Ward Churchill e Pierre Orelus - Confronting Western Colonialism, American Racism, and White Supremacy

Peter Lang AG
CONFRONTING WESTERN COLONIALISM, AMERICAN RACISM, AND WHITE SUPREMACY

Author(s): Ward Churchill and Pierre Orelus
Source: Counterpoints, Vol. 430, A Decolonizing Encounter: Ward Churchill and Antonia
Darder in Dialogue (2012), pp. 56-112
Published by: Peter Lang AG
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•3•
CONFRONTING WESTERN
COLONIALISM, AMERICAN RACISM,

AND WHITE SUPREMACY
Ward Churchill and Pierre Orelus in Dialogue
Context of Chapter
In this chapter, Professor Orelus engages Professor Churchill in a dialogue
revolving around themes such as colonization, racism, white supremacy, U.S.
imperialism, U.S. foreign policy, capitalism, and the genocide of Native
Americans. Professor Churchill draws on marxist theory, and his lived and
professional experiences as a scholar activist working primarily with Native
Americans and other marginalized groups to analyze and unmask brutal forms
of oppression these groups have experienced in the U.S and elsewhere. He goe
on to link these forms of oppression to U.S. racism and white supremacy, col-
onization, and the larger socioeconomic and political context in the U.S
Professor Churchill talks about the extent to which asymmetrical power rela
tions have led many historically marginalized groups, particularly Nativ
Americans, further to the margins. After critically analyzing the way many forms
of oppression manifest themselves, Churchill contends that people need to orga-
nize so that they can challenge those in power and fight for their human rights.
Likewise, Professor Churchill encourages concerned citizens to use their agency
to counter colonization, racism, white supremacy, and U.S. imperialism.
***
CONFRONTING WESTERN COLONIALISM, AMERICAN RACISM 57
The Dialogue
Orelus: You are widely recognized as being among the scholars most pro-
foundly vested in racial and socioeconomic issues affecting marginalized peo-
ple, particularly Native Americans. Would you share what motivated you to
devote your professional career to exploring these issues and advocating for
Native Americans and other groups who have been oppressed because of their
racial, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds?
Churchill: Tve never really compartmentalized my life in the manner implied

by your question. My scholarly work and teaching, which is what I take you to
mean by my "professional career," has always been inseparable from my
activism, and my activism arose rather naturally from my broader sense of self
and attendant responsibility. It's all a piece, really; what IVe done, and continue
to do, is indistinguishable from who I am, and who I am is in no sense defined
by a professional title. If anything, the reverse is true.
Orelus: Fair enough. But the question then becomes what is it that's motivated
you to devote your life to exploring these issues and acting upon the resulting
conclusions?
Churchill: I'm motivated by my sense of self, beginning with the knowledge that
I'm something of a racial hybrid. My family lineage includes several people of
American Indian or Indian/white admixture and at least one who was either black
or "mustee,"1 as well as numerous contributors of Germanic and Celtic "stock."
Culturally, my background is similarly diverse, but the fact is that IVe strongly
identified with the American Indian aspect of my makeup since childhood. This
in itself may explain why IVe concentrated so heavily on indigenous issues,
although, as you Ve already pointed out, I have by no means done so to the exclu-
sion of other peoples of color. Actually, since the bulk of my work has been
devoted to exploring white attitudes towards "nonwhites," excavating the histor-
ical realities these attitudes have generated over the past several centuries, and
"connecting the dots" linking it all together, it's at least arguable that I've been
engaged in a variant of what's come to be called "whiteness studies." Whatever
the label, my object is to confront and systematically "refiidiate" the matrix of fal-
sification and denial embodied in the U.S. settler society's triumphalist narrative
of itself, arriving thereby at an exponentially closer approximation of truth.
In any event, I was charged with the responsibility for doing the sort of work
I do by elders like Philip Deere and Mathew King during the early '80s. I've spo-
58 A DECOLONIZING ENCOUNTER
ken of this on numerous occasions over the years, and have rec
about it,2 but the bottom line is that Tve always sought to comp
a manner consistent with their enjoinders to speak the truth as I se
as possible, and to never compromise or equivocate in such matt
Mathew are both gone now, along with a lot of others from wh
my cues, but, although I'm starting to get on in years myself, I
I'm doing by the degree of resonance what I say, write, and do
grassroots elders: Carrie Dann, to name but one example.3
Even though my grounding is markedly different from the cont
describing, the stance IVe assumed is akin to that of what Ant
referred to as an "organic intellectual." My work arises directly
munities of resistance spawned by this country's politicoeconomic st
dynamics, and the measure of its value accrues from those com
from the academy. I'm really not much concerned with how I'm
my work is viewed, by what Gramsci termed as "bourgeois intel
than in the backhanded sense that the extent to which they fee
attack and discredit me is an indicator of the extent to which I
being on the right track.
Orelus: This accounts for a lot, but not the peculiarly angry ed
your material is often imbued. Other scholars, including Nativ
scholars, have examined subject matters similar to those you deal wi
don't end up making the same comparisons, drawing the same c
ultimately saying the same jarring sorts of things you' ve said a
do you think that's the case?
Churchill: I don't think it is the case. A number of others have

isons similar to those I make and have drawn essentially the sam
as I, albeit their focus and the particular examples they've deplo
been different than mine. A lot of Chomsky's work comes read
this regard, as does that of Ed Herman, Norman Finkelstein, Da
Barbara Mann, Tink Tinker, Roland Chrisjohn, Akinyele Um
Cleaver, Bruce Franklin, Eric Cheyfitz, Rob Williams, Immanu
Haunani-Kay Trask, Jack Forbes, Richard Falk, Jordan Paust, M
Peter McLaren, Henry and Susan Searls Giroux.
The list would become rather lengthy, were I to attempt a f
Maybe we should refer readers to David Horowitz's Dangerous P
better roster,4 although he, too, leaves out far more people than
worse still, at least from my point of view, he includes a few b
like Todd Gitlin, with whom I'm loath to have my name associated in any way
at all And I'm quite sure the feeling is mutual So, let's forget the Horowitz ide
and stick with those IVe named-
Apart from differences in our respective emphases, my work is distinguish-
able from that of those I've mentioned, it seems to me, mainly on the basis of
style, or, perhaps more accurately, rhetorical strategy - mine in most instance
hinges upon a conscious effort to reach not only the composite mind of my audi-
enee, but its collective gut as well - and often, as with Finkelstein, not even that
sort of distinction is involved, since he's basically taken the same approach. S
it's fair to say that I don't find myself especially lacking in intellectual compan-
ionship, even within the academic component of the so-called scholarly com-
munity. And that's to say nothing of those - Mumia Abu Jamal, Eric Mann,
Sharon Venne, and John Zerzan, to name just a few - who are not, and in man
cases, have never been campus-based.
But I guess I'm begging the point of your question, aren't I? Those I've men-
tioned, either by name or by extension, comprise no more than a scant minor
ity of those purportedly engaged in the scholarly enterprise, both within th
academy and without. What you're really asking is that I explain how I see th
nature of my relationship to "mainstream scholarship," right? Well, I can cer-
tainly do that, but it'll take a while. Ensuring what I would consider to be a rea-
sonable degree of coherence in my response will require a fair amount o
historical contextualization. Even the condensed version is apt to add up to a
pretty lengthy response.
Orelus: That's not a problem. In fact, it's the object of what we're doing here,
so, by all means, proceed. Take as long as you need to.
Churchill: Well, okay, but remember that I warned you. The place to begin, I
suppose, is with the fact that the normative standard of behavior among thos
comprising what I've referred to as the "scholarly mainstream" - or "responsi-
ble scholarship," if you prefer that I employ the often perverse vernacular of aca-
demic discourse - is and has always been that of Gramsci's bourgeois
intellectuals. In effect, they conceive of themselves as comprising a sociocul-
tural élite, the interests of which are aligned with those holding economic,
political, and military power, and therefore harness their intellectual proficien-
cies to the task of defending the status quo.
It's their job, for which they're rewarded with a range of typically petty priv-
ileges and the largely imaginary prestige attending institutional appointments
and promotions, to obscure reality, "interpreting" it in ways that invariably make
6o A DECOLONIZING ENCOUNTER
it appear to be something other than it is, often as the

This, of course, requires that at the very least tho
every pronouncement to the point of sheer meanin
obliges them to engage in intentional distortions of w
sented, mainly through definitional or semantic slights
atic omission - which is to say, suppression - of cou
I remember being struck by a passage in Susan Gr
nearly 20 years ago, something to the effect that the U
ciplines, institutions, and rubrics" which function
Insofar as the edifice of professionalized scholarship
hensive and continuous process of falsification, it se
observation was very much on target. Ill not bel
things got this way. Russell Jacoby and Clyde Barro
my estimation laid it out pretty well.6 Nor am I going
explaining the purpose served by such falsification, b
has been developed in that regard.
It should suffice for our purposes here to simply
advancing a complex of mutually reinforcing narrat
nate to a master narrative, eurosupremacist in its ess
imbed a profound misapprehension of historical act
sciousness, but to impart a sense that the outcome of
our present circumstance - is fundamentally right, nat
The aggregate effect of inculcating such false cons
coined by Georg Lukács, but applying it in a somewh
hegemonic. Oops, there's Gramsci again. I do keep go
But really, if people can be indoctrinated to actual
uation is both natural and inevitable, very few will end
why, a little earlier, I remarked upon the defensive rol
intelligentsia. Notwithstanding the ever-growing ra
other such obvious instrumentalities of force, the
tered by the academy, together with those of the co
lic school system, might rightly be described as com
defense relied upon by the status quo.9 Chomsky and
and quite aptly, in my view - described the process as d
ufacturing of consent."10
Up until the early '70s, academic rationalizations o
rather crudely framed, not least because most colleg
on the basis of a Jim Crow mode of segregation, eith
CONFRONTING WESTERN COLONIALISM, AMERICAN RACISM 6 1
professoriate, and overwhelmingly the students, were white- That being so, it's
unsurprising to find that among the more popular and widely assigned colle-
giate texts until some point towards the end of the '60s was The Growth of the
American Republic , coauthored by leading professional historians Henry Steele
Commager and Samuel Eliot Morison, wherein it is explained that there was
"much to be said for slavery as a transitional status between barbarism and civ-
ilization," and that "Sambo" was "happy" with his lot as chattel because he "suf-
fered less than any other class in the South from its 'peculiar institution/"11
That's just one example. I could spend the rest of the week citing others,
many of them even worse, and that's just with regard to historians. The same
can be said for anthropology, where you had such luminaries as Harvard's
Earnest Hooten - he not only wrote the standard texts in physical anthropol-
ogy, but reputedly trained every physical anthropologist in the country until his
death in the mid-'50s - teaching "eugenical science" in its most unattenuated
form. You don't even want to think about how Hooton depicted the "natural
characteristics" of blacks, American Indians, Jews, and other such Untermen-
sch A2 When I was a kid, this sort of blatantly racist scholarship wasn't simply
the norm, it was nearly monolithic.
Orelus: Let me break in for a moment. I'd like you to elaborate on Earnest
Hooton's work because I suspect that many readers may not know much about
him. Perhaps you could provide a bit of background on how his work influenced
people to view American Indians and other marginalized groups in negative ways.
Churchill: Sure. As I said, Hooton was a leading practitioner of what he called

"eugenical science." "Eugenics," literally meaning "well-born," is the dimension
of "race science" having to do with heredity and genetics.13 It is popularly linked
to the Nazis, for the very good reason that it provided the supposed "scientific
foundation" for Hitler's race laws,14 justification for Nazi sterilization and
euthanasia programs aimed at mental and physical "defectives,"15 the rationale
underpinning the efforts of the so-called Office of Race and Resettlement to
reconfigure the demography of eastern Europe by relocating entire populations
into specified "ethnic zones,"16 and ultimately the pretext for exterminating sev-
eral million Jews, Roma ("Gypsies"), and Slavs.
All that's true, but it would be well to remember, as most people do not, or
would prefer to forget, that the Nazis hardly had a monopoly on such insanity.
After all, the term "eugenics" was coined in the early 1880s, not by a German,
but by Darwin's cousin, Sir Francis Galton, known as "the father of statistics."17
Galton's idea was to apply statistical analysis to matters of heredity and, on that
Ó2 A DECOLONIZING ENCOUNTER
basis, formulate socioeconomic policies producing

population.18 This gives rise to some very ugly stuff
of "free market economics," for instance19 - but
brought his "eugenical" concept to bear on "The R
That was done in the U.S., where by 1920 or so,
inating scientific orthodoxy, taught in the public sch
the country.20 It's no exaggeration to say that the U.
up until about 1930, both intellectually and in term
or that the German eugenicists learned their chops fr
were it not for funding by the Rockefeller Foundatio
the U.S., the "racial science" specifically attributable t
when Germany took the lead on that front, would ha
if not impossible. Right on into the late '30s, the K
Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics wa
Rockefellers, for example, so the "Nazi connection"
While there were obviously a number of other
major player in all this. He was a Rhodes Scholar a
hired as a professor of physical anthropology by H
completed his degree in 1912, so he certainly carr
an impeccable scientific pedigree.23 What was he p
an example: In the mid-'20s, the American
Anthropology formed what was called the "Comm
ing as members not only Hooton, but Ales Hrdlič
eugenicist cum anthro - Hrdlička was curator
Smithsonian for about 40 years24 - and Charl
American Eugenics Society;25 their initial report,
literally compared African babies to young apes.26
That was not atypical. A decade later, Hooten an
it, publishing an influential article in the Am
Anthropology , "scientifically proving" that "the N
a closer approach to primitive man than to the wh
after that, in 1939, he solo-authored a major text
purported to establish on the basis of cranial char
"naturally" disposed to criminal behavior.28 Anoth
Men, and Morons - I kid you not - supposedly sh
the inherent intellectual inferiority of black folk.29
This takes us to American Indians, who were a
by Hooton to be of a "Pseudo-Negroid" type, as "m
indiciai likenesses to all Negro groups," He therefore concluded that Indians

are "in truth [of] Negroid [racial stock],"30 Given his stated views on blacks, the
mere fact that Hooton elected to classify American Indians as a "Negro group"
really ought to say all that needs saying. But, hey, the boy had a lot more to say
on the matter, and he kept right on saying it, as a distinguished Harvard "racial
expert," until the day he died [May 3, 1954]. That he was quite influential is
beyond question, as is the fact that his was a decisively negative influence on
how people of color were and, in some quarters, still are viewed by whites in
the United States.
There's a lot more I could say in this connection, regarding Hrdlička,31 for
instance, or concerning the work of Hooton s understudy Carleton Coon's
active collaboration with some of the worst Jim Crow segregationists during the
early '60s,32 to cite another example. But I don't want to turn this into an
extended critique of anthropology, and I think my point's already been made.
Anyone who hasn't detected clear parallels between what these guys were say-
ing and what the Nazi anthropologists were saying during the 1930s is either
in denial or simply hasn't been paying attention. Or maybe they don't know
enough about Nazi anthropology to form an opinion. In that case, I strongly
recommend they have a look at From Racism to Genocide , Gretchen Schafft's
recent study of anthropology in Hitler's Germany.33
Orelus: I notice that your emphasis has been placed entirely upon physical
anthropology or, perhaps more precisely, the "old school" of physical anthro-
pology. By the 1950s, a "new school" was already replacing the old. There's also
the question of cultural anthropology, arising from the work of Franz Boas and
others during the early twentieth century, which was from the outset in con-
flict with the physical anthropology of Hooton, Hrdlička, and their colleagues.
Do you view either the "new" physical anthropology or cultural anthropology
in a more favorable light?
Churchill: No. The "new" physical anthropology of the 1950s mainly embod-
ied a shift from methods of anatomical measurement, which had been pioneered
in the U.S. by people like Samuel George Morton and Josiah Nott back in the
early-to-mid-nineteenth century and then "refined" by people like Hrdlička and
Hooton during the twentieth, to an emphasis on genetics.34 Genetics is obviously
a much more sophisticated scientific domain than things like craniometry and
phrenology, but that just makes it a lot harder to rebut. And it's still eugenics, by
any other name. Witness the American Breeders Association, which gave birth
to the American Eugenics Society in 1911, renaming itself the "American
Ó4 A DECOLONIZING ENCOUNTER
Genetics Association," It still publishes the Journal of Heredity

