Earth My Body, Fire My Spirit
The Ward Churchill Interview

By Claudette Vaughan

Ward Churchill is a Creek and Keetoowah Band Cherokee, longtime American Native rights activist, professor at Colorado University and acclaimed left-wing speaker. Here we present part one of a two part interview for the Abolitionist-Online.

Abolitionist: Today it’s said that the world is a less safer place because of America’s pre-empted illegal war on Iraq and beyond Iraq. But the world has always been an unsafe place for Afro-American citizens and Native Indian American citizens. It was Malcolm X who wrote, “I am not an American. I am a victim of Americanism”. What are your thoughts Ward?

Ward Churchill: It depends who you are and where you are whether it’s a less safe place now then it was 2 years ago or 5 years ago or a hundred years ago. If you are on the receiving end of the continuous US projection of violence it’s just as unsafe as it ever was. The US tends to focus on particular targets during particular periods. The level of raw violence experienced by people elsewhere—and “elsewhere” can be here too, since the United States is by no means a homogeneous nation; it subsumes 500-odd indigenous nations within its claimed territorial boundaries, for example—is to a considerable extent contingent on what US élites hold as priorities at any given moment .

On the other hand, while the level may increase or diminish from time to time, there’s continuous violence inflicted upon people viewed as Other—that is, inferior—by those same US élites and people who, however erroneously, believe their interests coincide with those of the élites. That’s the nature of the system the US imposes and aspires to perfect under the rubric of “globalization.” Its very foundation is a drive by the state to monopolize the means of inflicting violence domestically and, as nearly as possible, internationally as well. Sufficient force, or the threat of force, can then be projected to compel Others, who have been rendered relatively defenseless in the process, to accept what are perceived as lesser forms of violence as a daily reality.

By this, I mean the systematic expropriation of everything the Others need in order to maintain a decent standard of living—in a lot of cases their very means of subsistence—to the ever-increasing profit of US corporations and to sustain the ever-more-opulent lifestyle to which a burgeoning sector of the US populace —I usually refer to them as “yuppies,” although the term lacks precision—imagine themselves to be divinely entitled. The bottom line is brown-skinned 3-year-olds suffering chronic malnutrition and endemic disease, dying by the millions of readily-preventable causes before they’re 5, and, if they survive childhood at all, being impressed at age 12 into a lifetimes of emiseration as sweatshop workers, all so that US transnationals can accrue the wherewithal to quite literally “own” the entire planet, their CEOs “earning” something like $2,500 per minute on average, and even the 25-year-olds peddling their stock are able to exercise their “natural right” to treat themselves to a new Porsche or BMW, spend lavishly on clothes and recreation, meanwhile living in million dollar townhouses and loft apartments in the trendier districts of New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco.

So, do people feel safer? Obviously not if they happen to live in Afghanistan or Iraq. Or Palestine. Or Lebanon. How about Syria and Iran? North Korea? Venezuela? Cuba? Every one of these countries has either been militarily attacked by the U.S. and/or its surrogates since 911, or has been openly mentioned by the likes of Bush, Cheney, Rice, and Rumsfeld as subject to a probable attack in the not-so-distant future. Do you think people feel safer anywhere in what I still insist upon calling the Third World because of the US campaign to assert its military and economic ascendancy at a planetary level over the past five years? How could they?

Or the Arabs, Arab Americans, and Muslims more generally, harassed, surveilled, arbitrarily detained, deported, profiled and stereotyped as terrorists, not only in the US, but throughout the “Free World”? Or the Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and other Latinos, already consigned to the lowest-paid sectors of the US labor force, and who, on suspicion of being “illegal aliens,” are have been increasingly subjected to routines similar to those imposed on Muslims? How about African Americans, racially-profiled as probable criminals because of their entirely understandable resentment at the place assigned them, both economically and socially, in American life? Such things as the proliferation of SWAT teams in police departments across the US, and the corresponding buildup of police firepower to military proportions, are, after all, aimed primarily at these groups, just as the ongoing mushrooming of the US prison system is designed and intended to warehouse ever more of them in a condition of outright slavery.

