DENVER – The outcome of a closely watched, month-long civil liberties trial that vindicated a controversial scholar also means that “white experts can no longer distort the truth about Native issues,” said former professor Ward Churchill, fired from the University of Colorado in 2007 for reasons a jury found to have been politically motivated. “It shows that white guys don’t get to dictate the terms of Indian history.”
Youthful jurors deliberated a day and a half before finding April 2 that CU did not fire Churchill for research misconduct, as it had claimed, but because of an essay Churchill wrote that said the 9/11 attack resulted from American foreign policy that caused the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children. He compared World Trade Center “technocrats” to “little Eichmanns,” referring to a key Nazi functionary, and the comparison ignited controversy.
Conservative talk radio, a former state governor, some CU officials, and others – many of whom Churchill’s lead attorney, David Lane, called “liars” at trial – urged dismissal of the tenured professor of ethnic studies in 2005 when the essay surfaced, but before firing him CU conducted an exhaustive investigation that led to charges of research misconduct. Lane termed the probe a “charade of fairness” and said the “appearance of fairness is not fairness.”
Former CU President Betsy Hoffman said she felt the essay was political speech protected by the First Amendment and that then-Colorado Gov. Bill Owens had demanded she fire Churchill in what was “neo-McCarthyism.”
Whether Churchill is reinstated on the CU faculty or receives significant damages will be decided by a Denver District Court judge at a hearing to be held within 30 days. Only a token $1 was awarded by the jury April 2 because, as one juror said, Churchill indicated that reinstatement, not money, was the goal of the litigation.
Prominent Native scholars testified for Churchill, who has been a proponent of critical race theory (postmodern oppression analysis) and who has challenged the “master narrative” of American history, including celebrations of Christopher Columbus and denial of the North American genocide.
Churchill has at times claimed to have varying degrees of Indian blood, but is not an enrolled member of any tribe. He is an honorary associate member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee.
On the last day of his testimony, Churchill told a packed courtroom that he had received guidance from the late Frank Fools Crow, a prominent Lakota traditional leader and healer, and from the late Phillip Deere, a Muscogee Creek spiritual leader in Churchill’s own southeastern tradition, who, as he recalled, said, “You have the talent to talk to those who don’t see things as we see them.”
Churchill said he was advised to speak to those who are outside (the Indian world) so they “can see the way we value things” and he should “speak from the inside to the outside.”
Among those called to testify to the historical accuracy of Churchill’s writings were professor Michael Yellow Bird, Arikara/Hidatsa, of Indigenous Nations Studies at the University of Kansas; professor Robert Williams, Lumbee, of the University of Arizona, American Indian Studies and American Indian Law, who testified as an expert witness; Dr. Barbara Alice Mann, Seneca, University of Toledo; professor George “Tink” Tinker, Osage, Iliff School of Theology, Denver; and Russell Means, Oglala Lakota, an activist leader and a national and international lecturer.
CU investigatory committees contended, among other charges, that Churchill misrepresented circumstances surrounding smallpox epidemics among the Mandan in 1837 and that he erroneously attributed blood quantum requirements to the General Allotment Act and Indian Arts and Crafts Act.
Yellow Bird said oral history supported Churchill’s accounts of the smallpox outbreak among the Mandans, and to dismiss the oral history of the Three Affiliated Tribes “is to dismiss them as liars.” He said white history has at times termed American Indians “savages.”
“Oral history has in many respects been treated as not a very serious methodology in history,” Yellow Bird said, noting it is often incorrectly called “storytelling” or “mythology.” Native oral tradition overall has largely substantiated Churchill’s assertions, he said.
Williams supported Churchill’s accuracy concerning the General Allotment and Indian Arts and Crafts Acts and placed his work in the context of critical race theory, one of the “dominant intellectual trends of the late 20th Century.”
Mann asserted there was a reasonable basis to support Churchill’s assertions that blankets from an infirmary in St. Louis caused a smallpox outbreak among the Mandans, and that Army doctors told the Indians with smallpox to scatter.
Tinker said Churchill’s work is regarded “by Indian people as being the most prolific and helpful body of scholarship by an Indian person, with the exception of the late Professor (Vine) Deloria,” while Means said Churchill’s books are “telling the world about who we are and what happened to us.”
“It’s an insult to my people and my history – to take a small phrase and besmirch him and try to ruin his reputation,” Means said of Churchill’s firing. “It’s a scholarly massacre – it’s not right.”
CU officials “don’t treat white professors at CU the same way,” Means said in a remark the judge ordered jurors to ignore.
Churchill’s wife, Natsu Saito, a law professor at Georgia State University, said he targeted major themes, not the small, contentious points focused on by the university.
CU’s attorney charged that Churchill kept changing his account of what oral history revealed, quoting a statement attributed to Means: “You don’t get to embellish oral history,” and the attorney also said research misconduct, “strikes at the heart of what the university does.”
Lengthy stretches of the legal proceedings parsed sentences and footnotes or discussed in detail whether quotation marks can only enclose direct quotes or can be used to indicate sarcasm. Detailed attempts were made to describe distinctions between and the appropriateness of material that is ghostwritten or prepared under pseudonym and when or whether it can or cannot be cited by the original author, and under what circumstances.
At one point, according to a courtroom observer, the judge had to declare a recess when it appeared one of the jurors was nodding off.
The day the jury’s verdict was returned it was not clear whether CU would appeal the decision, or whether Churchill’s attorneys planned any further action.