of the principle "scientific" organs of the eugenics movement d
The Eugenics Society itself was renamed "Society for the S
Biology" in 1972, while its main publication, Eugenical News , w
academic journal called Social Biology.36 The American Soci
Genetics, which publishes The American journal of Human Genetics
as "the primary professional membership organization for hum
cialists worldwide,"37 was founded in 1948 by "social geneticists
J. Muller, who served as its first president.38 Although ostens
eugenics, one of the AAHG's first acts was to extend member
Günther, a Nazi anthropologist whose record was sufficiently sordi
almost uniquely, from securing any sort of postwar university app
Think about it. Even Otmar von Verschuer, who was medic
ogist Josef Mengele^ boss, and who was reputedly a regular recipien
specimens" from Mengele's hideous twins studies at Auschwit
obtain a faculty position after the war, but not Günther.40 It's
ing, by the way, that Verschuer and Muller were not infrequent co
I don't know that Verschuer was made a member of the AAH
may have been, but Muller did quite a lot, both publicly and be
to rehabilitate Verschuer's reputation as a "scientist."41 I'm sorry,
where this was an especially "adversarial" relationship.
This sort of subterfuge - I think that's the appropriate wo
occurred internationally. The British journal Annals of Eugenics wa
tied Annals of Human Genetics , for instance. Similarly, Francis Ga
chair of eugenics at the University College of London has bee
"Galton Chair of Genetics," while the Galton Eugenics
University College is now called the "Galton Laboratory and D
Genetics."42 And, of course, there's British-turned-American
Roger Pearson's Mankind Quarterly 43 - Verschuer was a membe
ial board until his death in 196944 - an openly neonazi journa
viewed as a proper venue for "scholarship" by more than
"respectable" academics working in human genetics, anthropo
economics, and psychology.45
Changing the name doesn't change the reality. Physical anth
the only field involved, of course, far from it. Eugenics was always
disciplinary paradigm. But physical anthropology is involved, along
genetics, social biology, psych, and several other fields.46 The l
ity need to be understood. A good way to get at some of this i
money," as they say, to see whose research is being funded by racist entities - the
Pioneer Fund is a good example, as are the Coors and Heritage foundations -
who's underwriting certain "scholarly" associations, journals, and so on. William
Tucker, at Princeton, has done some excellent work along these lines and there
are others.47 It takes a little work, but the information is accessible.48
Orelus: And cultural anthropology?
Churchill: Oh yeah, those guys. Let's start with the fact that despite his repu-
tation as a staunch opponent of white supremacism, Franz Boas was perpetu-
ally equivocal, to say the least, about the equality of races. Among other
things, he was always a firm believer in the intellectual superiority of whites.49
The truth is that Boas, while his work was less decisively deterministic in a bio-
logical sense, made common cause with liberal and socialist eugenicists like
Hooton and Herman Muller during the '30s,50 and, as Eleanor Leacock has
emphasized, it was "the Boasian synthesis of biology and culture that laid the
foundation for the 'new physical anthropology'" I was just describing.51 So the
supposed distinctions between physical and cultural anthropology have been
vastly overdrawn, right from the get-go.
I find it supremely ironic that most arguments to the contrary now
embraced by progressives as signifiers of Boas' sociocultural egalitarianism orig-
inated with the Nazis and have been perpetuated by comparably rabid anti-
sémites in the U.S.52 One must of course defend him against that sort of
"critique," but to do so by holding him up as a sort of antiracist paragon is no
less absurd than according him sole credit for "starting all this equality garbage,"
as American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell did in 1966, 53 or plac-
ing him on a list of the 16 most significant figures in a century-long "conspir-
acy to destroy the white race," as the cryptonazi magazine American Renaissance
would do some 30 years later.54
That the glare of whiteness emanating from the work of Boas' protégés can
often be blinding should, given the real - as opposed to mythic - orientation
of Boas himself, come as no surprise. Consider, for instance, The Chrysanthemum
and the Sword , Ruth Benedict's 1946 study of the "Japanese national character."
Setting aside her thoroughgoing decontextualization of Japan's policy trajec-
tory from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and her implicit repetition of
all the usual clichés about "The Oriental Mind," and so on, Benedict's study
was explicitly designed to facilitate the efficiency of U.S. authorities in recon-
figuring Japan's sociopolitical institutions to "Western" specifications during the
postwar occupation.55
There are a seemingly infinite number of contend

a clearer example of how, since its inception as an "ac
pology has functioned not only in service to but as a
European/Euroamerican imperial project.56 As Alb
shown, a crucial role played by anthropologists in cre
tem of colonial domination, beyond their identificati
the targeted peoples through which they could be ma
selves, and thus maintained in a condition of perp
construct a triumphalist narrative of the colonizing
presented in the form of a "benefit" to the victims t
This is certainly true of Benedict's work on Ja
that the Japanese would benefit by being compe
forms of government and social organization in favo
of democracy,"58 and no less so of the work done
Boas' protégés, Margaret Mead. We needn't go in
infecting her famous Samoa studies, a topic that's
by the likes of Derek Freeman over the past 30 ye
offers still better illustrations of my point in some
rial. One of the best in this regard will be found
for Oíd, when she rhapsodizes about how, during
of Papua New Guinea, "The Americans knocke
channels, smoothed islands for airstrips, [and] tore u
"marvelous machines," devastating the ecosystem u
tainability of the area's indigenous cultures were
in the process, compelling the "natives" to attain
what it meant to be treated by civilized men, by
with individual names like anyone else."60
There's a lot more I could cite along the same lines
Margaret Mead and her groupies, but from other
ogy: the cannibologists, for example. It seems to m
is still missing the point would do better reading - o
be - Said's Orientalism or perhaps Baudrillard's The M
already said more than I meant to about anthropo
I was planning to go after the historians, as history'
I suppose this discussion has served equally well, a
been able to make many of the same points. Just wh
though, I was starting to segue into how the sit
altered in a way that broke up what might be cal
whiteness," bringing other voices into the mix, so to speak. That's the context
from which the sort of scholarship I do arose, so I'd like to pick up the thread.
Orelus: Certainly. But before you do, it would be good if you explained what
you mean by the term "cannibologist," since I suspect many of our readers will
be unfamiliar with it.
Churchill: A cannibologist is, at least in the first instance, any anthro exhibit-
ing an obsessive desire to prove that cannibalism was - in some cases still is -
an inherent feature of "primitive" societies. This has been a standard element
of white-supremacist discourse since at least as early as the mid- 1490s when
Christóbal Colón reported that a group of American Indians he never encoun-
tered were "Caribs," a word that has evolved into "cannibals,"62 which derives
from the Spanish mispronunciation of "Carib" as "Canib."
The so-called Caribs weren't cannibals at all, of course, but they've been
saddled with that name ever since, as has the body of water with which they're
associated, the "Caribbean Sea" ("Sea of Cannibals"). The term "Carib" (or
"Caribe") was applied by Colón to people who knew - and still know - them-
selves as Kalinagos. Persons of Kalinago/African admixture are Garifunas. It also
seems worth mentioning that Columbus' actual surname, Colón, derives from
the same Latin root as "colony" and "colonizer."
In any case, over the next several centuries, a copious "travel literature"
evolved wherein Europeans described their supposed eyewitnessings of, and
frequently their supposed firsthand experiences with, the anthropophagie prac-
tices of indigenous peoples the world over. Virtually all such material has of late
been debunked by Marianna Torgovick, Frank Lestringant, Marina Warner, and
other critical analysts.63 The point, however, is that long before that ever came
to pass, ethnology had harnessed itself to the task of moving such fantasies into
the realm of "scientifically confirmed fact." This gave rise to a school of cultural
interpretation that is probably most famously embodied in Columbia University
anthropologist Marvin Harris' characterization of precontact Mexica ("Aztec")
society as "the Cannibal Kingdom" in his 1977 opus, Cannibals and Kings .64
A couple of years later, William Arens, a much lesser-known anthro at
SUNY-Stony Brook, came out with The Man-Eating Myth, a succinct but rather
comprehensive survey of the "evidence" relied upon by Harris and his cohorts,
which demonstrated that aß of it was either faulty or downright fraudulent.65 The
latter descriptor is mine, by the way - Arens didn't employ it - but really, some
of the stuff that's gone on in this domain is plainly worthy of comparison to the
Piltdown hoax and Carlos Castaneda's "Don Juan" scam.66 That being so, the
reaction to Arens' material was "near hysteria" a

gists - this time 1 am quoting him67 - with Sage Fou
pology Mary Douglas, who never found it necessar
and still glowing endorsement of Castañedas extra
denouncing The Man-Eating Myth as a "slur on eth
The University of Michigan's Marshall Sahlins,
tural anthropology, weighed in even more quick
whole thing a "scandal" and accusing Arens of "hi
an exchange in the New York Review of Books.70
Anthropology, a subsidiary of the AAA, took the
publishing a special anthology of ripostes to Arens
Cannibalism J1 Nonetheless, by the mid-80s, foll
Prize-winning medical researcher Carleton Gajdu
cated - or at least seriously distorted - data indica
Fore people of upland New Guinea,72 the sheer pau
porting anthropology's sweeping assertions on th
rassingly obvious. And that, by rights, should hav
But, of course, it wasn't. A seemingly endless s
come forward to announce that they've at last co
or another indigenous society practices, or has p
sooner has any given claim been discredited, a job
erable time and effort, than the next one pops up
anew. One gambit has been to shift the frame of ref
nibalism," à la Marvin Harris, to regularized for
Pennsylvania's Peggy Reeves Sanday popularized t
able extent, with her 1986 book, Divine Hunger J
Sahlins has been a major figure in this process o
figuratively island-hopping his way around the Pa
more elaborate descriptions of what he invariably
ditionally played by cannibalism among whate
Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiians), Maoris, and F
to reside at each stop.75 He's still at it, although
Lankan anthropologist teaching at Princeton, has
with him on a couple of occasions,76 and, as is am
gies like Laurence Goldman's The Anthropology o
been alone in such endeavors. There are enough c
they're sufficiently cross-pollinating, that I supp
formed their own little subdiscipline. I call it can
Orelus: It seems you're saying that cannibology, as you call it, is a phenome-
non associated purely with cultural anthropology- Is my impression correct
that physical anthropologists are uninvolved in this?
Churchill: No. I responded to your question as I did simply because my use of

the term "cannibologist" occurred while I was talking about cultural anthropol-
ogy. I certainly don't want to leave the impression that physical anthropologists
haven't jumped on the bandwagon as well,78 although it would probably be
more accurate to say that they've been on it all along. I seem to recollect some-
thing about Mark Twain, clear back in the 1870s, ridiculing paleontologists for
having adduced cannibalism from the condition of some ancient American
Indian bones.79 Be that as it may, the signature case of the "new wave" is that
of Berkeley's Tim White, who claimed in 1992 to have found conclusive evi-
dence of cannibalism among the Anasazi during his examination of human
remains found at a site in Mancos Canyon [Colorado].80
When critics pointed out that White had simply ignored alternative inter-
pretations of the condition in which the bones were found - mortuary practices,
for example - and that his evidence was thus a tad shy of compelling, he got
himself all in a huff, denounced anthropology's "rejection of science," and
promptly transferred his tenure to the Department of Integrated Biology.81
Earlier, I remarked upon how the boundaries distinguishing physical anthropol-
ogy from fields like genetics and social biology had become so permeable as to
have lost all meaning. I can't imagine a better illustration than Tim White,
especially since, now that he's ensconced in biology, he's gone right on doing
exactly the same research he did while he was rostered in anthropology.82
Among other things, he's a consultant to some projects in Europe that
reveal, to my mind at least, just how far off the deep end things have gone in
these circles. One of them, headed by the Spanish archaeologist Eudald
Carbonell, has purportedly excavated a site dated at 800,000-odd years in the
Atapuera Mountains containing "fossil evidence of continuous cannibalism -
cut marks and butchering remains - as a way of life among the Homo anteces-
sor inhabitants."83 Well, maybe they're right, but so what? Homo antecessor
means "prehuman." They've unearthed remains of a primate species suspected
of having been an evolutionary dead end,84 and to have become extinct at least
a quarter-million years before the first Homo sapiens sapiens - or "human beings,"
as most of us prefer to be called - ever appeared on earth.85
It follows that, even if Homo antecessors as a species, or at least this partic-
ular group of them, did in fact practice cannibalism as a way of life, it has no
more bearing on understandings of contemporary human cultures than does the
fact that chimpanzees and other primate speci

their young«86 Carbonell and his colleagues hav
findings as solid evidence of human cannibalism
media and in at least one scholarly article that t
excavated had "accepted and included [the] pract
a way of competing with other human groups for
is for "nutritional" reasons - thereby providing
cannibalism known to date."87
There's a very important subtext here. Since vir
practices Carbonell and his pals are attributing to
lion years ago are identical to those Sahlins and
upon attributing to American Indian, African,
tive" societies over the past few hundred years,
sions present themselves with regard to how th
Their conceptual lens is inescapably that of "raciall
lution," a theory espoused by the previous
Pennsylvania anthropology professor cum Jim
Coon during the early-60s as a "scientific explanat
are "retarded" - intellectually, culturally, and
whites.88
On second thought, it seems I'm going to have to do something at this point
that I never in my wildest nightmares expected I'd have to do, and that's apol-
ogize to the ghost of Carle ton Coon for having defamed him just now. Why?
Because, whatever else might be fairly said about the man on the basis of his
contention that "the colored races" are "naturally less advanced" than whites -
and that in itself is quite sufficient, as I see it, to warrant referring to him as racist
slime - he never went so far as to insinuate that peoples of color comprise a dif-
ferent species altogether, as in "prehumans," or "subhumans" for those who pre-
fer the Nazis' term of choice. Hence, my comparing Carbonell and his
colleagues to Coon was grossly unfair to Coon.
Now, golly, gee-whiz, gosh, do you suppose it's "just a coincidence" that
every one of those I've named as spewing this crap about how "the natives are
cannibals" just happens to be a white guy? Or, in Sanday's case, a white woman.
And, it's not that I've been selecting them on that basis, either. I could run
down 50 more names, or a hundred, and the result would be the same. I'll con-
cede that there might be a few intellectual compradors like Thomas Sowell and
José Limon who've internalized the notion that his grandma might very well
have eaten her cousin for lunch one day, but I really can't name a single
CONFRONTING WESTERN COLONIALISM, AMERICAN RACISM 7 I
scholar of color in the U.S. who subscribes to the idea that "primitive" t
tions are or ever were "naturally" cannibalistic. Less still can I think of on
actively peddles the proposition. Can you?
Orelus: No, I can't. Although I agree with your supposition that there are
to be some who have accepted the basic premise, I know of none who pro
it.
Churchill: Right. That refines the definition a bit, so allow me to reformulate

it accordingly: Cannibologists comprise a subset of white anthropologists clearly
identifiable on the basis of their compulsion to "prove" that the terms "prim-
itive peoples" and "cannibalism" are synonymous, regardless of the evidence.
They're maddening in the way a cloud of flies swarming a manure pile can be
maddening. No matter how many times you shoo them away by disproving their
contentions, they just circle around and come right back, always claiming to
have "new evidence" proving they were right all along. I don't know how you
define "neurotic behavior," but this certainly fills my bill.
Their stance on the evidentiary issue is revealing of a fundamental irra-
tionality in other ways as well. On the one hand, you have Marshall Sahlins
asserting that overwhelming "empirical evidence" is right there in plain view,
scientifically recorded, and that anyone questioning its validity is comparable
to a climate change denier.89 On the other hand, you have Fernando Rozzi, a
paleontologist at the Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique in Paris,
who's presently trying to parlay a 300, 000-year-old Neanderthal jawbone he says
was "probably" cut by a tool-wielding human into confirmation that "humans
ate Neanderthals into extinction." Sound familiar? Rozzi's contention is that
while empirical evidence is ample, iťs been "hidden" by people who reject the
facts for reasons of political correctitude.90
Both positions hinge upon the existence of a mysterious conspiracy dedi-
cated to suppress the "truth" of primitive cannibalism, but Sahlins' assertion
that the evidence is in plain view flatly contradicts Rozzi's that it has been sys-
tematically concealed by the conspirators. At this point, I've started taking bets
on which of them will be the first to mention the Illuminati, and it gets even
better. Peter Robinson, a now-retired paleontologist at the University of
Colorado, is on record admitting that there really isn't much to support the
belief-system of cannibology, but then arguing that if cannibologists continued
their search for it, "a critical mass of irrefutable evidence" would eventually
accumulate, thereby "settling the debate" in their favor.91 Well, hey, here's a
hot news flash, boys and girls: There's a name for the belief that repeating the
same failed procedure long enough will ultimatel

