Wielding Words like Weapons

Ward Churchill

Description

Wielding Words like Weapons is a collection of acclaimed American Indian Movement activist-intellectual Ward Churchill’s essays in indigenism, selected from material written during the decade 1995–2005. It includes a range of formats, from sharply framed book reviews and equally pointed polemics and op-eds to more formal essays designed to reach both scholarly and popular audiences. The selection also represents the broad range of topics addressed in Churchill’s scholarship, including the fallacies of archeological and anthropological orthodoxy such as the insistence of “cannibalogists” that American Indians were traditionally maneaters, Hollywood’s cinematic degradations of native people, questions of American Indian identity, the historical and ongoing genocide of North America’s native peoples, and the systematic distortion of the political and legal history of U.S.-Indian relations.

Less typical of Churchill’s oeuvre are the essays commemorating Cherokee anthropologist Robert K. Thomas and Yankton Sioux legal scholar and theologian Vine Deloria Jr. More unusual still is his profoundly personal effort to come to grips with the life and death of his late wife, Leah Renae Kelly, thereby illuminating in very human terms the grim and lasting effects of Canada’s residential schools upon the country’s indigenous peoples.

A foreword by Seneca historian Barbara Alice Mann describes the sustained efforts by police and intelligence agencies as well as university administrators and other academic adversaries to discredit or otherwise “neutralize” both the man and his work. Also included are both the initial “stream-of-consciousness” version of Churchill’s famous—or notorious—“little Eichmanns” opinion piece analyzing the causes of the attacks on 9/11, as well as the counterpart essay in which his argument was fully developed.

Sujets

• Penal colony
• Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
• Terrorism
• Public international law
• Cinema

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 15 avril 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629633114
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

An important contribution that merits careful reflection, and an implicit call to action that should not be ignored.
-Noam Chomsky
Compellingly original, with the powerful eloquence and breadth of knowledge we have come to expect from Churchill s writing.
-Howard Zinn
This is insurgent intellectual work-breaking new ground, forging new paths, engaging us in critical resistance.
-bell hooks
I have often said that if I could hold a pen and write books I would write exactly what Mr. Churchill has written.
-Carrie Dann, Western Shoshone elder and resistance leader
One of the most widely read and influential writers in this country who deal with American Indian issues[,] Professor Churchill s work frequently challenges established narratives and conventional interpretations of previous and current events. Articulating an Indian perspective, he argues forcefully and bluntly on behalf of the positions he represents.
-Marjorie K. McIntosh, Distinguished Professor of History, University of Colorado at Boulder
Ward Churchill is important Noam Chomsky, Emma Goldman important.
- Maximum Rock n Roll
Churchill is a fluent and gifted prose stylist.
-Marianne Mimi Wesson, author of Chilling Effect

