ideas and his right to be heard.
Everything from his service
record in Vietnam to his ethnic heritage to the quality of his scholarly work
has been deconstructed - fueled by his own statements that don't always stand
up.
He's described himself in
interviews and documents as Indian - sometimes Creek, sometimes Cherokee,
sometimes both - but police records indicate otherwise, and he has been unable
or unwilling to provide any documentation of his ancestry.
He says he walked a dangerous
point position in Vietnam, but his military records say he was a light-truck
driver. Experts in his field of American Indian studies can't agree on the
quality of his scholarship.
To a degree, the 57-year-old
Churchill says, he is reveling in the spotlight, particularly the exposure it
has given his controversial essay written after the attacks of Sept. 11. "Maybe
10,000 would have read it. And now, well, it would have cost me millions of
dollars in Madison Avenue talent to get the same attention to it," he said
recently. But in the next breath, he says, "It's gone too far. You get
insanity prevailing as public discourse."
A likable, political youth
Churchill was born to Jack
LeRoy Churchill and Maralyn Lucretia Allen in Urbana, Ill., in 1947 and named
after his grandfather. His mother and father were divorced when he was 1 1/2,
at a time when divorce was highly stigmatized. He felt that stigma, according
to one of his high school friends, buddying up with someone who also came from
a split home. He was raised by his mother and stepfather along with a number of
stepbrothers and stepsisters.
He was known as
"Wardo" in high school, where he struck a clean-cut pose as a student-athlete
and letterman at Elmwood Community High School in Elmwood, Ill., a town of
2,100 people 25 miles west of Peoria, where he had lived since he was a small
boy. He also was known as Ward Debo for a time in high school, taking his
stepfather's name. He graduated in 1965 in a class of 55 students.
Some high school classmates
recall that Churchill had mentioned having Indian heritage in the 1960s. U.S.
census records from 1950 document no Indians in Elmwood. In 1960, two people in
the town identified themselves as "other," but no one claimed to be
Indian. Surrounding Peoria County listed 21 people that year as Indian.
At Elmwood High, Churchill
played fullback on a football team that won one game, and he played basketball.
He appeared in the junior and senior class play, according to the 1965
yearbook. He also served on the yearbook staff, in the band and in the pep club
for a year. His high school classmates remember him as a friendly teen who
liked to debate politics. Even then, he was left-leaning.
"He was outgoing, very
smart and very much the underachiever," said Sarah Christy, who remembers
Churchill talking about his Indian heritage. "He was the typical smart,
creative kind of person who found the standard stuff of school to be kind of
boring." He graduated in 1965 and went to work in a local Caterpillar
tractor factory. In February 1966, he was arrested in nearby Lewistown,
according to a brief story in the Peoria Journal Star. He was charged with
illegal possession of alcohol, paid a $25 fine and was soon off to the Army.
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Clouded picture from Vietnam
U.S. Army records produced in
2004 in response to a request from the organization News From Indian Country
show that Churchill was inducted on Nov. 16, 1966, and trained as a light-truck
driver and projectionist. He spent most of a year in Vietnam.
The stories he has told over
the years of his Vietnam service have varied dramatically. On a 1980 résumé
submitted to the University of Colorado, Churchill wrote that he served as a
public-information specialist who "wrote and edited the battalion
newsletter and wrote news releases."
In a 1987 interview with The
Denver Post, and as recently as two weeks ago, Churchill described his Vietnam
service as more complicated. In the 1987 interview, he said he had attended
paratrooper school and been assigned as part of an elite long- range
reconnaissance patrol to hunt the enemy. His service records do not reflect
paratrooper school, or training or assignment on reconnaissance.
At his recent trial on
charges of disrupting Denver's Columbus Day parade, he said he had walked
"point" in a combat unit in Vietnam and was called "chief"
because of his Indian heritage. "I was on the ground pulling triggers. You
can't undo that. And I have an obligation to do what I can by way of
compensation," Churchill said in a recent interview. "You can say
that is the foundational reason that I do most all of what I do."
Lt. Justin Journeay, a
spokesman for the Army at Fort Carson, said it is conceivable a truck driver in
Vietnam could have seen combat in some situations. But he said he doubted that
a driver would lead point on patrol. Churchill has repeatedly declined to
comment on the discrepancies between his printed military record and the
descriptions he has given of his service.
War was a turning point
But there is little question
that he returned from Vietnam after his discharge in 1968 as a changed person. "When
he came back from Vietnam, he turned into a radical," said Scott Davis, a
high school classmate. "He was a war protester. He burned the American
flag in front of the Peoria County Courthouse."
In the 1987 interview,
Churchill said he started spending time in Chicago at the office of Students
for a Democratic Society, an anti-war, leftist group. There, he said, he became
friends with Mark Clark of Peoria, a member of the Black Panthers killed in
1969 in a shootout with police.
He also said he met
representatives of the radical Weather Underground, and he said in 1987 that he
had taught them how to make bombs. He has declined to comment since then on his
1987 claims.
He enrolled at Illinois
Central, a community college, and then Sangamon State University in
Springfield, Ill., where he graduated four years after the experimental
alternative- education college was founded in 1970. At Sangamon, students
received written evaluations but were given the choice of receiving grades
along with them.
He said he received all A's
and a B in his two years at the school, earning a bachelor's in technological
communications in 1974 and a master's in communications theory in 1975,
according to the University of Illinois at Springfield, which took over
Sangamon in 1995.
And though he has produced no
evidence that he has any true Indian lineage, it is clear that he had developed
a genuine interest in all things Indian.