It's called alchemy, not science.
Orelus: You described this as "neurotic behavior."

take it that you weren't merely indulging in a turn
tion that there's something genuinely patholog
describing?
Churchill: Absolutely. I've said as much, and explained why, in a review of Man
Com, a truly ghastly tome coauthored by Christy G. Turner II, Regents Professor
of Anthropology at Arizona State University, and his late wife, Jacqueline. It
was really rich material to work with since their principal thesis, extrapolated
from what they claim is a Toltec skull found at Canyon Bonito, is that the
Chacoan Anasazi92 were colonized by the Toltecs for roughly four centuries,
during which time they adopted what the Turners depicted as the "Toltec
practice" of routinely "harvesting" large numbers of humans as food (hence,
"man corn").93 Not only was this a radical rewriting of Anasazi history - and
that of the Toltec, for that matter - but a complete inversion of the prevailing
image of the Anasazi as having been peaceful agriculturalists.94
In terms of presentation, which can mean everything in the success of such
endeavors, it's worth noting that in addition to its principal author's lofty acad-
emic title, the book carries the imprimatur of a "respectable" scholarly press
that spared no expense in producing it. Its 537 letter-size pages literally bulge with
charts, tables, maps, and photos. A whopping 359 pages are devoted to present-
ing the "Taphonomic Evidence for Cannibalism and Violence in the American
Southwest" purportedly supporting the Turners' portrayal of the Anasazi, all of
it carefully arrayed in a manner simulating the format of archaeological field
reports on an impressive-sounding 76 sites. Great care was taken, in other words,
to give Man Corn the appearance of being a scrupulously scientific work of great
importance. That just goes to show how deceptive appearances can actually be,
especially when they're deliberately contrived to obtain precisely that result.
Although the Turners' research was already being hyped as "meticulous" by
other cannibologists,95 if you actually wade through all that dead prose in their
technical section, what you'll find is that they never so much as inspected the evi-
dence from ten of the sites they'd included, and that the supposed evidence from
another had somehow been "lost." Evidence from a further 23 sites could not, by
the Turners' own admission, be connected to cannibalism in any way, was "insuf-
ficient" to reach a conclusion in another seven instances, and was clearly attrib-
utable to other causes in yet another six. Ultimately, material from only 22 of the
76 sites could be mustered as in any sense supporting the Turners' sweeping a

tions about Anasazi history and culture, and even that was marginal at best.9
To be more specific in the latter respect, several of the taphonomic a
ses on which the Turners relied were up to 60 years old - which is to sa
they were performed decades before currently accepted lab techniques b
available - and none of their evidence had undergone "the [still] more so
ticated level of osteological analysis" that Tim White has conceded is n
sary to confirm findings of cannibalism.97 Regarding the Toltecs
half-dozen other peoples indigenous to present-day Mexico whose cu
practices they characterized in spectacularly unflattering terms, the Tu
relied on a total of 16 sets of remains extracted from geographically disp
sites spanning a timeframe of roughly 7,000 years. Concerning the Me
["Aztecs"], a graphic depiction of whose "blood-drenched" culture the Tu
included as a means of "contextualizing" their other claims, they ci
taphonomic evidence at all.98
In sum, a gross misrepresentation of evidence was embodied in the
form assumed by Man Corn, that is, in the carefully crafted illusion of subs
it was designed to convey. Considered in light of the nature of the Tu
"reinterpretation" of the Anasazi, which the illusion was plainly meant t
tain, such evidentiary misrepresentation can only be viewed as conscious
not only on the Turners' part but also, I would argue, on the part of th
lisher. Quite conveniently, though perhaps subconsciously, the Turners even
closed their motive when, in their introduction, they accompany the
"scientific" boilerplate about how their work was free of value judgment
the assertion that it was not their "intent to shame, belittle, or ridicule any
historic American Indian people... or their possible living descendants."
Well, that was exactly their intent. How else are the living descenda
the Anasazi who, as the Turners knew perfectly well, are the contemp
Puebloan peoples of Arizona and New Mexico, to feel when their ancesto
described as "monsters" à la Albert Fish and Jeffrey Dahmer, their heri
consisting "psychopathic" collectivities comparable to Charlie Ma
lethally deranged "Family"?100 How else when - with utter predictably, a
least as part of the Turners' and their publisher's campaign to promot
book - such degrading characterizations were trumpeted in the med
months on end?101 And, by the way, how else are any of us to understa
Turners' comparisons as conveying anything other than "value judgmen
To be absolutely clear about what I'm saying: Truth is not pursued by
Anyone genuinely "attempting to understand Southwestern cannibalis
the Turners claimed they were,102 would neither hav

sented physical evidence to create the false impr
practice in that locale had been "confirmed," nor
to "explain" the meaning of cannibalism in any co
that it was in fact practiced therein. The Turners
concerning the advancement of unsupported "ex
Their sole discernable motive in undertaking th
that is Man Corn was thus to demean the Ana
thereby playing a significant role in "destroying the
as their champions have routinely put it.103 By th
of any favorable perception of traditional A
Cannibologists aren't the only ones involved in th
eral other schools of "debunkers" at work in anth
ogy may be may be the worst of the lot, the go
cultures is held in common - their work is other
whatever applies to cannibologists is equally appl
Cutting to the chase, it seems rather uncontrovers
to inflict pain and humiliation on another - or, m
toto - for the singular reason that they're "racially"
of the racist mentality.105 It also seems quite uncont
century after Fanon and Memmi to characterize t
of psychological disorder.106 At the risk of getting m
with my friend Roland Chrisjohn, a Mohawk psy
renounced euroderivative psychological theory alto
Joel Kovel's White Racism to find a useful view of
of overlapping pathologies ranging from phobic avoid
ity to actualization of annihilatory compulsions at
One can reject Kovel's flaming Freudianism, as
so - and nonetheless find considerable utility in hi
order that in mature form constitutes a full-blo
premise that psychosis not only can be, but often is,
vidual and sociocultural levels.108 Since any psyc
planting of reality by delusion, usually attended
part of the afflicted to insist that his or her delusio
embody the clearest possible apprehension of rea
exists, I think, between the proficiency of such in
case(s) in an authoritative manner on the one han
psychosis becoming socioculturally pervasive on t
This brings us back to the function of the master narrative, as we were di

cussing earlier, and the complex of narratives feeding into and affirming it. T
narrative of science, as Lyotard and others have called it, is among the p
pal lesser narratives, arguably the principal, if you follow Stanley Arono
argument in Science as Power.109 That accounts for the extreme attention
ished by the Turners and their publisher on giving Man Corn a properly
entific" appearance, thereby claiming the authority of science on behalf of th
demonstrably psychotic views.
The same of course applies to all the rest of the cannibologists, which
say to cannibology, per se, and to the other vectors of anthropology devo
destroying what those involved refer to as the "Myth of the Noble Sav
Really, although the specifics differ, it would be equally applicable to eve
and everything IVe been talking about since you asked me go deeper into
work of Earnest Hooton. And, believe it or not, IVe only been skimmin
surface. Where this ends up is with me reformulating Aronowitz to read "scie
as psychosis." That, to me, sums up the whole mess. These people are stark, st
ing mad, and always have been. Correspondingly, the propositions they Ve ma
aged to peddle, and are still peddling, as "scientific truth" are sheer madn
Orelus: I'm a bit conflicted on this. I partially agree with your characteri
of racism as a psychosis, or that what you've been describing meets any r
able definition of racist outlook and behavior, but quite a lot of it seems
fectly rational in its delivery. Moreover, the propositions themselves,
undeniably racist, appear to be quite functional in many respects. Neith
these attributes squares with my understanding of psychosis as a fundamenta
irrational condition. You used the term "delusional" in this connection.
you resolve the apparent contradiction?
Churchill: You Ve hit upon the crux of my ongoing debate with Chrisj
Roland's view, following Zygmunt Bauman, I think, is that insofar as ta
benefits accrue to the purveyors of and subscribers to the racist constru
it is perfectly rational, and that describing racism as a mental disorder s
lets racists off the hook of their own culpability, analytically and otherwise.
My response derives from something Chomsky wrote in American Power and
New Mandarins about "insane rationality," to the effect that if you accepted
Nazis' initial assumptions, everything from there would consist of debating t
nical questions, the very epitome of rational discourse.111
The question thus goes to whether the foundational assumptions of
seemingly rational system of discourse are themselves rational. As should be s
evident, the Nazis began from a set of lunatic assumptions, a matter

precluded their erecting an entire superstructure of technical and sc
mentation with which they imbued their delusions with an aura of
idation, thereby enabling themselves to infect German society
There's more involved, of course - it was a complex process - but th
ciai element. Nobody outside of the Institute for Historical Re
contests the substance of this analysis, or at least not publicly.
My premise is simply that the entire edifice of white-suprem
shares the Nazis' foundational assumptions and that, while the
stances peculiar to each context - the Nazis projected a part
against Jews rather than blacks or American Indians, for examp
of rationalizing the irrational has been pretty much the same every
supremacism has taken hold, here no less than anywhere else. Fr
point, the specific delusions we Ve been discussing are by definit
in that each of them reinforces the basic notion of whites bei
superior to people of color and thereby serves as a "rational" justific
existing sociopolitical and economic hierarchy.
Going back to something said earlier, I'm describing what Gr
a hegemonic process. For the hegemony to be truly Gramscian,
the purveyors and the subscribers have to share a discernable m
in sustaining it. I'd add a psychological interest as well, but in a
refer those with questions on that score to David Roediger's boo
of Whiteness, George Lipsitz's The Possessive Investment in Whitene
Rothenberg^ White Privilege.11^ The material is of somewhat uneven
on the whole, it should address whatever curiosities might be a
As for the concern that defining racism as a form of psychosis m
how absolve racists of responsibility for their acts, I'm more tha
construction of insanity in a legal context is very sharply circumsc
you're sitting there giggling uncontrollably, and having chats w
you can hear, you can be held accountable for your actions. Som
dants at the main Nuremberg trial, notably Rudolf Hess and Ju
were clearly psychotic, for all the good it did them when it cam
culpability. The only question is whether you're capable of Chom
rationality." If you are, into the dock you go.
Orelus: Could you sum up what you see as being the effects of w
talking about, especially cannibology, on people of color?
Churchill: It's axiomatic that degrading portrayals of nonwhite
to diminish them in comparison to the purported nature and attainme

"white civilization," thereby elevating perceptions of the latter. That's
essential ingredient of all white-supremacist cultural discourse, so there's
ing special about the "myth destroyers" in that respect. There's common gro
between what a lot of anthros do and what's done in certain streams of
ary fiction, historical interpretation, and so on, which indulge in a dim
ment so extreme that their predominately white audiences are able to a
the fact that native societies have been and are being eradicated on a w
sale basis without feeling that "anything of value" has been lost.
Such discourse, both academic and popular, is designed to engender th
of "ho-hum" attitude about genocide on the part of the "people who co
which is to say whites, that has always been necessary to enable Europe'
jection of global dominance. I'm thinking here in terms of Sartre's conc
that you can't have colonialism without genocide - though not necessari
versa - and that there's been a helluva lot of European colonialism over th
few centuries.114 None of that would've been possible, had the European
politic not been convinced to accept the validity of the racist paradigm
is, the psychotic delusion of their own racial superiority - and thus to treat
black- or brown-skinned Other as something devoid of genuine humanity, of
invisible in terms of any consideration at all.
Nor would continued domination in the "postcolonial context" b
European settler state known as the U.S. be possible without perpetuat
precisely the same sensibility, a matter evidenced rather spectacularly b
deafening silence with which "Good Americans" greeted reports th
upwards of a half-million Iraqi children under the age of 12 had effectively
exterminated during the mid-90s by their country's "sanctions regime," imp
to impress upon Iraq's government that "what we say, goes."115 No appr
cognitive dissonance was prompted by the news that the U.S. was enga
what U.N. Assistant Secretary General Denis Halliday, resigning in pro
publicly described as the "a policy of deliberate genocide" against Iraq.11
attitude was one of massive public indifference, since, after all, nothi
actual consequence was being destroyed.117
That's the function of the "science" we've been talking about, an
unremittingly, stupendously, irredeemably ugly. Where cannibology se
itself from the pack, becoming even worse than the rest, is that it function
a manner analogous to the notorious Nazi "blood libel" that Jews were re
by Judaism to engage in the ritual sacrifice of Aryan children each spri
The Nazis also promoted a corollary myth about how the Roma had a "
for human flesh," by the way, and that's of course a direct cor
what the cannibologists are pushing.119 Here, the object is not
engender indifference to the fate of the Other, as it is to stimu
feelings of loathing and revulsion sufficient to render genocide self
even a cause for celebration in the popular perception.120
Cannibology is not simply disgusting, it's dangerous. The stan
of the bourgeois intelligentsia, when such things are pointed ou
if there are parallels to the currents of Nazi thinking in the ar
discussing, "this isn't Germany," that the U.S. is "different" -
tional," no doubt121 - not least in the sense that its racism has n
sumably could never, manifest itself in the form of "real"
perpetrated by the Nazis.122 This is exactly the sort of technic
Chomsky described as "insane rationality." It's also an excellent
the sort of institutionalized denial that Susan Griffith was descr
Whether or not the continuous tone of racially motivated vi
trated over the course of U.S. history conforms in its technical
of the Nazi example is utterly irrelevant. It has often been gen
form and intent, as the Iraqi example alone should sufficiently d
that can be added the so-called Indian Wars, which I've written
extensively,124 the deliberately holocaustal "Indian War" - that's
they called it - waged in the Philippines at the dawn of the twen
and, of course, Vietnam, or, more accurately, Indochina, during
'70s.125 Vietnam was also referred to as "Indian Country," as you m
written much less about the Philippines and Indochina, but am c
process of correcting that deficiency.126
I've also published a chronology showing that this "most pe
nations," as it routinely proclaims itself, has engaged in one or
campaigns during every single year of its existence.127 The ov
majority of these wars have been against American Indians and
of color. That should tell you something . And you don't have to
military actions to see the pattern. Quite a lot of the attrition
Indian population during the nineteenth century resulted from
cially termed "individual affairs": massacres, both large scale a
killing of Indians for scalp bounties or "sport," deliberately in
with diseases, poisoning them, and so on.128 The same pertains
vate citizens" - meaning whites - carried out a number of whol
of African Americans during and after Reconstruction, as well
lynchings between 1880 and 1930 alone.129
Both Indians and blacks were killed continuously throughout the en