Wielding Words like Weapons: Selected Essays in Indigenism, 1995-2005
Ward Churchill
2017 Ward Churchill
This edition 2017 PM Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-62963-101-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930882
Cover by John Yates / www.stealworks.com
Interior design by briandesign
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PM Press
PO Box 23912
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This one s for Russ
I want my words to be as eloquent
As the sound of a rattle snake.
I want my actions to be as direct
As the strike of a rattle snake.
I want results as conclusive
As the bite of the beautiful red and black coral snake.
-Jimmie Durham from Columbus Day (1983)
Contents
FOREWORD
And Then They Build Monuments to You
INTRODUCTION
A Few Thoughts on a Book Long Overdue
ONE
Remembering Bob Thomas His Influence on the American Indian Liberation Struggle
TWO
Subverting the Law of Nations American Indian Rights and U.S. Distortions of International Legality
THREE
The United States and the Genocide Convention A Half-Century of Obfuscation and Obstruction
FOUR
Charades, Anyone? The Indian Claims Commission in Context
FIVE
In the Spirit of Gunga Din A Response to John LaVelle
SIX
History in Service to Liberation Ron Welburn s Roanoke and Wampum
SEVEN
Broadening Our View of the Penal Colony Luana Ross Inventing the Savage
EIGHT
Contours of Enlightenment Reflections on Science, Theology, Law, and the Alternative Vision of Vine Deloria Jr.
NINE
Science as Psychosis An American Corollary to Germany s Blood Libel of the Jews
TEN
American Indians in Film Thematic Contours of Cinematic Colonization
ELEVEN
Distorted Images and Literary Appropriations Gretchen Bataille s Native American Representations
TWELVE
Finding a Middle Place ? Not in Joni Adamson s American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism
THIRTEEN
Kizhiibaabinesik A Bright Star, Burning Briefly
FOURTEEN
The Ghosts of 9-1-1 Reflections on History, Justice and Roosting Chickens
FIFTEEN
To Judge Them by the Standards of Their Time America s Indian Fighters, the Laws of War, and the Question of International Order
APPENDIX
Some People Push Back On the Justice of Roosting Chickens
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
INDEX
Other Books by Ward Churchill
A Decolonizing Encounter: Ward Churchill and Antonia Darder in Dialogue (2012)
Kill the Indian, Save the Man : The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools (2004)
On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality (2003)
Acts of Rebellion: A Ward Churchill Reader (2003)
Pacifism as Pathology: Reflections on the Role of Armed Struggle in North America , with Michael Ryan (1998, 2007, 2017)
Perversions of Justice: Indigenous Peoples and Angloamerican Law (2003)
A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 through the Present (1997)
From a Native Son: Selected Essays in Indigenism, 1985-1995 (1996, 2017)
Since Predator Came: Notes from the Struggle for American Indian Liberation (1995, 2005)
Indians R Us? Colonization and Genocide in Native North America (1994)
Struggle for the Land: Indigenous Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide and Colonization in Contemporary North America (1993, 2002)
Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the Colonization of American Indians (1992, 1998)
The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI s Secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent , with Jim Vander Wall (1990, 2002)
Agents of Repression: The FBI s Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement , with Jim Vander Wall (1988, 2002)
Culture versus Economism: Essays on Marxism in the Multicultural Arena , with Elisabeth R. Lloyd (1984, 1989)
Edited volumes
Islands in Captivity: The Record of the International Tribunal on the Rights of Indigenous Hawaiians , with Sharon H. Venne (2004)
Leah Renae Kelly, In My Own Voice: Explorations in the Sociopolitical Context of Art and Cinema (2001)
Cages of Steel: The Politics of Imprisonment in the United States , with J.J. Vander Wall (1992)
Critical Issues in Native North America, Vol. 2 (1991)
Critical Issues in Native North America (1989)
Marxism and Native Americans (1983)
FOREWORD
And Then They Build Monuments to You
Barbara Alice Mann
Being Indigenous in the United States has never been easy, not a little because the settler script called for all the Indians of Turtle Island (North America) to have died politely in the first act of invasion. Our continued existence into the present is thus perceived as a Deliberate Affront to the Established Order, to be slapped down as hard and as often as necessary. The slapping continues into the present and, in the service of ethnically cleansing the ranks of intellectuals, it may even escalate into the gang-slapping of a particularly pesky offender, as it did for Ward Churchill in 2005.
Just why Churchill was singled out for sustained abuse is a long and tempestuous story, which attaches to forces substantially beyond individual personalities or the caprice of a news cycle. Instead, the dedicated character assassination of Churchill was orchestrated politically as a sort of demonstration project in intimidation, aimed as much at American dissenters, generally, as at Churchill, personally. The point was to head off at the pass any but the official settler version of the U.S. metanarrative, in a preemptive measure to delegitimize not just Indigenous but also any minority commentary, against the prospect of a future that will be less and less European as the twenty-first century wears on.
Westerners will doubtless face a harder task in this now than they did in earlier centuries, because simply wiping out those annoying lower races is no longer socially acceptable. The burden has necessarily shifted from physical to verbal attack, which has morphed from a sort of warm-up exercise for physical violence into the primary modus operandi. This is the good news, for in such a contest, Indigenous peoples are fully armed. As exemplified in this book, Ward Churchill can devastatingly wield his words as weapons. To aid in locating opposition bunkers, I have identified the four basic, Western tactics, as successively deployed, in verbal warfare. In order, the ploys are: 1) Amnesia, 2) Denial, 3) Minimization, 4) Hostility.
Amnesia
Amnesia is always the first strategy, should any unpleasantness bubble up beneath the surface of an official story. This tactic requires little organization, since Euro-Americans are impressively adept at simply forgetting that any unpleasantness ever transpired. Choctaw scholar Devon Mihesuah attributes the amnesia to the raw truth s violation of the settler myth of self, which prefers comfy to factual history. 1 Personally, I have wondered whether the general settler amnesia is genuinely hysterical in origin, a psychological defense mechanism against a reappraisal of self.
Comfy history helpfully glosses over the criminality of Native American genocide as well as that of African slavery-and, indeed, of the mistreatment of American Others of any wrong ethnicity. It prevents students from hearing of the Chinese race riots in the 1880s and realizing with a jolt that the rioters were Euro-Americans who murdered helpless Chinese immigrants in the heat of the shamefully racist Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. 2 It keeps students from learning that latinos residing on lands seized from Mexico in the unprovoked Mexican-American War (1846-1848) had been promised U.S. citizenship in Articles 8 and 9 of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, only to have had the deal yanked out from under them for over a century, should they have attempted to invoke the articles guarantees. 3
Shushing such challenging facts as these worked for quite some time to preserve amnesia. For instance, in 1851 when the historian Francis Parkman published his Conspiracy of Pontiac , he