I never had the chance to meet Ward Churchill. I first read him in the early 90s at Michigan in a Native Studies class taught by Estevan Rael-Galvez. Estevan assigned this book, one the featured Ward heavily:
I liked it enough to keep buying books by the leading authors in this collection, including Ward. I was reading Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Vine Deloria, John Trudell, Edward Said, Winona LaDuke, Paula Gunn Allen, Emma Goldman, etc. back in those days. They were mainstays of a radical publishing industry.
Eventually, I would hear negative comments about Prof. Churchill, that he threatened people, that he wasn’t really Indigenous, that he was a plagiarist. Hearing those things doesn’t necessarily make it so, especially when some of the people saying those things to me were themselves a bit unreliable. Other people I trust advised me that Ward was a true champion of academic freedom.
In the mid to late 2000s, D.C. Fed Bar asked me to join Ward and Sam Deloria on a panel about Indian citizenship and identity in their fall event one year. I even put together some materials in a packet I facetiously called “Who is an Indian? Ask the Government.” Being a baby law prof, I had no interest in arguing with either Sam or Ward, which I imagine could be quite bruising, but I did want to meet the man I had read for so long. Sadly, I did not get to see Sam and Ward interact on the same stage because Ward cancelled (or so I was told) and was replaced by a Congressional staffer. I can only imagine, given the controversies over Ward’s ancestry, that the panel might have been enlightening — or a debacle.
In Native circles in the public record, Ward first appears as an artist in the 1970s. That was news to me. He even showed in Paris in the mid-1970s.
Rapid City Journal, 1975
Rapid City Journal, 1976
Back inside cover of Shantiih, Summer-Fall 1979
An early bio from the same issue of Shantiih.
I confess that I found myself annoyed/jealous that Ward came up in a field that had so many gaps that one person could be so many things, artist, poet, activist, academic, institutional leader, etc. It’s very impressive that he was all these things without a PhD, JD, MFA, MBA, etc., academic credentials that Native people now struggle to attain — and usually must — just to be one of the things that Ward was known for. It was certainly a different time, with the few Native people that were able to make it through the higher education system that any person who did it was instantly a unicorn.
It was also a time of violence (Wounded Knee, treaty fishing, etc.), which seems to me to have contributed to the ugly academic discourse of that generation, in which Ward definitely partook. Whatever one’s views about Ward, his writings identified so many issues I had never heard about as a young man utterly uneducated about Native issues in the 1990s. For that, I say thanks to Ward and that entire generation of activist-academics.
Like I said, I never met him, but a few years back I did meet his delightful spouse, Natsu Saito, who is truly lovely. In my brief interaction with Prof. Saito, I noticed that her characterization of Ward was much different than what I had heard and read about him. My thoughts go out to her.