period simply because they were Indians and blacks. So, too, were Chícan
Chinese immigrants, albeit in lesser numbers. While these particular mo
racial murder, which meet the legal definition of genocidal killing under
national law, have abated, they have by no means disappeared.130 Offici
lence of the same sort - the grossly disproportionate number of people o
gunned down by police, for example - has shown no signs of diminishin
Indeed, the rate at which nonlethal violence has been visited upon non
has increased steadily since 1990, and, again, the primary determinant a
to be nothing other than skin color.132
I could, and perhaps should, go on to discuss the conditions of mass
eration structurally imposed upon peoples of color and maintained into th
rent moment, with American Indians suffering a level of impoverishme
dire that the average life expectancy of a reservation resident is roughl
third less than that of the general population,133 and blacks forming a p
nent "underclass," the situation of which is actually worsening dramatic
the present moment.134 1 should perhaps also go into the psychological i
of what I've been describing on children of color in terms of self-conce
esteem, varying degrees of trauma, across the board, generation in, gene
out, for what seems like eternity.135
All of that and more is worthy of consideration in depth, but we'll b
for a different kind of eternity if I go there. Besides, anyone who hasn't go
the drift at this point is never going to get it, no matter what I say, and I'm
terested in engaging in an exercise of insane rationality. Suffice to say
there's nothing in the least benign about what any of these people we'v
cussed, from Hooton to the Turners, has done. The effects are everyw
apparent, and unequivocally genocidal in their implications. On that ba
view them as being no different and not one whit more redeemable tha
Nazi anthropologists. If that sounds like a condemnation of American an
pology in general, that's fine by me, because that's precisely what it is.
Orelus: Well, okay then. That was certainly clear enough. But I can't hel
ing just one more thing before letting you get back to what you were sa
the point I posed the Hooton question. Are there any anthropologists yo
ally like? I don't necessarily mean personally, but rather by way of their
Churchill: Sure, and I've even mentioned a few of them as we've gone
Arens is one, obviously, and I definitely like the work of Gan
Obeyesekere. Then there's Deward Walker and Lane Hirabayashi, b
8o A DECOLONIZING ENCOUNTER
whom I do know personally - Deward for upward

sider friends. Let's see, now, there's Bill Zimmerman
Wounded Knee back in 73, 136 and Diane Lewis, wh
laying out the relationship between anthropology
same period.137 Til even admit to a fondness for
because of his demolition of Carle ton Coon while
of race as "man's most dangerous myth."138
I should probably point out that while I never stud
mal sense, I cut a few of my intellectual teeth un
Thomas, the Cherokee anthropologist. Actuall
"Colonialism: Classic and Internal," a little piec
long-defunct journal called New University Thoug
thinking in such terms and how, until his death
the older people I turned to as a sounding board f
I guess iťs fair to say that I've no innate bias agai
Although, based on its overall record, I thorou
as a discipline, and, as you may have gathered, am
ing so, my attitude towards any given anthropolo
upon what she or he actually says and does. Hell,
anthropologists, one of them being Jay Custer - y
Custer - who recruited me to do the review of Ma
Archaeologist . There's also a young Choctaw guy
whose work, what I've seen of it thus far, has bee
doubt others, but, like I said earlier, anthro hasn
emphasis, so my reading in that regard, while re
nowhere near as broad or consistent as in history,
areas of law.
Orelus: Thanks. That should bring us back to wher

not mistaken, was in describing the monolithic w
you were of elementary school age, during the 1
came up. I believe you were getting ready to expl
were changed and how those changes gave rise to
pedagogy you practice. Is that correct?
Churchill: Yes, it is. The place to pick up, I suppo

liberation struggle in the Third World after Worl
eurosupremacism was being repealed - or seemed
tion of India, the success of the Chinese revolutio
French colonialism in 1954, the beginning of the Algerian war of liberation,

and so on. By the early-60s, most of Asia and Africa had been decolonized, as
had Cuba, and guerrilla formations had sprung up throughout Latin America.
Peoples of color within the U.S. were witness to all this, of course, and had
begun drawing some rather obvious conclusions, none of them in the least con-
sistent with the proposition that white supremacy was inevitable here either.
The result was a severe destabilization of the status quo. By the end of the
decade, Malcolm X had announced that the liberation of African Americans
would be achieved "by any means necessary"; Stokely Carmichael had asserted
the demand for Black Power;141 cities across the U.S. had gone up in flames,
one after another, as the result of more or less spontaneous ghetto revolts;
openly revolutionary organizations like the Black Panther Party, the Young
Lords, the Brown Berets, 1 Wor Kuen, and the American Indian Movement
were gathering momentum; and clandestine armed formations like the Black
Liberation Army, the FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional, Puerto
Rico), the New World Liberation Front, and the so-called Symbionese
Liberation Army were on the verge of becoming operational. Under such cir-
cumstances, continuation of business as usual was impossible, to say the least.
The more so, since the U.S., having committed the bulk of its available mil-
itary capacity to waging a "white man's war" in Vietnam142 - the idea, appar-
ently, was to demonstrate that wars for national liberation in the Third World
would henceforth be unwinnable143 - was plainly being defeated by the
Vietnamese, a "ninth-rate" opponent President Lyndon Johnson had publicly
disparaged as a "yellow dwarf with a pocket knife."144 In fact, the "white-
faced" U.S. expeditionary force in Southeast Asia - I'm borrowing the charac-
terization from General Maxwell Taylor, Johnson's ambassador to South
Vietnam during the mid-60s145 - was in the initial stages of literally disintegrat-
ing in the field.146
Increasingly desperate to stave off the humiliation of a complete debacle,147
the U.S. had well over a half-million pairs of "boots on the ground" in Vietnam
by early 1968. The demand for cannon fodder was insatiable - all told, about
three million men and women had "served" in Vietnam before the last U.S.
ground forces were finally withdrawn in 1972 - requiring military conscription
on a massive scale. This, in turn, spawned an ever-broader and more militant
antiwar movement, a significant by-product of which was the spread of con-
scious anti-imperialism to an appreciable sector of the white population.
I'm simplifying greatly, but what I'm describing is a confluence of factors,
each of them devolving upon the issue of race, which resulted by 1970 in what
Paul Joseph aptly described as "cracks in the empire

had lost virtually ali of its "explanatory" utility, at lea
had been packaged, and the country was bordering
in some respects, especially true of academia. Ther
bombings on campuses across the country149 - most
tion of the Army Math Center at the University of
mer of 1970 - and student strikes were forcing suspen
at institution after institution. Hell, there was even
A lot of that was in reaction to the war, but by no m
tracted Third World Strike at San Francisco State, f
and sustained over a period of months for the express
school's well-nigh monolithic curricular whiteness, com
ulty competent to teach in areas outside the existing
and forcing the admission of students of color to th
State was still a college at the time - in numbers ref
the Bay Area population embodied in their respecti
There were a couple-hundred student actions und
sons during the spring semester of 1969 alone,
confrontations in Berkeley and Madison, and the sei
ing by armed black students at Cornell.152 It's im
when I speak of what "the students" were doing, i
there was a considerable participation by "outside ag
nities of color in which the students had been raise
part, and in whose interests they understood th
shock troops in pressing demands both for equa
"higher learning," and that the knowledge imparted
something other than the same old "fantasies of th
where described them).153 The display of unity w
to say the least.
In the face of this sort of full-on and highly princi
hidebound tradition of racial exclusivism was forced to
a relative trickle of students of color admitted to
decade had become a figurative torrent by the end
Student Unions had been formed on hundreds of ca
dent organizations like United Mexican American S
American Youth Association (MAYA), and Me
Organization (MAYO) - these three, along with som
ated under the heading of Movimiento Estudia
(MEChA) in 1969 - and in places like San Francisco State, Berkeley, and U-
Cal San Diego, there were what were called Third World Liberation Fronts,
coalitions not only of blacks and Latinos, but Asian Americans and American
Indians. Sometimes white radical organizations like Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) were also involved.
Orelus: Let me stop you there for a moment. I'm assuming you were directly
involved in some of this. Would you care to clarify how?
Churchill: Well, my pedigree in that regard is rather peculiar, but what's new?
I was in the army from November of '66 to November of '68, in Vietnam from
the end of January '68 until I got out. So, de facto, I was a member of Vietnam
Veterans Against the War from that point on. Actually, that woulďve been true
from the moment I arrived in Vietnam and realized that not only was I in the
middle of an Indian War, but I was on the wrong side of it. Vietnam had an
effect on how I understand the things Fve focused on ever since but truly
transcends my ability to articulate. Let's just say that it's the experiential lens
through which I interrogate the meaning of white supremacism, whether his-
torically or topically, and that I'm a lifetime member of WAW.
Where I really began as an activist, though, was with the "Rainbow
Coalition" formed by the deputy chairman of the Black Panther Party, Fred
Hampton, in Chicago during the spring of 1969. That was an alliance between
the Panthers, the Young Lords Organization, a Puerto Rican street gang headed
by Cha Cha Jimenez that Fred had helped politicize, Rising Up Angry, a col-
lective that had split off from SDS to organize in the northside community of
displaced Appalachian whites, and the Young Patriots, which was basically a
street gang comprised of the latter which had been politicized by the folks in
Angry, Mike James in particular. Jesse Jackson had nothing to do with any of
this, by the way. He was in Chicago, though, and knew about it, and simply
appropriated the name after Fred was assassinated by the Chicago police and
FBI in December of '69.154
There weren't any Indian organizations involved, so I was sort of like
Jimmy Carl Black on that Frank Zappa album, saying, "Hi, I'm the Indian of
the group." The way I came to being part of the coalition is that while I was
passing through O'Hare International Airport on my way home from Nam -
I grew up in and around Peoria, Illinois - I called the SDS national office, which
I knew was in Chicago because I'd read about them in Life magazine while I was
still in-country, and joined up. I did so because, at that moment, SDS was the
only organization I could name that was militantly opposing the war.
I was a real novelty in their eyes, I guess, since not only did
American Indian, but I was a combat vet and a factory worker - I di
at the Caterpillar plants in East Peoria and Mapleton after high scho
attending Illinois Central College after I got out of the army - s
me right up. Next thing you know, I'm a downstate SDS organi
a joke, since I really had no political grounding at all But that pu
with Mark Clark, the Panther defense captain in Peoria, and we
he brought me in to the Rainbow. Mark was murdered by the co
Fred, and it really hit me hard, not least by way of reinforcing
picked up in Vietnam. After that, I was really ready to rumble.
When the SDS split occurred in June of '69, 1 aligned with W
and that sort of speaks for itself.155 When Weather went undergro
1970, though, I didn't. Actually, it's fair to say that I wasn't invited
contrary to what's apparently a popular misimpression in some
never and have never claimed to have been a member of the Weather
Underground Organization. For that matter, I was never part of the Prairie Fire
Organizing Committee, its above-ground support network.156 Although I still
identified myself as SDS for about a year, I really wasn't a functioning member
of any organization other than VVAW until Clyde Bellecourt, of all people,
recruited me to join the American Indian Movement, sometime in late
November of 1972, and I've been with AIM ever since.
That's my political history in a nutshell. There are a few things left out, like
the International Indian Treaty Council, but UTC was a subpart of AIM - it's
"international diplomatic arm," as Russ Means used to call it - during the
period of my involvement (roughly 1982-85). As you can see, my activism has
always been far more community-based and -oriented, than on-the-campus-
focused, even while I was at least nominally a student, although I was always
interacting with campus-based organizations, and participated in a number of
actions on campuses, mostly in Illinois, during the early '70s. I know the FBI
thinks I was involved in more than I was in that regard - it says so in my file,
which I long ago obtained under the Freedom of Information Act - but that's
their problem.
As things stand, I'm still a member of WAW, and still in the leadership
council of Colorado AIM, although, by rights, I should probably have long since
moved over to the Elders Council. Along with Cha Cha, Mike James, Kathleen
Cleaver, and several others, I'm a member of the Elders Council of the original
Rainbow Coalition. Other than that, what I do, politically, is pretty much ad
hoc. Although I'm a member of the international advisory board of Israel
Charny s Institute for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide and a few editor-
ial boards, I belong to no "scholarly" organizations - never have - and it tends
to work out rather well that way. Does that cover what you wanted to know?
Orelus: Quite sufficiently, thank you. You actually covered a couple of ques-
tions I'd planned to ask, but hadn't gotten around to yet, so we're more than
good to go.
Churchill: Great. The upshot of the student insurgency I was describing is that
where there'd been only a handful of Black Studies programs in the country in
1965, by the early 70s there were somewhere in the neighborhood of 500. The
first Chicano/a Studies program was established in 1968, at Cai State-Los
Angeles, and the first program in American Indian Studies - albeit it was
called "Native American Studies" - at San Francisco State the same year.
Asian American Studies was the last to get off the ground, but only by a few
months. And, of course, creation of all these new programs generated a tremen-
dous demand for faculty capable of designing the necessary curricula, teaching
the courses, mentoring the students who signed up, and so on. Iťs not like the
then-existing professoriate had a whole lot of experience in these regards.
Those were the circumstances in which American universities - apart
from Howard, Spelman, Morehouse, and a few other "traditionally black"
institutions - first allowed scholars of color to join their faculties. They did so
because, given the magnitude and intensity of the student revolts, especially
when viewed against the broader backdrop of mounting sociopolitical instabil-
ity, they were left with no viable alternative. Even then, the old guard kept bab-
bling about a supposed "diminishment of scholarly standards" attending the
influx of "unwhite" faculty; although, to this day, questions as to what lofty
"standards" were reflected in the sewage peddled by the likes of Hooton,
Samuel Eliot Morison, and their peers was, and still is, typically met with a frosty
silence in "responsible" academic circles.
To be clear, while such sentiments were certainly ubiquitous, it wasn't just
the invasion of their previously tranquil little bastions of whiteness by hordes
of wogs that was driving the academic gatekeepers to distraction. Still more
unsettling was that the interlopers included organic black intellectuals like
Harold Cruse, C. L. R. James, and John Henrick Clarke, all of whom lacked the
formal credentials deemed essential to membership in the professoriate. None
possessed a university degree. James received a teaching certificate from Queen's
Royal College, Trinidad, in 1918, but Clarke, in fact, never acquired so much
as a high school diploma. Yet, and here's where it became really humiliating,
precious few of their "properly qualified" white counte

ducing work of a significance equaling that of Cruse
Intellectual and Rebellion or Revolution ? or James* The
Boundary y and Notes on Dialectics (to name but three).
Orelus: I'm sorry to interrupt again, but your ment