Is there something in any of this that should make any of these Others, including the Others who happen to be US citizens, feel “safer”? I doubt that you could sell the bill of goods even to “the troops.” By this, I’m not talking about the “heroes” flying stealth aircraft to deliver smart bombs against virtually defenseless targets in the dead of night, or the brave boys and girls sitting at computer consoles in air-conditioned comfort launching cruise missiles at civilian-populated targets 1,500 miles away. I’m talking about the human fodder who have proven necessary to try and quell the guerrilla wars that have quite predictably begun in Iraq and Afghanistan now that all the hi-tech “shock and awe” of the US invasions has worn off. Those are the folks coming back in body bags, blinded, with 3rd degree burns over 90 percent of their bodies, missing arms and legs, and so on. And that’s not to mention the psychological after effects, which are often permanently disabling. All told, I’d say it’s rather dubious that those actually doing the fighting might somehow feel “safer” now than they did in August of 2001.

I could go on, but I’m sure you catch my drift. If there is anybody who actually feels safer as a result of what’s been done by the Bush régime since 911, it’s got to be those living in gated communities or well-guarded private estates. Everything we’ve been talking about goes to securing their personal safety and, more broadly, their interests, against those of virtually everybody else, including, not least, the bulk of the population of the US itself. It puts a rather revealing spin to all that Bushian rhetoric about what “we” need to sacrifice in order to guarantee “our” security, doesn’t it?

Abolitionist: Many people outside of America see America as the biggest terrorist threat in the world today. In Australia we have seen the stripping of an aboriginal boxer, Anthony Mundine, of his world boxing ranking for saying after 9/11 that the US needs to look at its foreign policy to see why this occurred. How are activists coping in the US if such a thing as one sentence of dissent is quickly removed and silenced immediately, as it was here?

Ward Churchill: I think it’s important to emphasize that there are a fair number of people in America who not only see things pretty much the same way, but have been saying so for quite a long time. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman spring immediately to mind, of course, as do Ellen Ray, William Blum, Chalmers Johnson, Phyllis Bennis, and numerous others. And, yeah, a lot of us know about Anthony Mundine, at least in general terms. There’s a clear parallel, I think, between what’s happening right now with Mundine and Muhammad Ali’s being stripped of his world heavyweight title for displaying the courage to condemn US policy in Vietnam back in the ’60s. Similar parallels are also obvious in the less-remembered case of Jack Johnson, the first black man to win the heavyweight crown, who was not only stripped of the title, but criminally charged and driven into exile, for defying US race laws back around 1910.

As to how people are coping at present, it must be understood that the context in the US is that of a sustained, concerted, highly-organized, and very-well-funded drive by the Right to eliminate dissident scholarship from the academy altogether. This did not begin with 911. It began well over a decade earlier, with the launching of so-called culture wars, the targeting of Afrocentric scholars like Leonard Jeffries, critical theorists like Henry Giroux, and so on. The demand of the Right was and remains that whole disciplines—ethnic studies, women’s studies, queer studies and peace studies, primarily—be abolished, along with critical subfields in history, literature and the social sciences, and that the “traditional” canon celebrating the supposed achievements of the usual gaggle of dead white guys be (re)imposed upon the curriculum.

Meanwhile, you’ve got people like Herrnstein and Murray recycling early 20th century eugenics arguments and supporting them with the fruits of outright nazi research to “prove” that people of color—blacks in particular—are genetically limited to being the intellectual inferiors of whites, and that, among other things, their views not only can but should be discounted, marginalized or excluded from “legitimate” scholarly discourse. This is the kind of shit that was being treated as credible scholarship and analysis by major US publishing houses by the early-90s, and at this point there’s quite a lot of it in circulation, all of it continuously peddled as self-evident truth by the talking heads on Fox News, Clear Channel, and their mass media cohorts.