"I was identifying more
with people of color than the white left," Churchill said in the 1987
interview. Sometime around the 1973 siege at Wounded Knee, Churchill developed
a relationship with Indian leader Russell Means. After Means became a celebrity
through the dismissal of charges against him, Churchill became his aide and,
according to some biographical information, his speechwriter.
To pay the bills, he briefly
worked as a designer with Soldier of Fortune magazine, and he applied for a job
with CU.
In paperwork accompanying his
1978 application for a job, Churchill checked the box for "American Indian
or Alaskan Native." Two years later, on a résumé, he noted that he was
"Creek/Cherokee (unenrolled)" - the last notation meant he was not an
official member of the tribes.
A turbulent personal life
He was hired in 1980 as
acting director of the American Indian Equal Opportunities Program at CU. Three
years later, he went with a delegation from the American Indian Movement to
visit Libyan dictator Moammar Khadafy at a time the United States had broken
diplomatic relations with the African nation. He was part of a 15-member
delegation of U.S. minority groups seeking support from African nations,
according to The Associated Press.
At CU, he held several administrative
positions until he was appointed associate professor in 1991 in the
communications department and received tenure the same year.
His tenure was transferred to
the ethnic studies department in 1997, and he was appointed full professor the
same year. His classes are full. "His classes are standing-room- only.
There are always 50 to 60 students on the waiting list, and these aren't just
ethnic studies students; they are students of all disciplines," said
Arturo Aldama, a professor in CU's ethnic studies department.
He was chairman of the ethnic
studies department for 2 1/2 years until he resigned the post Jan. 31 when the
controversy exploded. Throughout that time, his personal life was in a
near-constant state of turmoil, according to court records. In 1977, Churchill
and Dora-Lee Larson started living together in what divorce documents describe
as a common-law marriage. That ended in 1984 when Larson filed for divorce and
asked to have her address kept secret because of "past violence and threats"
from Churchill. He did not respond then, nor last week, to questions about that
case. She did not respond to messages seeking comment.
The division of property in
that divorce shows many of the trappings of an aging '60s radical.
Churchill demanded that Larson
return nearly 100 books, including Karl Marx's "Das Capital," a first
edition of "The Little Red Book" by Mao Tse- tung, and various
anarchist tracts.
Three years later, Churchill
married Marie Annette Jaimes, a fellow CU employee. Jaimes' work on Indian
history, particularly the General Allotment Act that conveyed land to
recognized members of tribes in the 1800s, was frequently cited by Churchill in
his own academic research - and criticized as untrue by other academics, particularly
University of New Mexico law professor John LaVelle.
That marriage ended in 1995,
shortly after Jaimes wrote a glowing review of a Churchill book for a local
literary journal. She filed for divorce and today teaches at San Francisco
State University. She also did not return messages seeking comment.
Churchill's third wife,
25-year-old Leah Kelly, was killed May 31, 2000, when hit by a car outside
Boulder, and Churchill's biography of her continues to stir bad feelings with
her family. Kelly had a blood-alcohol content of 0.35 percent when a motorist
came upon her outside of town. He said she was lying in the road and he had no
time to stop. Churchill later wrote that her death "left a crater in my
soul," but he blamed her alcoholism, and her demise, on the colonial
treatment Indians received from white people.
Her family today feels
Churchill used Kelly's death to make philosophical points with which they don't
agree. He portrayed her family as dysfunctional - a dysfunction he said was
caused by her Indian parents' confinement to Indian schools. The family and her
Ojibwe tribe dispute those details and Churchill's overall assessment that Leah
Kelly was ground down by a white man's system until she became a doomed
alcoholic.
"This was a really bright,
outgoing (person), and she was absolutely beautiful," her sister Rhonda
Kelly said. "I have yet to come across anybody who disliked her."
Churchill is now married to
his fourth wife, Natsu Saito, a fellow professor in ethnic studies.
Lawsuits and legal troubles
Since 1983, Churchill has had
several minor run-ins with the law. He also has been stopped for speeding,
driving an unsafe vehicle and driving without a valid license, according to
court records. Officers and police records listed him as white.
In 1996, Churchill clashed
with a parking services employee and was cited for use of intimidation and
violence on CU grounds. Those charges were dropped.
Additionally, he has been
sued more than a dozen times, including a 1992 suit filed by the U.S. government
for failing to repay an $18,000 student loan, a judgment that was satisfied by
Churchill.
And as he has gained fame -
or infamy - far beyond the academic world, Churchill has found some of his core
principles challenged. A critic of this country's "mighty engine of
profit," he brings down $94,242 from CU - $114,032 before he resigned as
chairman of the ethnic studies department - and his acceptance of so much money
from the society he derides became one of the topics of last week's
question-and- answer period on campus.
A student, referring to
Churchill's characterization of World Trade Center workers as technocrats like
Nazi Adolf Eichmann, stood to ask: "You speak against the technocrat
corps. The students here, we're not training to be food-service workers or
janitors. Are we also 'little Eichmanns'?"
Almost without hesitation,
Churchill produced an answer both verbose and bellicose that summarized much of
his writing and his approach to life. "... Even if you don't agree with
it, it is your expertise, your technical ability, your proficiency that is
furthering the process of extermination of masses of children for your own
personal gain and benefit," he said. "To fit into the structure
without challenging it, you are in a metaphysical sense all Eichmann,
Eichmann."
Staff writer Amy Herdy,
library director Vickie Makings and librarians Anne Feiler and Jan Torpy
contributed to this report.
Staff writer Howard Pankratz
can be reached at 303-820-1939 or hpankratz@denverpost.com
.