Clarke raises another question. You yourself never b
either, did you? Was there a particular reason?
Churchill: I had other things to do, quite frankly,

never seen the need for one. As the work produced by
mentioned abundantly demonstrates, a doctorate is en
flight intellectual endeavor. It might be useful to m
ples in this connection, beginning with Arthur Schle
heard, was considered to be one of the major Amer
generation. He held a BA, but was a full professor of
Bell? Columbia awarded him a PhD on the basis of T
lection of essays he'd already published, just so they
they tenured him as a professor of sociology.158
Then there's Irving Kristol, the grand cyclops of
went no further than a BA - in English lit, as I reca
own policy studies center at NYU, teaching only gra
This was quite common, so long as it was only white
and Kristol - or Nathan Glazer, or Irving Howe, or
being hired.159 It didn't become a "problem" until
black scholars like Cruse, James, and Clarke showe
holes in the color barrier, but injecting seriously cou
into the "scholarly" environment. It wasn't until th
ness about an "earned PhD" being the "threshold req
tion as a tenure-track faculty member began to bec
until the mid-'70s, after the student revolt had for the
it became standard.
That being so, allow me to suggest that imposition of
ment never really had a thing about "maintainin
"ensuring academic quality," or any of the rest of that
bilge. In view of the sort of "scholarship" theretofore p
emy, the very idea is facially ludicrous. The objectiv
containment and pacification: First, to staunch
autochthonous discourse into the institutional aren
trol over the narratives disseminated therein by mandating that wogs aspiring
to join the professoriate first be properly housebroken by doctoral committees
composed of the very professors, the scholarly deficiencies of whose monolithic
whiteness the new faculty were ostensibly being hired to correct.
Thus could the requisite number of red, black, brown, and yellow bodies
be brought into the faculties to create the necessary appearance of "diver-
sity" - an exercise in bean counting, really - but only on condition that the
minds imbuing each of those bodies be programmed to reinforce rather than
challenge hegemony. The process might be viewed as a grand exercise in intel-
lectual counterinsurgency, and, as Chomsky and Herman put it in a related con-
nection, "the reconstruction of imperial ideology" in a more sophisticated
form.160 The strategy was brilliant in its way, but only partially successful.
It's true that they've been able to crank out an uncomfortably large num-
ber of intellectual compradors - I mentioned a couple of them earlier, and
could name a bunch more - "house negroes," as Malcolm X called them,161 or
"Gunga Dins," to use my own term of choice, conditioned to view "success" as
being "whiter than white." By the same token, however, a substantial enough
base of counterhegemonic scholarship seems to have been laid before the
establishment could regain its balance that younger scholars have had plenty
to build on, and a lot of them have. A tremendous amount of really good work
has been done these past 40 years by scholars of color as well as whites who Ve
repudiated the canons of whiteness; so clearly, a lot of people were secure
enough about who they were and what they were about to devise ways of cir-
cumventing the doctrinal impositions of their doctoral committees. Hats off to
them for that.
I've no inherent objection to doctorates, you understand. Some of my best

friends have one. Given the right circumstances, and the right group of peo-
ple to work with, I can imagine myself signing on. But it's by no means the only
way to learn the same things, nor necessarily the best, and the "right people"
to learn from can always be found. They're there; all you have to do is seek them
out. That's what I meant about being under the "loose tutelage" of Bob Thomas,
for example. I'd have gotten no more from him in a formal learning environ-
ment than he willingly gave simply because I asked. Similarly, I learned as much
or more from Vine Deloria by working and hanging out with him over a period
of about 20 years as I would have had I been his student in a formal sense.162
That's the nature of organic intellectuality.
Look, even if I'd wanted to pursue a doctorate, which I didn't, or felt
myself at liberty to spend the time necessary to do so, which I also didn't, under
the circumstances prevailing in the late 70s and e

told that I "needed" one to be "qualified" to teach
ten, Pd have refused on principle, and it's a princ
I'm quite content keeping figurative company wit
Despite the fact that I doubt we could so much a
speaking, he's in some ways one of my heroes. H
about all I have to say on this one.
Orelus: Okay. Let's go back to what you were sayi

hegemonic scholarship being laid during the la
think that's pretty much where we were when we le
Churchill: Well, in addition to the student insurgenc

was emerging within the professoriate's various
Actually, there's a direct overlap because, as was a
number of grad students are members of the org
part of their "academic socialization." Noam
"Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship" and "The Re
were a major influence, I think.163 In any cas
analysis were consistent with those of the mostly wh
cus - Staughton Lynd, Howard Zinn, and Jesse Le
prominent figures, but there were a number of othe
American Historical Association at about the same time.
In 1969, the caucus made a bid to assume control of the AHA and to
amend its constitution in a decisively antiestablishmentarian manner. Lemisch
delivered a devastating critique, too little remembered these days, of the sheer
hypocrisy embodied in professional historians' continuous assertion of ideals like
"neutrality" and "objectivity" as a means of barring unsanctioned interpreta-
tions of the record while themselves advancing sharply defined ideological
polemics in defense of the status quo.164 Although the radicals failed in their
effort to take charge of the association, it's fair to say that they destabilized both
the organizational hierarchy and historiographical orthodoxy to a considerable
extent, thereby opening things up for a range of historians and historical inter-
pretations. A spectacular case in point is that of African American historians
like Vincent Harding and Sterling Stuckey, practitioners of the "new black his-
tory," as it was then called. By the early '70s, they were able not only to carve
out an appreciable space for themselves within both the AHA and the
Organization of American Historians, but had asserted dominion over the
narrative of Afroamerica, evicting whites from their customary station of pri-
macy in that regard, and were perfecting approaches to historical exposition fun-
damentally at odds with those sanctioned by "responsible" professionals.
The benefits were quickly forthcoming, too. Stuckey's Ideological Origins of
Black Nationalism and Slave Culture , and Harding's There Is a River , are, to my
mind, invaluable examples of how history should be done,165 and it's immensely
instructive to me that, on the whole, white historians greeted their publication
not with enthusiasm, but with as Peter Novick describes it, "nervous bewilder-
ment."166 Equally telling is the diametrically opposing response of blacks who'd
already been admitted, often as tokens, to history faculties, Nathan Huggins at
Harvard and John Blassingame at Yale, being prime examples. Both of them
seized the opportunity to do comparable work, Huggins in Black Odyssey ,
Blassingame in Long Memory, which he coauthored with Mary Berry.167
I've always admired them not only for the exceedingly high quality of
such material, but, probably even more, the open and unequivocal refusal of
those who produced it to play by "white boy rules." In the intro to There Is a
River j Harding wrote that he was less concerned with "the ambiguous abstrac-
tions of 'objectivity' and 'scholarship'" than with fulfilling his responsibility to
further the struggle of African Americans "to be whole."168 Another black his-
torian, a woman whose identity seems, ironically enough, to have been lost to
history - or at least to me - put it much more bluntly, emphasizing that she
wrote "history for a purpose," that being to "critique and condemn white
America," thereby participating in creation of a counterhegemonic narrative
of the U.S.169 That was pretty much a consensus position among black histo-
rians during the early '70s.
Blacks weren't alone in this, of course. Material of comparable sensibility
and value was being produced by Chicano historians like Rudy Acuña, the first
edition of whose Occupied America was another breakthrough work, both in
terms of method and in terms of content.170 Then there's Ron Takaki's Iron
Cages and Strangers from a Different Shore , work that stacks up very well against
that of Harding and other new black historians.171 It seems worth mentioning
in this connection that Takaki taught the first Black Studies course offered at
Berkeley, that his first book detailed a campaign in the U.S. to reopen the slave
trade during the mid-nineteenth century, and that several of his other books -
A Different Mirror, for example - concerned the multifaceted context of race
and racism.172
History wasn't the only discipline undergoing such potentially transforma-
tive upheavals. The Union of Radical Political Economists had emerged within
the American Economic Association in 1968, as had both the Left Caucus for
go A DECOLONIZING ENCOUNTER
a New Political Science and the Chicano Caucus wi

Science Association. There was a radical caucus within the American
Sociological Association, another in the Modern Language Association, and
so on. Black, Chicano, and feminist caucuses were emerging within each orga-
nization more or less simultaneously, and by the early 70s, most of the con-
stituencies involved had formed their own professional organizations, the
National Association of Chicano/a Scholars, for example.
A dissident tendency even emerged among anthropologists, although, so
far as I know, it never actually congealed into anything resembling a radical cau-
cus, especially after my old mentor, Vine Deloria Jr., put the boots to anthro-
pology's prevailing presumptions and practices in his 1969 "Indian Manifesto,"
Custer Died for Your Sins, and again, during a special session at the 1972 annual
meeting of the American Anthropological Association.173 Vine's books, not just
Custer , but We Talk , You Listen , God Is Red , and Behind the Trail of Broken
Treaties , were the hallmarks of American Indian scholarship during the early
70s.174 That, in capsule form, is what I referred to as the "counterhegemonic
base" upon which subsequent work can and has been built. It arose directly from
the real-world struggles undertaken by peoples of color to break the back of
white supremacy in this country. In that context, the sole legitimate purpose of
scholarship is to confront the self-serving orthodoxies of whiteness, systemat-
ically exposing the falsehoods upon which they depend, thereby deconstruct-
ing the attendant narratives involved and ultimately the master narrative
itself. David Roediger depicted the goal as being the "abolition of whiteness,"
a characterization with which I agree and doubt can be improved upon.175
It's both the scholarly context I came up in and my intellectual foundation,
for lack of a better way to put it, and none of it was painlessly arrived at. The
people who forced open the doors of the academy to students and faculty of
color paid a heavy, heavy price. People were beaten, gassed, jailed, expelled,
and had their lives generally wrecked in that process, and I'm not talking about
just a few. There were thousands. Hell, people died to make that happen. They
paid that price for a reason, and that reason was to empower an intellectual
demolition of whiteness. Pm of the view that there's an obligation on the part
of those of us who've benefited from their sacrifices to pursue precisely that
objective, and that's what I've done, in my own way and to the best of my abil-
ity ever since.
Orelus: I was going to pose a question about marxism, but you mentioned peo-
ple dying in the struggle to open the doors of the university for students and
faculty of colon I didn't take you to be indulging in hyperbole. Could yo

explain what you meant?
Churchill: No, I wasn't hyperbolizing. At one level, if you view the camp
struggle as arising from the broader libratory struggles of the various com
nities of color, as you should, because they did, then what I meant migh
clearer. I mentioned Mark and Fred, right? They were Panthers, and
Panthers certainly had a stake in the struggles at San Francisco State
Berkeley, as examples.176 Mark Clark spent a fair amount of time on
Bradley University campus, working with the Black Student Alliance. Fr
Hampton taught a community education class on the very night he was m
dered. LA Panther leaders Bunchy Carter and Jon Huggins were assassin
in a classroom on the UCLA campus, where they were meeting with mem
of the Black Student Union. Carter's replacement, Geronimo Pratt, w
UCLA student at the time.177 These things really aren't separable.
But let me narrow this down to a campus-specific context and persona
it as well. I worked at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for nearly 30 y
beginning in 1978, and I know exactly how I got there. Six young Chican
all associated with UMAS/MEChA and at least two of them key organize
a long and bitter struggle to establish "minority" access to UCB, were killed
another maimed by the off-campus detonations of two bombs within a two
period in May 1974.178 The prospect of being the target of the next bla
finally convinced the university to allot substantial resources to its so-c
Educational Opportunity Programs, the American Indian component of w
hired me four years later.
If it weren't for the price paid by Los Seis de Boulder and others - ano
prominent example is Ricardo Falcón, a founder of UMAS at UCB who w
murdered in August of 1972179 - you can be sure that neither I nor most
faculty of color at UCB would have been hired. That's especially true of t
working in Ethnic Studies, perhaps, but the principle applies to a greate
lesser extent in all disciplines. It's clear that none of these people die
enable me or any anyone else, irrespective of skin tone, to secure a comfor
berth within the bourgeois academy. Their purpose, often explicitly stated
to destroy the existing academy and reconstruct it as a genuinely radical entit
one dedicated to realizing the kinds of critical, politically engaged, and soc
transformative scholarship we've been talking about.
That was their charge, as I understood it then, and as I understand it n
Interestingly enough, their charge was entirely consistent with my responsibi
ities, as explained to me by Philip Deere, so maybe that

it than it has been for some others. I really can't say
I hear some young guy spouting off about not owing a
where he is, that he's became a professor strictly on hi
sigh and congratulate him on being the latest Repu
especially if he happens to toss in something dissing
seems to have become a bit of a fashion statement in
quite happy to remind him that without those radi
with a five-dollar bill, might just get him a latte at St
Orelus: Now the question about marxism. You seem

and you've quoted Lukács, and you've also mentioned
of your heroes. The Black Panther Party, with whic
quite closely at one time, and with some of whose m
relationships over the years, is usually considered to
nization. All of which leads me to ask whether yo
marxist. If not, how do you describe your political
Churchill: Was that my cue to crack a lame joke abo

to mention my stint with Weatherman, but no, I'm
first book, back in 1983, was an edited volume crit
ism for indigenous peoples. The second, which cons
oretical piece I'd written but didn't feel fit very w
against a piece by a marxist-feminist named Elisab
much the same direction, and I've subsequently pub
quite critical of marxism, both conceptually and i
where I've left a lot of doubt on where I stand on t
The simplest way to explain my differences with Ma
purposes here would be in the realm of what I see a
clusions, and the practice that quite naturally deriv
Basically, I don't see the position of indigenous peop
or, more accurately, under - a marxist system than it
italism or any other euroderivative system. They
"proper historical role" of "primitive" societies is to
by way of being subsumed within some broader statist
okay? That's what got me interested in George Man
World,181 and led me to the conclusion that anarch
the European tradition comes to approximating tra
approaching the question of political organizing.182
All that said, I do find some of the analytical methods employed in m

ism to be very useful. So I use them for my own purposes. The same goes for
cepts like Gramscis notion of hegemony. Actually, much of Gramscis ma
is so fragmented that I'm not entirely sure what he was. Everybody assum
was a marxist, and I tend to share the assumption, based on what IVe read
if he'd ever been able to lay his thinking out, systematically and at length, ra
than ending up in one of Mussolini's prisons, iťs possible that he'd have tu
out to be something else entirely. He was no leninist. Of that much I'm s
The bottom line is that I use whatever I find useful in Marcuse, or Lukác
Adorno, or whoever, and jettison the rest.
With James, my respect goes not so much to his theoretical work - I alrea
said I don't especially agree with much of it - but to the way he lived his life.
same with Harold Cruse and a number of others. You don't have to agree
somebody in order to respect them. On second thought, maybe that depen
the nature of the disagreement. I've not a scintilla of respect for Irving Krist
for example, but then, that includes the way he lived his life. So there's obvio
a difference. And if somebody wants to think this puts me closer to marxism
to neoconservatism, that's fine by me. It's not a point I'd care to argue. In
I'll affirm it. If it comes to a choice between Marxists and outright Nazis,
with the marxists every time. Meanwhile, I'll exercise other options.
How I describe my political orientation is "indigenist." By that, I me
briefly, that asserting the rights of first peoples is my first priority, not on
defending them against transgression in concrete ways, on the land, in
streets, and sometimes in the courts of the colonizer, and explaining to o
how and why it's in our mutual interest that these rights be fulfilled.183 Tha
why so much of what I've written has addressed issues like treaty rights, and
they relate to little things like environmental preservation. That's just
example. In any case, I'll make common cause with anyone moving in w
see as being the right direction. That entails reciprocation, supporting their l
tory struggles as being in our interest. It's a matter of mutual respect an
darity. Simple as that.
Orelus: Last question: Do you feel your work has made a difference?
Churchill: What am I supposed to say? That I've spent my whole life do

what I do without effect? That my work is the light that shows the way
about not as much as I wish it had, or something like that? I'm certainly
going to sit here reciting a list of awards, and honorary and whatnot, alt
I've got them, because ultimately they're meaningless. And I'm not goin
expound on how well my students have turned out,