Again, I’m drawn to mention Chomsky and Herman, who, although they’ve mostly used other examples to illustrate their points, have, more than anyone else I could name, done absolutely brilliant work in laying out how the system works in this respect. Anyone who’s not read their Manufacturing Consent by now, or Chomsky’s follow-up, Necessary Illusions, really should. Those two books are indispensable.

In any case, along comes 911.

Abolitionist: In the book Agents of Repression you wrote about the secret wars against the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement and COINTELPRO’s involvement in systematically destroying each Movement by political assassinations (18 of the Black Panther Party leaders were assassinated within 21 days). If we fast forward now to Katrina there were no leaders there yet thousands upon thousands of Afro-Americans were left to die without government aid. Do the two points intersect for you and did the elite finally get what they wanted made apparent in that they didn’t have to cover their tracks any longer?

Ward Churchill: That’s not exactly new; it’s a variation on a theme. What you see happening there is just a fundamental application of eugenics principles because if you think about the early eugenicists poverty was seen as a genetic defect. It was a class analysis and was aimed primarily at lower class/working class proletariat if you will from England itself, so it wasn’t particularly concerned with race because race was a consideration ‘out there’ in the Empire. The idea that being impovished was a cardinal indicator of genetic inferiority was immediately applicable to any colonized people that had certain diseases that attend poverty. For example, epilepsy was considered a genetic characteristic, pellagra, tuberculosis, various and sundry dietary associated diseases so on and so on were considered to be signifiers of detective genes. The idea was to toughen up the gene pool so you would withdraw support assistance altogether but those who profited from the British class system and you can extrapolate this to any other class system had become rich by virture of their own inherent genetic superiority, because it was hereditary at the time those who suffered by being exploited and expropriated the process of enriching their betters brought it upon themselves, not intentionally, intent didn’t enter in, it was simply a fact of nature and if you wanted to better the breeding stock you would let these people die out. So in the United States it was much more racially focused than Britain and the early eugenists. Imported from England to the United States the Eugenics Movement retained it’s class analysis, if you will, that the poor ought to die off for the good of the race for humanity yet it incorporated much more of a racial connotation. Not that the early English eugenists were devoid or totally ignored the race issue but they weren’t preoccupied with it being more concerned with their immediate environment. In the United States it was different so whole races were consigned to the status of genetic inferiority subjected to policies of withdrawal even at the means of subsistence exactly medical care, there’s no need to educate them because they are in educable and besides that would be an unnatural thing. You would have created a synthetic environment and appear to be what they are not – that whole rubric.
That was implemented in the early twentieth century in the United States and various other places and advocated as much by progressives as by what would now be known as neo-cons or open imperialists although you’ve got these interactions of these ideas. What you see is the full force of the restoration of it. It’s interesting to note in this connection that while this has been advocated by neo-conservatives, paeleo-conservatives, Christian right conservatives and so forth self-prescribed – they are all basically fascists and not conservative at all about the content of their politics. It was actually implemented by the so-called “liberal” alternative, that would be Bill Clinton and the Democrats with the disband of the New Deal and Great Society Social Security Safety Nets.

What you see with Katrina is a much more blatant example of a particular location as it sort of crystallizes it so they won’t say it straight out but this is perfectly consistent with a value system priorities and fundamental eugenises view of those in power and you don’t see any kind of effective response. You see no response what-so-ever. Everybody is so god damn busy wringing their hands in being so morally pure and enlightened and sympathetic that we’re seeing no concrete action what-so-ever. The nature of the response is utterly within the bounds sanctioned by the State and if it’s sanctioned by the State it’s not going to be effectual in terms of changing the configuration of the State.

Abolitionist: In keeping on the subject of eugenics the Christian right has moved to remove condoms, being a medical factor as the front line of defense in stopping HIV infection from spreading. This has been granted with the full support of the Bush Administration. High-risk categories such as homosexuals and drug users are people that the neo-cons and Christian right would class as undesirables and I’m wondering if you would consider the AIDS epidemic as a holocaust in its own right as it wasn’t so long ago that Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children {from homosexuals}, Jerry Falwell’s “Declaration Of War [against homosexuals] and bumper stickers were around urging people to “Kill A Queer For Christ”?

