342 Indians

"Falsification and fabrication are habitual with Churchill"

---Professor Thomas Brown

The purpose of this blog is to show how Professor Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado at Boulder has falsified the history of American Indians to serve his own agenda. His falsifications have injured both Indian and non-Indian Americans.

My view is that Ward Churchill has a long history as a scholar who has knowingly collaborated with America's enemies.
He was an activist in the American Indian Movement [AIM], an organization that Churchill's own schismatic Colorado AIM [CO-AIM] claims accepted money from the Baath Socialist Party of Iraq.
Churchill has also written propaganda for the Covert Action Information Bulletin [C.A.I.B.], a mouthpiece of the Cuban and Soviet dictatorships.
He has spread mendacious falsehoods about the "crimes" of our government; he has exploited guilt to disarm our people; and he and his minions have furnished the United Nations and our enemies with a ready-made laundry list of supposed American "crimes."

But who is the real criminal? Look at Ward Churchill's own words!

Ward Churchill is a self-confessed wife-beater who celebrates the mass-murders of 9-11, who glorifies the criminal Black Panther terrorist movement, who has made false allegations about the American Army committing genocide, who daydreams about hanging American politicians, who "jokes" (in Boulder, Colorado) about "snuffing" American children, who boasts that he is a terrorist who taught the Weathermen how to make bombs, whose Colorado AIM website admits that the American Indian Movement took money from Iraq, and who claims that he was on Pine Ridge Indian reservation when two FBI agents were ambushed and murdered "Custer-like -- in their self-made trap."

Ward Churchill is an enemy of America who supports international terrorist murderers and who has said that he wants "America off the planet."

In 1985, Ward Churchill published an article titled "The Covert War Against Native Americans" [The Covert Action Information Bulletin, (Summer 1985 issue.), Number 24 pp. 16-21. C.A.I.B., P.O. Box 34583, Washington, D.C. 20043].
See also here.
The article alleged that FBI-backed death squads had murdered 342 Indians on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. Churchill claimed that these murdered Indians were members of the American Indian Movement, or AIM.
Churchill wrote:
"[I]n the post-Wounded Knee context of South Dakota's Pine Ridge Lakota Reservation, independent researcher Candy Hamilton established that at least 342 AIM members and supporters were killed by roving death squads aligned with and supported by the FBI."

Churchill did not really document his allegations. He did not give the names of the people who were supposedly murdered or any details about their deaths in this 1985 article. He distanced himself slightly from his claim of 342 murdered people by writing that this figure had been established by another person, an "independent researcher" named Candy Hamilton, but Candy Hamilton was not an "independent researcher." She was an AIM activist and a good friend of another AIM activist, Anna Mae Aquash, who was murdered by some people in AIM. Hamilton was reportedly one of the last people to see Aquash alive and testified at the trial to see who murdered Aquash.

I have never seen what Candy Hamilton actually determined. I only know what Churchill claims she established.
I was very skeptical of this claim that FBI-backed death squads killed 342 Indians because the Covert Action Information Bulletin has been identified as a publication begun by a CIA defector named Philip Agee who now lives in Cuba.

A book by a British scholar, Christopher Andrew, and a Soviet defector, Vasili Mitrokhin, states that the Soviet KGB supplied the C.A.I.B. with propaganda designed to compromise the American government. [The Sword and Shield pages 232-234; See also my post about the Mitrokhin Archive].

In a 1990 book, Churchill told a different story about the 342 Indians.

In Chapter 7 of his 1990 book, Cointelpro Papers [Documents from the FBI's Secret Wars Against Dissent in the United States by Churchill & Jim Vander Wall South End Press ISBN 0-89608-359-4], Churchill claimed that more that 60 people were murdered.

The 342 figure has somehow changed from murdered people to people who were subjected into "violent physical assaults":

Churchill wrote:
"During the 36 months roughly beginning with the end of Wounded Knee and continuing through the first of May 1976, more than sixty AIM members and supporters died violently on or in locations immediately adjacent to the Pine Ridge Reservation. A minimum of 342 others suffered violent physical assaults."

Churchill has never explained this "mistake." How he could write in one place that FBI-backed death squads murdered 342 people and later that 342 Indians were assaulted and over 60 killed?

UPDATE: Because the 1973 Chilean coup that deposed President Salvadore Allende occurred on 9-11, just like the Al Qaeda attack on America, some writers on the left have called the Chile coup "The Other 9-11."

In 1990, years before America's 9-11, Churchill cited sources [Roberto Maestas and Bruce Johansen] who compared the murder rate after the 1973 coup in Chile to the murder rate during the alleged FBI-backed killings on Pine Ridge:

"The political murder rate at Pine Ridge between March 1, 1973, and March 1, 1976, was almost equivalent to that in Chile during the three years after the military coup supported by the United States deposed and killed President Salvador Allende ... Based on Chiles population of 10 million, the estimated fifty thousand persons killed in three years of political repression in Chile at the same time (1973/1976) roughly paralleled the murder rate at Pine Ridge. 79"

It is strange that Churchill felt the need to quote Maestas and Johansen in 1990 about the comparison of death rates in Chile and on Pine Ridge. Why didn't Churchill simply quote his own earlier research? As early as 1985, Churchill himself had written:

"The statistics [death rate on Pine Ridge] are entirely comparable to what happened in Chile in the immediate aftermath of Pinochet's coup."

Perhaps Churchill did not want readers to notice that he had made the preposterous claim in the Soviet/Cuban Covert Action Information Bulletin that FBI-backed death squads had murdered 342 Indians.

For more details about "The Other 9-11" see this post:

It is completely false to compare the death rate after the coup in Chile to the alleged death rate on Pine Ridge. For one thing, Churchill is inventing that FBI-backed death squads killed 342 Indians. The political killings in Chile actually happened.

Some leftists reacted to America's 9-11 by making an analogy to Chile's 9-11. Their point was basically that America "had it coming" because of their support for the Chile coup and other dictators. There is actually not much evidence that the U.S. caused the coup in Chile.