of them, and I'm very proud of them. But as far as I'm
credit for putting whatever I might have imparted
Maybe the best way to respond is by quoting Rob W
scholar down at the University of Arizona. He's seve
kind of intellectual shock trooper, "the guy who throw
wire so the rest of us can get in close and finish the jo
appreciated that, because my aspiration all along has
those things. Mine has always been a kind of combat
Philip's instruction that I should always speak the tr
things by their right names, and never back down. No
So, yeah, assuming Rob was correct in his assessment, 1
to say my life, has made exactly the difference I hoped
Notes
1 . "Mustee" is a term, still employed in some areas of the Deep South - e.g., northern Ge
and North Carolina, whence the wing of my family at issue traces - to describe black Af
and American Indian admixtures. Most of those among my forebears identified as Amer
Indians were undoubtedly racially mixed as well, albeit with whites, or, at least in some
with both whites and blacks (such triracial admixtures were/are referred to in Georgia
the Carolinas as "red bones," "brass ankles," "buckheads," and so on). See Brewton B
Almost White: A Study of Certain Racial Hybrids in the Eastern United States (New
Macmillan, 1963); Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race i
Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, [2nd ed.] 1993).
2. Ward Churchill, "Reflections on Gord Hill's 500 Years and the Nature of Indig
Resistance," introduction to Gord Hill, The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book (Vanc
BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010) pp. 7-20.
3. For those unfamiliar with her, Carrie Dann and her late sister, Mary, are profiled in co
erable depth in the recent documentary film, American Outrage (Los Angeles: Firs
Features, 2008).
4. David Horowitz, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (Washin
DC: Henry Regnery, 2006).
5. "There are whole disciplines, institutions, rubrics in our culture which serve as cate
of denial." Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stone: The Private Life of War (New York: Doubl
1992) p. 162.
6. Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals : American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic
Books, 1987); Clyde W. Barrow, Universities and the Capitalist State: Corporate Liberalism and
the Reconstruction of American Higher Education, 1894-1928 (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1990).
7. Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1971 of 1922 original) pp. 72, 83-109. My own usage comes closer to, but is not
fully encompassed by, that set forth in Joseph Gabel's False Consciousness: An Essay on
Reification (New York: Harper & Row, 1975) pp. 119-38.
8. For my usage of the Gramscian terms/concepts I've employed, see Carl Boggs, The T
Revolutions: Gramsci and the Dilemmas of Western Marxism (Boston: South End Press, 19
organic intellectual, pp. 223-28; bourgeois intellectuals/intelligentsia, pp. 22
hegemony/hegemonic, pp. 162-63.
9. The term in quotes is from the title of Noam Chomsky's Necessary Illusions: Thought Con
in Democratic Societies (Boston: South End Press, 1989).
10. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy
the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988).
11. Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Eliot Morison, The Growth of the American Repub
2 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1930), Vol. 1, pp. 415, 418. The book was c
tinuously reprinted, with revised/updated editions released on at least six occasions, the l
in 1980. From 1970 onward, University of North Carolina historian Robert E. Leuchtenbu
was listed as third coauthor.
12. See generally, David Hurst Thomas, Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Bat
for American Indian Identity (New York: Basic Books, 2000) pp. 106-10. Üntermensch -
erally "subhumans" - was the Nazi term for non- Aryan peoples.
13. From the Greek word eugenes , meaning to be "good in stock, hereditarily endowed with n
qualities." The antonym of eugenic was originally kakogenic (or cacogenic) - derived from
Greek kakos , meaning "bad" - although the term dysgenic has largely replaced it. See All
Chase, The Legacy of Malthus : The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism (Urb
University of Illinois Press, 1980) pp. 13-15.
14. While the so-called Nuremberg Laws of 1935 come immediately to mind, and are in
respects emblematic of the lot, there were a whole series of race laws enacted by the N
between 1933 and 1939. For a comprehensive overview, see Richard Lawrence Miller,
Justiz: Law of the Hobcaust (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995).
15. See, e.g., Robert Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harv
University Press, 1988) pp. 95-117, 177-222; Götz Ally, "Medicine against the Usele
in Götz Ally, Peter Chroust, and Christian Pross, Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine
Racial Hygiene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) pp. 22-98.
16. By far best study of this complex process is, in my estimation, Götz Ally's "Final Solutio
Nazi Population Policy and the Murder of the European Jews (London: Arnold, 1999). Also
Mark Mazower, Hitler's Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe (New York: Penguin Press, 20
pp. 179-222.
17. Galton described eugenics as being the "science of improving the stock." Francis Galton,
Inquiries into the Human Faculty (London: Macmillan, 1883) p. 24. For background on the
man himself, see Michael Bulmer, Francis Galton: Pioneer of Heredity and Biometry (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Martin Brookes, Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions
and Bright Ideas of Francis Galton (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004).
18. Gal ton's "vision" in this regard was not simply class based, but frankly Malthusian. So, too,
the ongoing effects of attendant socioeconomic attitudes. See Chase, Legacy of Malthus, pp.
77-84, 394-405,415-31.
19. The costs and consequences attending such policies are brought out with stunning clarity
by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2007).
20. "Eugenics rocketed through academia, becoming an institution virtually overnight. By
1914, some forty-four major institutions offered eugenic instruction. Within a decade, the
number would swell to hundreds, reaching some 20,000 students annually.... Before long,
the overwhelming number of high schools employed [also] eugenic textbooks." Black, War
g6 A DECOLONIZING ENCOUNTER
on the Weak , pp. 75-76, citing Hamilton Cravens, Triumph of Evolution

Environment Controversy, 1900-1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Universi
53: Steven Seiden, Inheriting Shame (New York: Teachers College Press,
21. Black, War on the Weak , pp. 247-77.
22. Stephen Kühn, The Nazi Connection : Eugenics, American Racism, and
Socialism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) pp. 20-21. Also see B
Weak , pp. 283-85, 306-07, 313-14; Paul Weindling, '"Out of the Ghetto':
Foundation and German Medicine after the Second World War," in Willia
ed., Rockefeller Philanthropy and Modern Biomedicine: International Initiatives
I to the Cold War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002) pp. 208-
ing that, although its funding of German "eugenical research" was one of
principle "international initiatives" during the interwar period, recitation of
in Germany begins only after World War II. While Weindling does di
period to the extent that several Foundation-supported researchers faced
crimes against humanity after Germany's defeat, he offers no hint of the
Foundation funding of eugenics research during the Nazi era. Indeed, the
appears nowhere in his text.
23. For an extraordinarily charitable overview of Hooton's academic backgro
as a eugenicist, see Donald K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives
Vanderbilt University Press, 1968) pp. 178-83.
24. A representative example of Hrdlicka's fieldwork is his 1916 collaborat
cally minded colleague, physical anthropology professor Albert E. Jenks
of Minnesota, in examining the earwax, coarseness of hair, and other such "
iognomy" of people resident to the White Earth Reservation for purpose
which were "full-blood Indians." See Melissa L. Meyer, The White Earth T
and Dispossession at a Minnesota A nishinaabe Reservation, 1 889-1 920 (Linc
Nebraska Press, 1994) pp. 168-70.
25. Davenport, too, had a solid academic pedigree, serving as an instructor of z
prior to receiving funds from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carne
establish an independent eugenics research institute at Cold Spring Harbor,
Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (New York: Henry Holt, 1911) was routinely
lege textbook until well into the '30s, by which point he'd accepted position
ing editor with two Nazi race journals. At least as late as 1939, he contr
testimonial to a book honoring the Nazi anthropologist Otto Reche, an im
the "race and resettlement" programs in eastern Europe (see note 16, abov
see Black, War Against the Weak , pp. 33-4 1 , 267-83, 344, 385; Kühn, Nazi
68-69. On Reche, see Proctor, Racial Hygiene , pp. 150-51, 373n67, 384-85
"German Ostforschung and Anti-Semitism" in Ingo Haar and Michael Fah
Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1919-1945 (New York: Berghahn Books, 20
26. The committee was formed in 1926; its initial report was submitte
American Anthropological Association, "Eugenics and Physical Anthropo
(available at http://www.understandingrace.org/history/science/eugenics
27. Ibid., noting that the American Journal of Physical A nthropology was foun
in 1918. Until 1942, he served as editor, while Hooton was associate
Eugenics and the Progressivesf p. 179. Most of their "scholarly" material wa
self-published.
28. Earnest A. Hooton, The American Criminal: An Anthropological Study
Harvard University Press, 1939). For a pertinent critique of Hooton's met
eral connection, see Stephen Jay Gould, The M ismeasure of Man (New York: W.W. Nor
1981) pp. 109-11.
29. Earnest A. Hooton, A pes, Men, and Morons (New York: Putnam's, 1937).
30. Thomas, Skuü Wars, p. 107, quoting Earnest A. Hooton, The Indians of Pecos Pueblo: A Stu
of Their Skeletal Remains (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1930) pp. 355-56.
31. Another example: In a 1942 report to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hrdlička supported the m
internment of Japanese Americans on the basis of a "scientific" determination that Japan
skulls are "2,000 years less advanced" than those of whites, a matter rendering them,
race , "untrustworthy," even "nefarious." Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The Un
States, Britain, and the War Against Japan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)
158-59, 167-68.
32. Coon, who trained under Hooton at Harvard during the 1920s, was a professor at
University of Pennsylvania and a leading light in physical anthropology after his ment
death in 1954 (among other things, he was president of the American Physical Anthropol
Association during the early-60s). In this capacity, he assisted - anonymously - in prepari
a major segregationist text, Race and Reason, published by his cousin, Carleton Putnam
1961. He also had an anonymous hand in preparing Biology of the Race Problem , a screed c
missioned by Alabama governor George Wallace and published under the name of anot
rabid segregationist, Wesley Critz George, in 1962. Both books were mainstays of the Wh
Citizens Councils, the Klan, and other such groups. So, too, was Coon's The Origin of R
published under his own name in 1962, wherein he argued a peculiar form of polygenesis
which blacks supposedly evolved into Homo sapiens at a point some 200,000 years later th
whites and were correspondingly less developed as human beings. See John P. Jackson,
"'In Ways UnacademicaP: The Reception of Carleton Coon's The Origin of Races," Jour
of the History of Biology, No. 34 (2001) pp. 247-85. Also see Carleton S. Coon, The Or
of Races (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962); Wesley Critz George, Biology of the Race Prob
(Washington, D.C.: National Putnam Letters Committee, 1962); Carleton Putnam, Race
Reason: A Yankee View (Washington, DC: Putnam Letters Committee, 1961).
33. Gretchen E. Schafft, From Racism to Genocide: Anthropology in the Third Reich (Urb
University of Illinois Press, 2004). Toward the end of her book, Schafft offers a few dire
comparisons between the views propounded by Nazi anthropologists like Eugene Fischer a
those contemporaneously espoused by anthropologists in the U.S. Unfortunately, she se
far more familiar with the work of the Germans than that of their North American cou
terparts. Hence, while she emphasizes the all but identical nature of Fischer's and
Hrdlicka's warnings about "miscegenation" leading to "racial degeneration," she pronou
Hooton to have been a "well-respected anthropologist... [who] no one could accuse
being racist" (p. 213). That he was "well-respected" is unquestionable - so was Fischer, d
ing the '30s - but to claim that Hooton cannot be considered a racist evidences a t
abysmal ignorance of his work.
34. For background, see Gould, M ismeasure of Man; William Stanton, The Leopard's S
Scientific Attitudes Toward Race in the United States, 1815-59 (Chicago,: Universit
Chicago Press, 1960).
35. During the 1950s, the interests of American Genetics Society were still officially list
being "Eugenics-Heredity- Breeding" on its letterhead stationery. See Black, War Against
Weak, pp. 137, 244, 412, 425. Also see Mark H. Haller, Eugenics : Hereditarian Attitude
American Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963) pp. 62, 64-65, 14
Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New Y
Alfred A. Knopf, 1985) p. 60.
36. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, p. 252; Kühn, Nazi Connection , p. 105;
the Weak , p. 424.
37. American Society of Human Genetics, "About ASHG" (available at h
org/pages/about_overview.shtml) .
38. Kühn, Nazi Connection , pp. 103, 105; Haller, Eugenics , pp. 183-84. Mull
Nobel Prize for his work on X-ray- induced genetic mutations, belonged to a
eugenics movement that became increasingly estranged by the American
endorsement of Nazi "racial hygiene" policies. The nature of Muller's and hi
agreement with the Nazis was, however, revealed in the 1946 Genetico Mani
Muller was principal author - which "clearly demonstrated that the scien
Nazi race policies did not do so because of their opposition to their eugenic
Manifesto signatories were critical only of the [Nazis'] arbitrary definitio
struggle within the international scientific community of geneticists conce
position toward Nazi race policy was [thus] not between a liberal group of a
scientists and a group of reactionary, racist 'pseudoscientists.' Rather, it was
gle between scientists with differing conceptions of how race, econom
should be used to realize their goals." Kühn, Nazi Connection , pp. 78-79. For
"Geneticists Manifesto" itself, see H. ]. Muller, Studies in Genetics: The Sele
L. Muller (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962) pp. 545-48.
39. On Günther, see Kühn, Nazi Connection , pp. 70, 103; Benno Müller-Hill, M
Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others in German
York: Oxford University Press, 1988) pp. 10-11, 30, 37-38, 58; William
Science and Politics of Racial Research (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
13 1 ; William H. Tucker, The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper an
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002) pp. 15, 80, 159.
40. Verschuer, director of the Rockefeller-funded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
Human Genetics, and Eugenics from 1942 to '45, and a prime mover in im
"racial hygiene" policies during the '30s, "was accused by German physicist
of receiving 'human material' from his assistant Josef Mengele....[ V
[Mengele] to request a transfer to Auschwitz as a 'unique opportunity' fo
research. At Auschwitz, Mengele examined twins and dissected them after t
He sent the results of dissections (including pairs of eyes) to Verschuer at t
Institute. Miklos Nyiszli, doctor and prisoner at Auschwitz who worked
preparing the specimens, confirmed this in his autobiography and claime
thanked Mengele for the 'rare and valuable specimens. '...Shortly after th
destroyed all his correspondence with Mengele and denied that Mengele
assistant in Berlin or that he had ever received biological specimens from h
became a professor of human genetics at Münster in 1951. Shortly thereaft
president of the German Society for Anthropology [and] became editor
Zeitschrift für menschlische Vererbungs-und Konstitutionslehre... . Verschuer's c
ical. Other racial hygienists who played prominent roles in Nazi Germany
influential positions. Between 1946 and 1955, for example, Fritz Lenz, Gü
Heinrich Schade returned to professorships in German universities [at Gött
and Düsseldorf, respectively] in human genetics, anthropology, [and] psych
Connection, pp. 102-3, citing, among other sources, Robert Lifton, The Naz
Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 1986) p. 358
Racial Hygiene , pp. 42^4, 81, 104-6, 211, 292, 295, 300, 307-8, 369
Murderous Science , pp. 10-12, 17-19, 27-35, 42-45, 48, 56, 70-73, 89-90,
178n42, 181n; Schafft, From Racism to Genocide , pp. 206, 229-30, 187nl44; Schafft, Racism
to Genocide , pp. 54-55, 171, 182-83, 189-190, 222-23; Eric Ehrenreich, "Otmar von
Verschuer and the 'Scientific' Legitimation of Nazi Anti-Jewish Policy," Holocaust and
Genocide Studies , Vol. 21, No. 1 (2007) pp. 55-72. On Mengele, see Lucette Matalón
Lagnado and Sheila Cohn Dekel, Children of the Fiâmes: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Twins of
Auschwitz (New York: William Morrow, 1991 ). On Fritz Lenz, see Proctor, Racial Hygiene , pp.
53-57, 204, 136, 197, 300; Müller-Hill, Murderous Science , pp. 10-11, 76-79, 83, 110-15;
Black, War Against the Weak , pp. 316-17; Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research ,
pp. 112-120, 128-29, 277-78, 230-31; Schafft, From Racism to Genocide, pp. 206, 229-30.
On Günther Just, see Proctor, Racial Hygiene , pp. 47, 300. On Heinrich Schade, see Proctor,
Racial Hygiene , p. 308, 403n34; Müller-Hill, Murderous Science , pp. 30, 32.
41. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, p. 252; Kühn, Nazi Connection , p. 103.
42. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, p. 252; Black, War Against the Weak, p. 425.
43. Pearson, a British national, has claimed to hold a doctorate in anthropology from an
unnamed "South African university," although he received both an MA in sociology and
PhD in anthropology from the University of London. In 1965, he was brought to the U.S.
by Willis Carto, head of the neonazi Liberty Lobby, to edit Western Destiny (which subsumed
Northern World), an "antimiscegenationist" publication of Carto's Noontide Press. From the
mid-'60s through the early '70s, Pearson also held faculty positions in anthropology at
Queens University of Charlotte, the University of Southern Mississippi, and Montana
Tech (where he also served as dean of academic affairs). In 1975, financed by the billion-
aire Wickliffe Draper's Pioneer Fund, Pearson established the so-called Institute for the Study
of Man, which maintains a book-publishing imprint, Scott-Townsend, publishes the Journal
of Indo-European Studies, the Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies, and Conservative
Review, as well as Mankind Quarterly . During the mid-'70s, he also served on the editorial
board of the Heritage Foundation's journal, Policy Review, and as president of both the World
Anti-Communist League and the Northern League (see note 44, below). Pearson has pub-
lished under a variety of pseudonyms over the years, including Stephen Langdon, D. Purves,
J. McGregor, Allan McGregor, J. W. Jamieson, R. Peterson, William A. Massey, and Edwin
Clark. Under his own name, he's also published several supposedly "respectable" - and
widely adopted - anthropology texts, including Introduction to A nthropology (New York:
Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974) and Anthropological Glossary (Malabar: Kreiger, 1985).
His magnum opus is probably Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe (Washington, DC: Scott-
Townsend, 1991). See Tucker, Funding of Scientific Racism, pp. 109-10, 159-79, 183, 196,
259n83, 262-63nl07. Also see Frank P. Mintz, The Liberty Lobby and the American Right :
Race, Conspiracy and Culture (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985); Russ Bellant, Old
Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party (Boston: South End Press, 1991) esp. pp. 60-64.
44. Pearson did not assume the editorship of Mankind Quarterly until 1978, nearly a decade after
Verschuer's death. Both men were members of the editorial board from a much earlier point,
however, and from 1958 onward Verschuer, along with Hans Günther (see note 39, above),
former assistant to Reichsfiihrer SS Heinrich Himmler, and Klan leader Ernest Sevier Cox, was
a member of Pearson's neonazi organization, the Northern League. In that capacity, Verschuer
published articles in the League's periodical, Northern World, under such pseudonyms as
"Heinrich Ackermann" and "Ludwig Winter." Kühn, Nazi Connection, pp. 3-6, 8-9, 103.
45. As Ronald Reagan put it in the early '80s, Pearson, through his various journals, was respon-
sible for "bringing to a wide audience the work of leading scholars" in such areas. Quoted in
Kühn, Nazi Connection, p. 1 10n7, citing Barry Mehler, "Eugenics: Racist Ideology Matters,"
The Guardian, Aug. 22, 1984. Among those publishing most frequently in journals published
IOO A DECOLONIZING ENCOUNTER
by Pearson's Institute for the Study of Man du