Ward Churchill: I would put it in the general box but I don’t know if I’d call it a holocaust, per se. It’s closer to the eugenics model I was talking about, it’s closer to perhaps a form of euthanasia. I’m not talking about individual killing; I’m talking about a policy application which signifies whole categories of people will not be killed so much as they will not be allowed to live. Now that is a form of euthanasia. When you think of euthanasia usually its some active intervention by Jack Covorkian or some nurse that’s motivated by spite or compassion to perform the act and then it’s really seen as individual acts multiplying out to a number of them in a given year. But the original notion of euthanasia, articulated in the United States and later picked up by Germany, was you would simply withdraw medical attention and let them die out naturally. That’s a variation of the theme I was talking about a few minutes ago. In that sense sure, sure. It is holocausal not in terms of the deliberate and direct killing that marked the particular phenomena that we still attach that word to. So it’s more like eugenises originally conceived it and this notion of the ‘moral’ imperative to do that is not alien from Nazi ideology either. It doesn’t come from a particular religious camp either that these so-called Christians – and they are not Christians, they are scum – but they took these same sort of moral judgments in Germany in the same way.

There’s a malignancy of thought which the most appropriate and comprehensive analogy is these are the same sets of sensibilities, principalities and values that practitioners of Nazi Germany undertook. We’re not being rhetorical. They are Nazis. This is concrete, point for point correspondence in attitude and for Nazis to call themselves Christians – I’m not a Christian myself but I would not demean the notion of Christianity by accepting the assertion by these people that they represented. They don’t. In fact the little thing that was controversial that I wrote on 9/11. If you break it down there are several different facets to it but the main one that they took exception to was my assertion that the basic principle that “Do Unto Others”, then you’ve got no complaint. I guess you could make that a kind of a Buddhist thing too in a crude form of what goes around, comes around. You are going to get back what you put out. Unquestionly the United States in what they put out, they got back. By and large the people I targeted the “little Eichmanns” in the World Trade Center have certainly been putting it out. They’ve been doing it in an Eichmann fashion not involved so much in the direct killing imperative but they made the direct killing imperative possible, profitable, efficiently and hidden from general view although sometimes on a subliminal level virtually everyone that purports to innocence knows it’s going on and does nothing to stop it. Infact they look for it, often applaud it and put published figures put on it. Now that is complicity. The idea that you get back what you put out, that you are obliged to ‘do unto others what you would have others done unto you’ – being such a fundamental Christian principle – I figured that the Christian conservatives would endorse what I said. Of course they don’t mean what it is they purport to be because they are not Christians. I’m not a Christian but I’m more of a Christian than those at Christians at Colorado Springs. Call a nazi, a nazi. If you are going to be a nazi, be proud of it and put it right out front. Don’t pretend to be something else. That just makes you a lier on top of it all.

Abolitionist: There is a move in Australia and I’m sure the same applies to the States where all discourse about what’s going on with the war and the New World Order is being quashed. This discourse is disallowed and has degenerated into a simplistic (which is what they want) “Us” versus “Them” situation through media and by government.

Ward Churchill: Who is the “Us”? Us or Them? They are certainly not talking about inner city people in the United States and I would wager the same for any major inner city in Australia either. Those people [the Muslims] are to be regimented controls, fill the prisons or to be continuously monitored and denied the benefits that the society that supposingly defines and encompasses within us. So now that we have excluded “them” it’s certainly not the cannon fodder out there getting their legs blown off and then abandoned on the battlefield. Nor the heroes sitting on their damn councils and the missile Frigate launching cruise missiles and targets fifteen hundred miles away and are absolutely in no danger at all and how that translates into valor- I don’t know, maybe they can’t get the right brand of toothpaste. That’s their big sacrifice. It’s openingly reflected the “Us” in it’s broadest is reflected by those who drive around in their BMW’s, issue V’s living in gated communities. I mean what are the gates about? They are to keep most of the population out from the self-styled elite but ultimately they are expendable too. There’s only a top one or two, maybe three percent of Australian or US society are being protected from the sorts of things we are discussing here today so I guess the rest of Australia and the rest of the United States need to wake up, pull their heads out of their ass and pretend they have enough IQ to tie their shoes without an instruction manual and realize that they are “Them”.

