Colorado professor fabricates Native history
Sunday, June 18, 2006
_http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2006/06/18/jodirave/rave18.txt_
(http://www.missoulian.com/articles/2006/06/18/jodirave/rave18.txt)


It's not always easy for university administrators to discern authentic
Native professors from those who wish they were - or try to be.

Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado tops the list of poseur
professors. Throughout the years, he's become a magnet for lost Indians and
Native
romanticists.
But his disputed personal claim of being Cherokee falls below a damning list
of professional problems.

And on Tuesday, a CU committee recommended firing the ethnic studies
professor for research misconduct.

This is no light charge.

It's the first time the CU Standing Committee on Research Misconduct has
voted to ax a professor in its 17-year history.

The committee found Churchill guilty of plagiarism and fabricating material
in his academic writings. Among his sloppy research, Churchill invented
details about my tribe, the Mandans.

Tribal oral tradition deserves its due.

Churchill, however, succeeded in mangling it.

I've never been a fan of Churchill, a professor I met as a journalism
student attending CU in Boulder.

My mother was a Spotted Bear, a Mandan-Hidatsa from the Fort Berthold
Reservation in North Dakota. I'm a daughter of the Maetsi-Dogah, or Knife Clan.
My
great-great-grandfather, Spotted Bear - the son of Raven Chief - descended
from the Mandan villages typically built along the tributaries of the upper
Missouri River. My great-great-grandmother, Stella Tail, was Hidatsa.

Most people know my tribes through the explorers Lewis and Clark, who
wintered with my people in 1804 and 1805. The Mandan and Hidatsa villages along
the
Knife River in present-day North Dakota were the center of a vast trade
network on the Northern Plains.

By the time Lewis and Clark arrived in 1804, we had already been in contact
with white traders. A smallpox outbreak hit our tribes in 1782, more than 20
years before we ever saw men from the Corps of Discovery.

A smallpox epidemic in 1837 nearly wiped out my Mandan ancestors, reducing
their numbers from about 2,000 people to fewer than 150.

Our oral histories speak of a time of incomprehensible despair.

This story needs no embellishment. But Churchill decided to make up his own
details.

Among his fantasies: The U.S. Army intentionally spread smallpox among the
Mandan by distributing infected blankets from an infirmary in St. Louis -
goods hauled up the Missouri on the St. Peter's steamboat.

He then pawned his lies to other scholars.

First, the army wasn't even posted around our villages at the time Churchill
claims. And no proof exists, orally or in text, to show blankets came from a
hospital.

But our tribal people have long said the spread of smallpox was intentional.

I recently talked with Gerard Baker, a Mandan-Hidatsa and leading oral
historian for our tribes. Baker, park superintendent at Mount Rushmore, is a
fluent Hidatsa speaker and comes from a traditional family. He's also lived and
worked at many of our historical village sites along the Missouri.

Baker has talked with tribal elders and spent countless hours looking at the
journals of the fur traders. He's convinced traders deliberately spread
smallpox to eliminate us as middlemen in the trade network.

Bernard Pratte Jr., captain of the St. Peter's, was the son of an American
Fur Company owner who bought the Missouri branch in 1834. Three years later,
Pratte insisted on keeping a smallpox-ridden man on board as the crew made its
way toward the Mandan and Hidatsa villages.

The Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara populations - known today as the Three
Affiliated Tribes - were nearly eliminated within months. The white trade
flourished in our area well into the 1850s, said Baker.

A CU committee investigating Churchill's work devoted 44 pages to smallpox
and Mandans in its 125-page report released last month. The committee
concluded Churchill's Mandan writings "created myths under the banner of
academic
scholarship."

Churchill made feeble attempts after the fact to acknowledge the oral
history of my people.

In his defense, he told an investigative committee he never tried to
corroborate any of his writings because he considered his account to be "rather
self-evident - such stories have been integral to Native oral histories for
centuries. I've heard them all my life."

Among his sources, he cited a TV series, "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman."

The committee said he "disrespectfully introduced Indian sources only
belatedly as a defense against this allegation."

Far be it for Churchill to seek out a real Native expert, such as Baker.

But Churchill has already done his damage in trying to be a voice for Native
people. My tribe's oral history fades in light of his self-made scandal.

The CU professor demonstrates how artificial Native thought can damage
legitimate indigenous views.


Jodi Rave covers Native issues for Lee Enterprises. She can be reached at
406-523-5299 or _jodi.rave@..._ (mailto:jodi.rave@...)


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