a professor of psychology at the University of
that there is a genetic basis for the suppos
admixture with blacks produced a dysgenic ef
Jensen, who advanced a position quite similar
rapher Daniel Vining, who held that high
University of Georgia psychologist R. Travi
environment accounted for a lower IQ among
chology at the University of Western Ontario
"intellectual inferiority" is genetically correl
low of the American Academy for the Advan
is now a director of the Pioneer Fund). See Ch
"Professors of Hate," both in Russell Jacoby
Debate: History, Documents, Opinions (New
179-200. Also see Tucker, Funding of Scientif
46. See generally, Barry Mehler, "In Genes W
Judaism (Winter 1997; available at http://w
47. See Tucker, The Funding of Scientific Racis
Also see, as examples, Troy Duster, Back Door
Bellant, The Coors Connection: How Coors Fam
(Boston: South End Press, 1992); Jean Stef
Conservative Think Tanks and Foundations
Temple University Press, 1996); Joseph L. Gra
Theories of Race at the Millennium (New Bru
48. Humanities professor Berry Mehler's Insti
State University is a very good resourc
http://www.ferris.edu/isar/archives/ sources
pologist at the University of North Carolin
http://personal.uncc.edu/jmarks/.
49. "Boas acknowledged the essential logic of
character and achievement and that the dif
ties.... [H]e did not deny inequality in me
inequality rather likely." Haller, Eugenics , p
Boas and his 'Conspiracy' to Destroy the
Phibsophical Society , Vol. 154, No. 1 (Mar.
50. Kühl, Nazi Connection , pp. 77-80. As is n
Hooton...were among the dozens of resear
anthropologists like Hans Günther] searched
ers and ethnic or racial character." Claudia
Belknap Press of the Harvard University P
5 1 . Eleanor Leacock, "Anthropologists in Sea
and All the Rest of Us," in Lenora Foerst
Margaret Mead Legacy: Scholarship, Empire
University Press, 1992) p. 4.
52. For example, "Franz Boas, a twisted little J
undisclosed reasons, made professor of Anthr
school of fiction-writing called 'social anthro
The Enemy of Europe: The Enemy of Our E
CONFRONTING WESTERN COLONIALISM, AMERICAN RACISM IO I
24-25. Also see Gelya Frank, "Jews, Multiculturalism, and Boasian Anthropology,"
Anthropologist , Vol. 99, No. 4 (1997) pp. 731-45; Andrew Winston, '"The Boas C
The History of the Behavioral Sciences as Viewed from the Extreme Right" (200
at http://htpprints.yorku.ca/archive/0000001 2/00/boasforarchive.htm).
53. "Don't you know that all this equality garbage was started by a Jew anthropol
Franz Boas at Columbia University?" Quoted in Baker, "Cult of Franz Boas," p.
Alex Haley, "George Lincoln Rockwell: A Candid Conversation with the Fanatic
of the American Nazi Party," Playboy (Apr. 1966) p. 76.
54. Baker, "Cult of Franz Boas," pp. 8-9, citing Jared Taylor, "Who Reads
Renaissance?" American Renaissance , Vol. 8, Nos. 8-9 (1997) pp. 8-11.
55. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
study, contracted by the Department of War, was actually completed in 1944.
56. Anthropology's context is that "of a historical process which has made the la
mankind subservient to the other, and during which millions of innocent human
had their resources plundered and their institutions and beliefs destroyed, whilst
selves were ruthlessly killed, thrown into bondage, and contaminated by diseases t
unable to resist." Diane Lewis, "Colonialism and Anthropology," Current Anthropo
14, No. 5 (Dec. 1973) p. 582, quoting Claude Lévi-Strauss, "Anthropology: Its Ac
and Its Future," Current Anthropobgy , Vol. 7, No. 2 (July 1966) p. 126.
57. Ideally, the essential framework of the narrative will be internalized by the colon
selves. "In order for the colonizer to be a complete master, it is not enough for h
in actual fact, but he must believe in [the colonial system's] legitimacy. In order for
imacy to be complete, it is not enough for the colonized to be a slave, he must
role." Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1
58. See, e.g., the critique of Benedict's depiction of Japan's society functioning as a
ture" in Takeo Doi, The Anatomy of Dependence (Tokyo: Kodansha Internati
Regarding certain realities attending the U.S. imposition of democratic forms on
John D. Montgomery, Forced to Be Free: The Artificial Revolution in Germany
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957) esp. pp. 20-21, 28-36, 82-9
Herbert P. Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: HarperC
pp. 567-79, 609, 615-16.
59. See Derek Freeman, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and unma
Anthropological Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983; updat
by Penguin in 1997 under the title Margaret Mead and the Heretic ), and The Fate
of Margaret Mead: An Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research (Boulder, CO
Press, 1999). For useful rebuttals of Freeman's biodeterminist distortions, s
"Anthropologists in Search of a Culture," pp. 4-11; Lowell Holmes, The Quest f
Samoa: The Mead/Freeman Controversy and Beyond (South Hadley, NJ: Bergin
1987), and Martin Orans; Not Even Wrong: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman , and t
(Novato, CA: Chandler & Sharpe, 1996).
60. Margaret Mead, New Lives for Old: Cultural Transformation , Manus 1 928-1 9 53
William H. Morrow, 1956) p. 173.
61. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978); Jean Baudrillard, Th
Production (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1975).
62. Kirkpatrick Sale, The Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columb
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990) pp. 129-35. For broader background, s
Whitehead, "Carib Cannibalism: The Historical Evidence," Journal de la
Américanistesy No. 70 (1984) pp. 69-87.
I02 A DECOLONIZING ENCOUNTER
63. Torgovick concludes that "cannibalism, h

not and do not really exist within most
describing the whole notion as a primal "fa
Men, Women, and the Quest for Ecstasy (N
Frank, Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery an
to Jules Verne (Berkeley: University of Cal
Fum: Children in the Jaws of History," in Fr
eds., Cannibalism and the Cobnial Encounter
1998) pp. 158-82. For an explicitly ethnogr
many of the same conclusions arrived at
James Q. Jacobs, "The Cannibalism Parad
Discourse" (2004; available at http://jqjacob
64. Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings: The
1977) esp. pp. 34, 60, 102-25. Also see Mic
Sacrifice," American Ethnobgist , Vol. 4, N
Sacrifice," Natural History , Vol. 86, No. 4 (A
namericanstudies.org/aztecs/sacrifice.htm).
65. W. Arens, The Man-Eating Myth: Anthr
University Press, 1979); for critique of Har
66. See "Carlos Castañeda: The Greatest Hoa
Master Race: Literature, Cinema, and the Colo
Lights Books, [2nd ed.] 2001) pp. 27-66.
67. Quoted in Lawrence Osborne, "Does
Controversy," Linguafranca , Vol. 7, No. 4
68. See Mary Douglas, "The Authenticity of
Anthropobgy (London: Routledge & Keeg
the only "reputable" anthropologist who ext
rications. See, e.g., Paul Heelas, "Expressing
Formal Analysis," Journal of the A nthropo
133-48; Keith H. Basso, "Southwest Ethnog
(1973) p. 246; C. Scott Littleton, "An Emic
Rise of a New Anthropology," Journal of
145-55. Also see the untitled reviews p
Anthropobgist , Vol. 71, No. 2 (Apr. 1969) pp
of the Royal Anthropobgical Institute, Vol. 4
in Journal of the Anthropobgical Society of
excerpted from Castaneda's The Teachings of
University of California Press, 1968) will a
ogy textbooks as Walter Goldschmidťs Exp
Rinehart, and Winston, [2nd ed.] 1971, [3r
Fields, Other Grasshoppers: Readings in Cu
1977) pp. 99-111, 114.
69. Mary Douglas, "The Hotel Kwilu: A Mo
Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory (London:
70. "Cannibalism: An Exchange," New York
71. Susan Brown and Donald Turzin, eds., Th
Society for Psychological Anthropology, 1
72. "Gajdusek said that he had photographs o
CONFRONTING WESTERN COLONIALISM, AMERICAN RACISM IO3
to produce them. He also claimed in a 1982 paper that he'd been "present several times just
after bodies were dismembered for cannibalistic consumption," although one of his own col-
laborators, Stanley Prusiner, subsequently admitted in print that "there'd been no direct
observation of cannibalistic acts." Osborne, "Does Man Eat Man?" pp. 32-33. For further
discussion of the problems with Gajdusek's premises and "facts," see Arens, Man-Eating
Myth, pp. 103-15; Lyle Steadman and Charles F. Myers, "Kuru and Cannibalism?" American
Anthropobgist , Vol. 84, No. 3 (1982) pp. 611-27.
73. As Arens puts it, "The typical response to my book among anthropologists has been, 'Well,
Arens is right in general, but in my research I've found evidence of cannibalism [emphasis
original].'" Quoted in Osborne, "Does Man Eat Man?" p. 31.
74. Peggy Reeves Sanday, Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System (Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press, 1986).
75. See, e.g., Marshall Sahlins, Historical Realities: Structures in the Early History of the Sandwich
Islands (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Islands of History (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1987) esp. pp. 57, 86, 99-101; How "Natives" Think: About Captain Cook ,
for Example (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Cultures in Practice: Selected
Essays (New York: Zone Books, 2000) esp. pp. 328, 332, 451, 462n24.
76. See Gananath Obeyesekere, The Apotheosis of Captain Cook: European My thmaking in the
Pacific (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [2nd ed.] 1997); Cannibal Talk: The
Man-Eating Myth and Human Sacrifice in the South Seas (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005).
77. Laurence R. Goldman, ed., The Anthropology of Cannibalism (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999).
78. See, e.g., Ann Gibbons, "Archaeologists Rediscover Cannibals," Science , No. 277 (Aug.
1997) pp. 635-37.
79. See Hamlin L. Hill Jr., "Mark Twain's 'Brace of Brief Lectures on Science,"' New England
Quarterly y Vol. 34, No. 2 (June 1961) pp. 228-39; James D. Wilson, "'The Monumental
Sarcasm of the Ages': Science and Pseudoscience in the Thought of Mark Twain," South
Atlantic Bulletin , Vol. 40, No. 2 (May 1975) pp. 72-82.
80. See Tim D. White, Prehistoric Cannibalism at Mancos 5MTUMR-2346 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1992).
81. Among the critics were Arens; British archaeologist Peter Bahn, author of the entry on can-
nibalism in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution; and the Museum of New
Mexico's Peter Bullock - all quoted, along with White, in Osborne, "Does Man Eat Man?"
pp. 33-36. For further background, see Paul Bahn, "Is Cannibalism Too Much to Swallow?"
New Scientist , No. 130 (1991) pp. 30-32; Peter Y. Bullock, "A Reappraisal of Anasazi
Cannibalism," Kiva , Vol. 57, No. 1 (1991) pp. 5-16; Paul Bahn, "Cannibalism or Ritual
Dismemberment?" in Stephen Jones, Robert D. Martin, and David R. Pilbean, and Richard
Dawkins, eds., Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge
University Press, 1992) p. 330; Peter Y. Bullock, "A Return to the Question of Anasazi
Cannibalism," Kiva , Vol. 5, No. 2 (1992) pp. 203-05; Paul Bahn, "Ancestral Cannibalism
Gives Us Food for Thought: A Review of Prehistoric Cannibalism by T. D. White," New
Scientist, No. 134 (1992) pp. 40-41.
82. See, e.g., Tim D. White, "Once Were Cannibals," in Evolution: A Scientific American Reader
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) pp. 338-46.
83. Dan Vergano, "Cannibal cavemen of Spain uncovered," USA Today , Aug. 11, 2010 (avail-
able at http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2010/08/cannibal-cave-
men-spain-nutrition/1). Also see Eudald Carboneil et al., "Cultural Cannibalism as a
Paleoeconomic System in the European Lower Pleistocene: The Case of Level TD6 of Gran
I04 A DECOLONIZING ENCOUNTER
Dolina (Sierra de Atapuera, Burgos, Spain," Current Anthr