Abolitionist: Or they are next perhaps…

Ward Churchill: They are not even next. They’ve got grotesque injuries coming in under a steady flow. How many Americans have been killed in Iraq and they aren’t even mentioning the Iraqi’s that have been killed until somebody mentioned it this week in a report and quoted two thirds of a million fatalities in the process of actualizing what George W.Bush refers to as “a bastion of democracy in the Middle East”. Give me a break on that. You might as well have taken acid if you are going to buy into this kind of insanity but the point is for every American soldier killed in Iraq and being killed kind of speaks for itself, you’re getting twelve coming back here with absolutely ghastly injuries. Limbs have been blown off and pieces of their head and all this techno medicine out there is keeping them alive. Third degree burns over 80% of your body embedded in your tissue but there are all manner of toxins that are having an effect that are more virulent than the veterans that were seen back from Vietnam. If you are being used in that manner and you come back, you’re good to find out that the interests by the elite who sent you off to do this in your well being expired the moment you got hurt. You are no longer a utility. So there’s this old Irish song about the Wild Geese that was appropriated by the United States during the period of the war’s succession which goes “Johnny Goes Marching Home”. We are an armless, legless chickenless egg, they’ll set you out on the street to beg”. I think that was genetic inferiority too to the fact that you are legless and a begger. It’s the same dream for the actual soldiers who do the fighting who don’t tend to be upper middle class, or middle class or rich. It’s not young men and women set off to do this most of whom try and treat the military as a job alternative because they couldn’t get work and then they are suddenly confronted with the reality of why the military exists. From the view point of those whose interests are being protected with all this security and so on it’s designed to accommodate. That’s just so much toilet paper being that’s being expended out there in the desert, in the Philippines, in Cheyena, in Seattle and probably in Australia as well. There’s probably a Delta Force equivalent in Australia, perhaps it’s the Australian SAS, who are deployed against people who are unruly in Australia just as readily unleashed on so-called terrorists or usually people who are trying to assert their own dignity and retaliate against the carnage upon them and theirs. It’s a continuous process and it’s the distinction that is drawn between “Us” and “Them” as an inside and outside of any given State at this point is a mirage.

Abolitionist: What has happened to the resistance movement both in America and it’s the same for Australia which is the 52nd State, after Israel of course. America chose to abandon any form of restraint in its quest for complete world dominion of the world’s oil even to declaring the Geneva Convention as a quaint and antiquated document. The viciousness in which the US pursues its victims of foreign policy is echoed on a domestic scale by the mercilessness it shows to its citizens who dare to dissent.

