C.U. Instructor Ben Whitmer Denigrates the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian

Picture credit for Washington D.C. National Museum of the American Indian

"The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) works in collaboration with the Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere and Hawai‘i to protect and foster indigenous cultures, reaffirm traditions and beliefs, encourage contemporary artistic expression, and provide a forum for Native voices."---NMAI’s Community and Constituent Services department

Ben Whitmer, an instructor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, recently criticized Washington's National Museum of the American Indian on his blog.

Whitmer writes:

"One of my favorite examples of Holocaust denial is The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. It’s sort of an anti-museum, with no correlation whatsoever to the historical realities one might expect to be at issue."

This museum, which is actually three museums, owes its existence to a collector named George Gustav Heye.

Linda Poolaw (Delaware/Kiowa), Deleware Grand Chief, says:

“If Gustav Heye hadn’t collected those things back then, we would not have them today to look at. Now, over 100 years later, my people can see what we had, and it is not lost.”

Whitmer is a supporter of the discredited ex-professor and plagiarist Ward Churchill, who is a propagandist for the Colorado American Indian Movement (CO-AIM). Churchill also admits that he abused his young Indian wife, the late Leah Kelly, a student at the University of Colorado
in Boulder. He denigrated her as a drunk and blamed white opression for her alcoholism, although her family says she didn't have an alcohol problem until she married Ward, a white man. [Search Leah on this blog.]

Ward Churchill admits:

"I broke and slammed [my wife] back against our bedroom wall, telling her that if she kept it up, she’d be apt to land in a hospital."

AIM pretends to advocate for Indians, but really they reportedly have a criminal history of vandalizing, stealing, and selling stolen Indian art. Ward Churchill even plagiarizes other people's art and then sells it for money. He plagiarized a painting by the artist Thomas Mails called "Winter Attack." When reporters found out, Wardo attacked the reporters.

In February 1973, AIM vandals attacked the Indian town of Wounded Knee. This is what John Burrows reports that AIM did to people's homes and to their small museum in the name of "liberation":

"[O]ne hundred to two hundred Indians led by members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), swarmed into Wounded Knee and wrecked Clive Gildersleeve's museum. They knocked the old man down and spat on him. They smashed and overturned glass display cases and slashed hide paintings and pictures. Then they left, these self-proclaimed AIM "warriors," taking with them whatever artifacts they had not destroyed. Altogether they stole, destroyed or damaged $50,000 worth of irreplaceable Sioux treasures. Many of these items were later sold to white collectors. "The reason for that destruction," AIM "leader" Clyde Bellecourt said, "was that the owner, even though he was married to an Oglala Sioux, was white.....The AIM people destroyed the homes of Indian residents. They stole valuables and burnt furniture. They shot pets, dogs and cats, and smashed children's tricycles. They defecated and urinated on floors—after having "purified" themselves in "sweat" rituals. Sanitation does not obtain in the Indian movement." [Full story]

I wrote about how AIM attacked Wounded Knee in an earlier post. That post shows how the criminals who attacked Wounded Knee camoflaged their violence, vandalism, and theft with hypocritical accounts of their "bravery."

Really, Ben Whitmer and Colorado AIM don't want American Indians to have success. They want Indians to be oppressed because that is the only way that Indians are useful to anti-American radicals.

Any day now a book will be published by a retired FBI official named Joe Trimbach. His soon-to-be-published book, American Indian Mafia, "exposes myths and falsehoods, as well as never-before-published secrets of AIM."

While we wait for the skeletons in AIM's closet to be revealed in Mr. Trimbach's book, we can read some books based on the Mitrokhin Archive, a collection of notes transcribed from the secret archives of the KGB's foreign intelligence and smuggled to the West:

"According to the FBI, Mitrokhin’s documents are 'the most complete and extensive intelligence ever received from any source.' Perhaps the most significant prize for the Western intelligence community are the documents that contain the real names and identities of thousands of foreign agents the KGB recruited and kept under deep cover abroad—a rosetta stone for the spy world...Many of the documents remain classified.” [Stromberg, Stephen W. "Documenting the KGB". Oxonian Review of Books. Winter 2005]