Professor Ward Churchill says an 11-year-old videotape that shows Keetoowah Band Cherokee Indian council members debating his heritage is “crushing evidence” that he is American Indian.
Churchill’s claim of Indian ethnicity is at the center of an inquiry by his employer, the University of Colorado, where he teaches in the ethnic-studies department. The probe began after an essay he wrote came to light last winter that compared some 9/11 victims to a leading Nazi, prompting widespread criticism.
On Monday, Churchill submitted a 50-page response to questions posed by CU concerning his heritage and other issues, such as plagiarism.
Tuesday evening, Churchill summed up his response to the plagiarism allegations in two short sentences. “I didn’t plagiarize anything,” he said. “You can’t plagiarize yourself.”
The videotape shows tribal council members debating who can define an Indian and includes them saying they had already granted Churchill an associate membership but would reconsider his application. A few weeks later, Churchill said, a membership card and a copy of the video arrived in the mail.
When asked why he hadn’t presented the videotape until showing it to a Denver Post reporter Tuesday, Churchill said, “I don’t feel the need to present it to people. I don’t have to prove a (expletive) thing to them.”
In the video, which is more than an hour long and shows more than a dozen members of the Keetoowah Band council discussing various tribal matters, the issue of Churchill’s ethnicity is raised by a nontribal council member who discounts the CU professor’s credibility and urges council members to withdraw Churchill’s membership.
“He wants to prove he’s an Indian so he can sell books as an Indian,” said the man, whose identity The Post has been unable to verify.
He then added that certain members of the American Indian Movement “have been stripped of their dignity” in part by Churchill’s testimony against them in a court hearing.
Yet Churchill did not approach the council with a request to join, member Shelley Davis said at that meeting. She approached him after questioning him about his background.
“A lot of questions about his Indianness arose when trouble with AIM began,” Davis says in the videotape.
Yet she was satisfied enough to invite him to join the tribe, she said. “He was asked. I asked him.”
After several other council members weighed in on the topic, the council decided to present Churchill’s membership application “one more time” in order to verify whether he would qualify to become an associate member of the band.
Shelley Levine, who was Shelley Davis at the time, confirmed to The Post from her home in Arizona on Tuesday night that she was present at the 1994 meeting and that Churchill’s ethnicity was proved to the band.
“The people I talked to said they confirmed his genealogy,” Levine said.
After the uproar over Churchill’s comparing 9/11 victims to a top Nazi, the university formed a committee of three administrators in February to investigate Churchill’s work and statements.
At the end of March, the administrators found that Churchill’s controversial statements were protected by the First Amendment.
But the administrators decided that there were enough questions about whether Churchill plagiarized in his writings and used claims about his Indian heritage to promote his work to spark an investigation by the university’s Standing Committee on Research Misconduct.
The 12-member research misconduct committee, which is the first to give Churchill a formal chance to respond to allegations, is expected to spend eight months reviewing his writings, but if it finds wrongdoing, it can only recommend a punishment, ranging from censure to firing. Administrators have the final say.
Specifically, the committee will review complaints by University of New Mexico professor John LaVelle and Lamar University professor Thomas Brown about whether Churchill misrepresented historical facts in his work, including whether the U.S. Army purposely distributed smallpox- laced blankets to Indians.
The committee also will review a complaint by Dalhousie University professor Fay Cohen that Churchill plagiarized her work as part of a book.
Additionally, the committee will attempt to determine whether Churchill qualifies as an American Indian or whether he misrepresented himself in order to give credibility to his work. Churchill denied plagiarizing or misrepresenting anything in his writing.
Staff writer Amy Herdy can be reached at 303-820-1752 or aherdy@denverpost.com.