Ward Churchill: The violence of the State against people who are unruly is a well-known phenomena. I don’t know what Australia’s situation is with regards to what proportion of the population is incarcerated but in the United States, the land of the free you understand, has a greater proportion of it’s population in prison now than in any country in the world and they are still babbling about the need to build more prisons. See, this is straight up violence of the State and that’s intimidating. I wasn’t kidding a little while ago when I said that Delta Force was being deployed against unruly people in the United States, as it was when it was called in by Clinton in Seattle. It was called in right after the verdict was made public on the Rodney King case, it was called into Atlanta Federal Prison when there was a inmate revolt which was basically an insurrection against Cubans who’d been consigned their indefinitely because in the land-of-the-free being so critical of Cuban prisons were cut loose by Castro, they came up here immediately and were incarcerated by the United States and they are still in there, twenty years later. They haven’t been convicted of anything. Delta was used in all three of those and Delta probably used in the Waco thing and it was quite possibly was represented in the Ruby Rich stuff up in Idaho. Some white separatists had gone onto the mountain to live and one of them was conned into providing a short barrel shot gun to a federal agent. There’s undoubtedly additional examples that we don’t know about and Delta is sometimes referred to sometimes as a commando force. They are not. Delta is an assassination unit. Delta is sent in to take out select targets. They’ll take out key leaders or at least as perceived by intelligence agencies then they eliminate them. That’s there one function. As I say you probably have an SAS component in Australia that performs the same function. Going up against these guys that are extremely well trained and equipped is a daunting prospect. It’s not a question of whether they will be used they have been used and we have assassinations and we have others sorts of repression of that type of nature. All of that is said to reinforce your point on the intimidation factor. Not too often do many people want to admit it but it’s there. The other thing is sheer boredom. People don’t rally so much anymore. There was a big rally against the war in DC. I was doing other things but I watched several hundreds of thousands of people protest, neatly in ranks in little picket-fenced areas- allotted areas – where the feds told them they could be. Nice and orderly and symbolic, and it does nothing. People understand that it does nothing. It’s a ritual spectacle to make yourself feel good. That’s what it is. They want to feel morally superior. They want to feel enlightened and they want to smell the new brand of incense they brought to change the world and they have to have candles and vigils and they are going to bear witness. Look! Let’s put it really simply, if you are walking down the street minding your own business and come upon a rape in process or whatever and you stand there and watch, which is bearing witness as far as I’m concerned you’re as god damn guilty of the crime as well as the perpetrator. Your obligation isn’t to take notes. Your obligation is to do whatever is within your power to do and there’s no limits on that, to make the offense stop. This notion that some disempowerment for reasons of personal safety and comfort is somehow a moral virtue out-stripping all others is absolutely absurd. That’s the hegemonic view for the so-called opposition. You are obliged to bear witness and make symbolic gestures like an alchemist running around and around and around and around and around and around the same old rock failing every time apparently in the belief that if we repeat the same failed experiment often enough we’ll get a different result. What we’re saying is if we went beyond these approved forms we would create great personal risk and possibly damage not just the risk of damage but the damage itself. We’re not prepared to do that but we want to be pure so we’ll make those ritual god damn gestures forever and purport innocence of what we don’t not an effectual response to it and at the same time call ourselves the legitimate resistance. You are good Germans that’s what you are.

Abolitionist: Why is it that the French resistance of WW2 is romantized yet in the west the Iraqi resistance of 2006 is demonized?

Ward Churchill: That could apply to the Black Panther Party, the Weather Underground or anybody who did anything which if it could be taken as an example to be emulated might actually have brought to fruition the cracks in the Empire that appeared in the war in South-East Asia back in 1970’s and brought the structure into some sort of radial accommodation with an altered reality. Put simply the State was destabilized at the time. All parties agree on that that I’ve encountered. Maybe somebody out there doesn’t agree with it out there, I won’t rule out that. There’s delusional people all over the place but you actually had a situation afflux at the primary but of course they quelled that. As far as I’m concerned it’s not so much the police agencies although they certainly took their toll but it was other supportive oppositionists who wouldn’t take the risks and said simply that the armed formations were as bad as the other side because they were quote “resorting to violence” and isolated them. Well, gorillas require a sea to swim in. The sea in this instance was some very small groups and they were never apprehended by the authorities but as far as galvanizing any effective action goes, meaningful support to armed struggle, it wasn’t there. I can’t quite distinguish where the ‘other side’ begins. I said that about 9/11 and I have always been clear that you have to get outside of approved forms of opposition or you are not really an oppositionist.

The harshest attacks on me have come from the so-called Left. The editorial staff of the Nation magazine and so on and so on and the preponderance of people who have taken a position on my personal targeting always begin with about 50% of their text being a disavowal of me, my politics, me, my attitude, my ancestry, my sex life, my writing then gotten everyone bored into ambivalence then enter, “yeah but he’s got a right to free speech”. You’ve got the attackers from the Left. Straight up they are worst than the Right in a number of respects and you’ve got equivocators who are so busily distancing themselves from the politics of under attack that you never get around to what is suppose to be a defense. With friends like those you don’t really need Karl Rove out there. You don’t really need intelligence agencies. If you can’t count on your support base and their demanding cataclysmic sort of opposition which took 200 goddamn years to be ineffectual. They are the one’s that want to tell me about Gandhi. Gandhi was the one who said weapons training and so on. I can take you to the unedited East Indian released original versions of Gandhi and show you line for line that he’s saying the same things that I am saying by definition. I am far closer to Gandhi than the Gandhian pacifists who are opposing you.

Abolitionist: Karl Rove, it’s been said is the brains behind Bush. He’s known to be a close reader of Machiavelli and he’s said to live by the philosopher’s insight that “the great majority of mankind is satisfied with the appearance of things as though they are the realities”. Have you noticed how much animation has crept into the American teaching apparatus where a Homer Simpson gets more airplay than a Noam Chomsky or a Ward Churchill or a Derrick Jensen and how TV programs such as “The West Wing” are used in universities as a tool to show what “government” is really like. You wrote a book on the fantasies of the master race in literature, movies and colonization on this very subject on how Native American Indians are portrayed and belittled. Can you talk about that Ward?

Ward Churchill: He’s a reader I suppose but I wouldn’t give Karl Rove credit for all of that (laughter). He’s probably read Gobbels as well. His particular brilliance is in coordinating mastering and realising what buttons to push in to obtain the desired result, not the theory. A lot of people have been involved in this for quite a while, not just Karl Rove. He just knows how to use that system that was already in place. The propaganda industry that Chomsky was talking about in “Manufacturing Consent” is the manufacturing of illusions all predate Karl Rove by considerable extent. Chomsky was talking about it being an already long-term problem 15 years ago. So you’re really looking at being a sort of integral dimension for the convergence of mass media. Once you had the newspaper chains in the 70’s look what Hearst did with it.

Abolitionist: In Hollywood in the 50’s Native American Indians were always acted by whites saying something like “Hau” [phonetically = how] as a caricature on all things Indian and what was sacred to the Native American Indian. What other images are offensive to the indigenous people of America?

Ward Churchill: I suppose you could start with “squaw”. This is a corruption of a Onondaga or a Mohawk word depending on who’s telling the story. In any event out in the Shawnee it’s a corruption of the word for female genitalia. So all Indian females are squaws. That’s slang so what would an English equivalent be. Living in a State like Colorado like I am, with all these Christian conservatives who want to have English only translate “squaw”. Now run around calling a bunch of white women the equivalent in English and see where you end up but when it’s Indian woman it doesn’t seem to matter if it’s a six year old girl or an 80 year old grandmother they’re not supposed to get upset with it because nobody really means it. Over and over and over what the word means but they never really know. They are place names like Squaw Valley or Squaw Mountain. I’d say that rates fairly high in terms of offensiveness. Then there’s the images of drunken Indians as a joke. This is funny? People are creating slow motion suicide and it’s an amusement to the dominant society and suicide is not always slow motion. How about dumb Indians, cartoon character Indians. Hau is actually a real greeting. They pick the words for whatever reason that they find to be amusing or convenient but it’s a common greeting and is translated “hello friend”. Meeting each other as friends, never having laid eyes on each other but they take it out and render it ridiculous. We all speak the same language but you get these signifiers e.g., tee pees. Every Indian lives in a tee pee. We have tee pee hotels and all manner of images – the red man chewing tobacco, Big Chief running tablets, Winnebago campers, and Hiawatha pencils. I have never seen a sport model Australian on sale in automobile showroom here. What about sports teams mascot, the Redskins. That’s a racial perjority. It is but it doesn’t refer to redskins. That goes to the scalp bounties. They paid for a proof of death in the form of scalping of the bloody red skin. I mean you are talking about a National preoccupation with the sensibility of a Hannibal Lecker here. I could keep going but you get the drift.

Abolitionist: By making the American Native Indian look ridiculous is this deliberate or is this stupidity or ignorance?

Ward Churchill: Well give them a little credit for some kind of IQ. (laughter)
Nobody ever knows, nobody ever knows. They have counter arguments like “We’re honouring you”. Let’s honour you by calling a sports team “The Sluts”. How’s that? (laughter)
Let’s rename the Fighting Irish football team the “The Drunken Irish” football team. I’m honouring you. I didn’t mean to give any offense. Now we’ll all go out there and do the Stations of the Cross. 1,2,3,4. We can have the cheerleaders leading it.

Abolitionist: What connections do you make between your indigenism and your anarchism?

Ward Churchill: I don’t see them as being incompatible. My anarchism as I understand it, the cutting line is, this utility of the State – State being an inherently repressive and anti-democratic entity, you can’t have actual freedom in the context when you are compelled to conform to the arbitrary order imposed by the State. So you are fundamentally opposed to the State. I come from traditions that never had a State. There you have it. That’s about as strong an intersection on a philosophical level and also in terms of what it is you value. It doesn’t mean that they are entirely interchangeable. Anarchists aren’t American Indians. They haven’t developed the same traditions as ways of living with the land. To my knowledge anywhere else, although there may be exceptions, they’re not interchangeable but we have those things in common.

Abolitionist: What the bison and the Native American Indian share is a common history. The slaughter of the bison accompanied the massacres of the indigenous peoples of America. American land once supported over 60 million plus bison who were completely exterminated except for a few remaining. What is the full impact of the extermination for American’s today from their killing off the Native American Indian and the absence of its Bison?

Ward Churchill: It’s a homicidal reality. It takes us off into environmental and ecological regions. I use those two terms interchangeably although both are distinct terms. There’s people who are primarily preoccupied with what’s being done ecologically in particular points of geography and so on. Ecology includes social organizations as well.
You can take ecocide plus genocide and you have omnicide which is usually a set of values and goals that are being pursued in ways that if you accept the premises that goes into those values, goals, priorities and everything it does is perfectly logical other than omnicide which will eventually take out the perpetrators as well because of the over-all habitat sustaining at least their life form. It’s suicidal in a way. Dynamic.

You have environmentalists, deep ecologists and otherwise, people who are native rights activists who want to see a restitution in native traditions and values in some sense – all of this is brought together under this total motion that omnicide has been perpetrated in order to create the certain circumstance we are in and omnicide will increasingly in intensive forms be actualized if it is pursued. The end game if it is not stopped in order of reverse, the different values and understandings and so forth brought to the fore is the guidepost of how we go on living our lives and the sets of understanding that make that possible. We are simply not going to be here and quite a lot of the planet as we understand and perceive it isn’t going to be here either. Maybe it’s time for the cockroaches to take over. Let me concede that.

Abolitionist: Forces have been set in motion to intentionally prove you and your scholarship wrong, to discredit you and to ridicule you yet so many activists are thankful that you are speaking out. What’s it been like for you?

Ward Churchill: Very interesting, busy, educational and rewarding. They don’t go after somebody like this unless you have taken a piece out of them. We had this saying when I was youthful but you could tell who was most effective, organizationally and sometimes individually. Sometimes they were right even if by accident at galvanizing people, not always but you could get a handle on actually who was doing damage to the State or who was perceived as being capable if allowed to continue by the degree of repression being visited upon you. In a context of which I have been operating for a while as I get older has less and less to do with physical occupations. Put simply my physical capacity to do certain things is diminishing, as is the same for all of us as we go on so we find other things to engage with. In that context in terms of trying to silence my voice I’m probably the most academically attacked person perhaps on the goddamn continent at this point. In a certain sense it’s unnerving but it’s also gratifying in another sense. The more I push them the more I’m going to talk. If it bothers them it must be in some sense correct.

Abolitionist: We thank you for speaking out Ward and I think you have just highlighted the essence of resistance in that resistance is all about damaging the larger picture they have told us is true and immovable.