539-48.
84. Richard Klein, "Hominin Dispersals in the Old World,"
Past (London: Thames & Hudson, [2nd ed.] 2009) p. 108; "Ti
p. 8 (available at http://www.talkorigins.org).
85. One need look no further than the entry for "Hum
"Anatomically modern humans originated in Africa about 2
behavioral maturity around 50,000 years ago [and is] define
of which the only extant subspecies is Homo sapiens sapien
species, Homo sapiens idaltu. . .is now extinct." To reiterate -
sors was not of the human species.
86. See, e.g., David P. Watts and John C. Mitani, "Infan
Chimpanzees at Ngogo, Kibale National Park, Uganda," Prim
pp. 357-65.
87. Vergano, "Cannibal cavemen"; Eudald et al., "Cultural Cannibalism," p. 539. Also see James
Owen, "Human Meat Just Another Meal for Early Man: Cannibalism Helped Meet Protein
Needs, Keep Rivals in Line, Study Suggests," National Geographic News , Aug. 31, 2010 (avail-
able at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/08/10083 1 -cannibalism-cannibal-
cavemen-human-meat-science/); Niall Firth, "Early Man 'Butchered and Ate the Brains of
Children as Part of Everyday Diet,'" Mail Online , Sept. 1, 2010 (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sci-
encetech/article-1307936/Early-man-butchered-ate-brains-children-every-day-diet.html).
88. Carleton S. Coon, The Origin of Races (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962) p. 656. On Coon's
Jim Crow connections, see note 32, above. For critique of theory of human evolution, see
Ashley Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (Cleveland: World,
1964) pp. 83-87.
89. Marshall Sahlins, "Artificially maintained controversies: Global warming and Fijian can-
nibalism," Anthropology Today , Vol. 19, No. 3 (June 2003) pp. 3-5 (available at http://www.
jestor.org/pss/3695286).
90. Fox News, "Scientist: Cannibal Humans Ate Neanderthals Into Extinction, May 19, 2009
(available at http://www.foxnews.eom/story/0, 2933, 520549, OO.html); Robin McKie, "How
Neanderthals met a grisly fate: devoured by humans," The Observer , May 17, 2009 (avail-
able at http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/may/! 7/Neanderthals-cannibalism-anthro-
pological-sciences-journal.html).
91. Quoted in Osborne, "Does Man Eat Man?" pp. 36-37. It should be noted that while
Robinson often passed himself off as a paleontologist, his training was actually in geology.
At CU, he was tenured as a professor of geology and served as curator of geology at the uni-
versity museum. See "End of Epoch as Robinson Retires," Sept. 30, 2002 (available at
http://cumuseum.colorado.edu/About/newsdetail.php ?newsID=3).
92. "Anasazi" is a corruption of a Diñé (Navajo) term meaning "the ancient ones."
93. Christy G. Turner II and Jacqueline A. Turner, Man Corn: Cannibalism and Violence in the
Prehistoric Southwest (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1999) pp. 459-84.
94. Man Com "debunks the traditional view of the Anasazi as peaceful agriculturalists." Julie
Cart, "Did cannibalism kill Anasazi civilization?" Los Angeles Times , July 13, 1999 (reprinted
in Japan Times; available at http://www.trussel.com/prehist/newsl28.htm). For a capsule ver-
sion of the "traditional view," see Paul Madden, "Anasazi," in Ready Reference: American
Indians , 3 vols. (Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 1995) Vol. I, pp. 36-37. More expansively, see
Richard J. Ambler, The Anasazi: Prehistoric People of the Southwest (Flagstaff: Museum of
Northern Arizona, 1977).
95. See, e.g., John Kanter, "Anasazi Mutilation and Cannibalism in the American Southwe
in Goldman, Anthropology of Cannibalism, p. 75.
96. See my review of Man Com in North American Archaeologist , Vol. 21, No. 3 (2000
268-88; break out of results by site, pp. 271-73.
97. The reasons were/are manifest. The digestive juices of certain scavenger species,
instance - hyenas are a notorious example - contain sufficient concentrations of hydrochl
ric acid to "leave smooth holes in digested bones which resemble the supposed traces of ca
nibalism." Osborne, "Does Man Eat Man?" p. 36.
98. Turner and Turner, Man Corn; on the Toltecs and others, pp. 421-28, 459-84; on
Mexicas, pp. 415-58.
99. Ibid., p. 8.
100. Ibid., pp. 478, 481.
101. See, as examples, Douglas Preston, "Cannibals in the Canyon," The New Yorker , Nov. 30,
1998 (available at http://www.newyorker.eom/archive/1998/l l/30/1998_l 1_30_076_TNY
_LIBRY_0000 16941); Robert Gehrke, "Anasazi Cannibalism Theory Ignites Bitter
Controversy," Los Angeles Times , Dec. 20, 1998 (available at http://articles.latimes.com
/1998/dec/20/local/me-55814); James Bishop, Jr., "Bones of Contention: New Book Puts
Anasazi Diet Under Scrutiny, Tucson Weekly , Feb. 7, 2000; Thomas H. Maugh II,
"Conclusive evidence of American Indian cannibalism found," Seattle Times, Sept. 7, 2000
(first published in the LA Times; available at http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com
/archive/ ?date= 20000907&slug=404 1 05 8 ) .
102. Turner and Turner, Man Corn , p. 8.
103. David Wilcox, an anthropologist with the Museum of Northern Arizona, puts it more ele-
gantly: "We are in a period when everything Native American is [seen as] spiritual, sensi-
tive and wonderful. We would like to believe that all the nasty stuff was introduced by
Europeans [but] it's just not so....[N]ow we realize that this was not a peaceful place."
Turner himself has proven less circumspect, openly bragging about being "the guy who
brought down the Anasazi." Both quotes in Cart, "Did cannibalism kill the Anasazi?"
104. Other such efforts include campaigns to reverse the accepted view that traditional
American Indian societies maintained ecological balance over extended periods, demon-
strate that traditional spiritual beliefs were lifted from Europeans, refute the idea that
indigenous peoples ever attained highly refined economies and systems of sociopolitical
organization, and strip the "primitives" of credit not only for having independently dis-
covered such things as agricultural fertilizer, but such relative banalities as maple sugar and
caramel corn. Some anthros have joined forces with attorneys seeking to establish that
American Indians, as polities vested with inherent rights, are a "legal fiction," while oth-
ers, without focusing on cannibalism, have set about "proving" that far from being com-
paratively peaceful, traditional societies were extraordinarily violent. As a representative
sample of such material, see Sam D. Gill, Mother Earth: An American Story (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987); R. Douglas Hurt, Indian Agriculture in America:
Prehistory to the Present (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987); James A. Clifton,
ed., The Invented Indian: Cultural Fictions and Government Policies (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction, 1990); Shepard E. Krech III, The Ecobgical Indian: Myth and History (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1999); Richard J. Chacon and Ruben G. Mendoza, eds., North
American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,
2007); Richard J. Chacon and David H. Dye, eds., The Taking and Displaying of Body Parts
by Amerindians (New York: Springer, 2008).
105. For insight into how endemic this impulse is, and has always been, to anthropological
Io6 A DECOLONIZING ENCOUNTER
practice, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other : How Anthr
York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
106. The works I have in mind are Memmi's The Colonizer and t
and Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove P
more recent, and much weaker, Racism (Minneapolis: Universi
107. Joel Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Pant
108. Ibid., pp. 249-89. Although Kovel makes little of the connect
more compelling portions of his analysis he draws quite heav
study, The Mass Psychology of Fascism (New York: Farrar, Str
109. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Repo
University of Minnesota Press, 1984) pp. 18-37. Also see St
Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society (Minneapoli
Press, 1988).
110. Generally speaking, this is Bauman's analysis, as articulated in his Modernity and the Holocaust
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989).
111. Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon, 1969) pp.
8-9.
112. The Institute for Historical Review is a Torrance, California-based entity established in 1979
by Willis Carto (see note 43) for purposes of lending a scholarly veneer to the proposition that
the Nazi judeocide never occurred. See generally, Deborah Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The
Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: Free Press, 1993) pp. 137-56.
113. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness : Race and the Making of the American Working Class
(New York: Verso, 1991); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White
People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998); Paula S.
Rothenberg, ed., White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism (New York:
Worth, 2002).
114. See Jean-Paul Sartre, "On Genocide," in John Duffett, ed., Against the Crime of Silence:
Proceedings of the Russell War Crimes Tribunal (New York: Bertrand Russell Peace
Foundation/O'Hare Books, 1968) pp. 612-26. For further explication, see the selection of
Sartre's short writings collected by Azzedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams
under the title Cobnialism and Neocolonialism (New York: Routledge, 2001 ) esp. pp. 39, 45,
50, 75-76, 132.
115. The assertion that "what we say, goes" comes from a 1991 speech outlining his conception
of a "New World Order" by U.S. President George H. W. Bush. In a 1995 report commis-
sioned by the U.N., it was estimated that by the end of that year some 565,000 children
under 12 years of age had died "needless deaths" as a result of the U.S. -imposed embargo of
certain foodstuffs, medical equipment, and matérial necessary to repair Iraq's sanitation sys-
tem and medical facilities, most of which were systematically obliterated during the pro-
tracted U.S. bombing campaign of 1990-91. In an interview aired by the CBS "news
magazine" 60 Minutes on May 12, 1996, then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations
Madeleine Albright confirmed that she was aware of the toll taken by the sanctions, but that
U.S. officials had decided it was "worth the cost." She was subsequently quoted to the same
effect in the New York Times and elsewhere. See Noam Chomsky, "What We Say Goes: The
Middle East and the New World Order," in Cynthia Peters, ed., Collateral Damage: The New
World Order at Home and Abroad (Boston: South End Press, 1992) p. 52; Ramsey Clark and
Others, War Crimes: A Report on U.S. War Crimes in Iraq (Washington, DC: Maisonneuve
Press, 1992) esp. pp. 22, 35, 53-54; Ramsey Clark, The Impact of Sanctions on Iraq: The
Children are Dying (Maisonneuve Press, 1998).
116. On Halliday's various statements and actions, see Ramsey Clark et al., Challenge to Genocid
Let Iraq Live (New York: International Action Ctr., 1998) pp. 79, 127, 191. Also see Dav
Barsamian, "Iraq: The Impact of U.S. Sanctions and Policy (an interview with Phy
Bennis and Denis]. Halliday)," in Anthony Amove, ed., Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Im
of Sanctions and War (Boston: South End Press, 2000) pp. 35-46.
117. For analysis of the implications, see "The Ghosts of 9-1-1: Reflections on History, Jus
and Roosting Chickens," in my On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on t
Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003)
5-37.
118. See, e.g., the first page of the "Special Edition on Jewish Ritual Murder" published by the
Nazi tabloid Dur Sturmer in May 1934, reproduced in Randall L. Bytwerk, Julius Streicher:
The Man Who Persuaded a Nation to Hate Jews (New York: Dorset Press, 1983) Fig. 16.
119. Donald Kendrick and Donald Paxton, Gypsies Under the Swastika (Herfordshire, U.K.:
Herfordshire University Press, 1995) pp. 11-12,
120. Consider, e.g., the consensus of pundits as ostensibly diverse in their political perspectives
as Charles Krauthammer, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and Christopher Hitchens that the quin-
centennial of the Columbian landfall was worthy of celebrating with "great vim and gusto"
in 1992. Quoted/summarized in Stannard, "Uniqueness as Denial," pp. 165-66.
121. For cogent analysis of the meanings with which the term is imbued in the U.S., see Natsu
Taylor Saito, Meeting the Enemy: American Exceptionalism and International Law (New York:
New York University Press, 2010).
122. Stannard covers the mechanics of such argumentation very well in "Uniqueness as Denial,"
pp. 169-85.
123. For further explication, see Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and
Suffering (London: Polity Press, 2001) esp. pp. 37-41, 58-63, 101-16, 132-39, 280-86.
124. See, e.g., "'Nits Make Lice': The Extermination of North American Indians, 1607-1996,"
in my A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas , 1492 to the Present
(San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997) esp. pp. 206-45.
1 25 . See To Judge Them by the Standards of Their Time : America s Indian Fighters, the Laws
of War, and the Question of International Order," in my Perversions of Justice: Indigenous
Peoples and A ngloamerican Law (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2003) esp. pp. 315-38.
126. Together with Natsu Taylor Saito, I'm currently preparing a new edition of the proceedings
of the 1967 Russell Tribunal on U.S. War Crimes in Indochina for publication along with
a second volume containing reedited versions of the Winter Soldier Tribunal and Dellums
Committee hearings of the early 70s. A third volume will consist of essays by both Saito
and me addressing subsequently emerging information serving to confirm or expand upon
what was established in these earlier fora, and otherwise bringing things up to date. The three
volumes are tentatively scheduled for release under the collective title Confronting the
Crime of Silence during the spring of 2013.
127. See "That 'Most Peace-Loving of Nations: United States Military Actions at Home and
Abroad, 1776-2003," in my On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, pp. 39-85.
128. On scalp bounties, see my '"Nits Make Lice,'" pp. 186-88. On poisoning and deliberate infec-
tion with disease, see Barbara Alice Mann, The Tainted Gift: The Disease Method of Frontier
Expansion (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger/ABC-CLIO, 2010) pp. 83-111. For official reference
to "individual affairs," see Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population
History Since 1492 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987) p. 48; citing U.S. Census,
Report on Indians Taxed and Indians Not Taxed in the United States (except Alaska) at the Eleventh
Census: 1890 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1894) pp. 637-38.
Io8 A DECOLONIZING ENCOUNTER
129. On massacres, see, e.g., LeeAnna Keith, The Colfax Massacre

Power, White Terror , and the Death of Reconstruction (New Yo
2008); Grif Stockley, Bbod in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Ma
University of Arkansas Press, 2001). On lynchings, see, e.g.,
Beck, A Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lyn
University of Illinois Press, 1995); James Allen, Hilton Al
Litwack, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America
2008).
130. Consider, as but one example, that of James Byrd, Jr., a black man dragged to death behind
a pickup truck driven by two self-proclaimed white supremacists desiring to "send a message"
to African Americans residing in the town of Jasper, Texas, on June 7, 1998. The case is ana-
lyzed quite well in a documentary film, The Two Towns of Jasper (Two Tone Productions,
2002).
131. Quite apart from such prominent examples as Anthony Baez, Amadu Dialo, and Sean
Bell, consider the hundreds of other examples presented on a state-by-state basis in Stolen
Lives: Killed by Law Enforcement (Bronx/Los Angeles: Anthony Baez Foundation/National
Lawyers Guild. [2nd ed.] 1999). Also see Marilynn S. Johnson, Street Justice: A History of
Police Violence in New York City (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003) pp. 285-305.
132. See Derrick Bell, "Police Brutality: Portent of Disaster and Discomforting Divergence,"
Katheryn K. Russell, "What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue? Police Brutality and the Black
Community," and Patricia J. Williams, "Obstacle Illusions: The Cult of Racial Appearance,"
all in Jill Nelson, ed., Police Brutality: An Anthology (New York: WW. Norton, 2000) pp.
88-101, 135-48, 149-56. Also see Committee Against Anti- Asian Violence, "Police
Brutality in the New Chinatown," Andrea McArdle, "An Interview with Derrick Bell:
Reflections on Race, Crime, and Legal Activism," and Dayo Folayan Gore, Tamara Jones,
and Joo-Hyun Kang, "Organizing at the Intersections: A Roundtable Discussion of Police
Brutality through the Lens of Race, Class, and Sexual Identities," all in Andrea McArdle
and Tanya Erzen, eds., Zero Tolerance: Quality of Life and the New Police Brutality in New York
City (New York: New York University Press, 2001) pp. 221-42, 243-50, 251-71.
133. For a very succinct overview, see Rennard Strickland, "'You Can't Rollerskate in a Buffalo
Herd Even if You Have All the Medicine': American Indian Law and Policy," in his Tonto's
Revenge: Reflections on American Indian Law and Policy (Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1997) pp. 52-53.
134. See generally, Martin Carnoy, Faded Dreams: The Politics and Economics of Race in America
(Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Manning Marable, Race, Rebellion,
and Reform: The Second Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-2006 (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, [3rd ed.l 2007).
135. The useful literature on this topic is both sparse and diffused. For a glimpse of one dimen-
sion of the issues involved, see my Kill the Indian , Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of
American Indian Residential Schools (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2004) pp. 68-76. For
broader theoretical background, see Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks: The Experiences
of a Black Man in a White World (New York: Grove Press, 1967); Albert Memmi, Dominated
Man: Notes Toward a Portrait (New York: Orion Press, 1968).
136. See Bill Zimmerman, Airlift to Wounded Knee (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1976).
137. See Lewis, "Colonialism and Anthropology" (cited in note 56).
138. See note 88.
139. See Ward Churchill, "Remembering Bob Thomas: His Influence on the American Indian
Liberation Struggle," in Steve Pavlick, ed., A Good Cherokee, A Good Anthropobgist: Papers
in Honor of Robert K. Thomas (Los Angeles: UCLA American Indian Studies Ctr., 1998)
pp. 281-91. "Colonialism: Internal and Classic" appeared in New University Thought , Vol.
4, No. 4 (Winter 1966-67). Also see Robert K. Thomas, "On an Indian Reservation: How
Colonialism Works," collected in Shirley Hill Witt and Stan Steiner, eds., The Way: An
Anthology of American Indian Literature (New York: Vintage Books, 1972) pp. 60-67.
140. See, e.g., Michael Wilcox, "Marketing Conquest and the Vanishing Indian: An Indigenous
Response to Jared Diamond's Archaeology of the Southwest," in Patricia A. McAnany and
Norman Yoffee, eds., Questioning Collapse: Human Resilience , Ecological Vulnerability, and the
Aftermath of Empire (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2010) pp. 113-41.
141. Although it had been coined at least as early as the mid-50s, the term "Black Power"
gained broad public attention only in 1966, after being tested in speeches by Willie Ricks
(Mukasa), an organizer in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
Carmichael, chair of the organization and an extraordinarily galvanizing public speaker, then
propelled the slogan to national prominence. See Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and
the Black Awakening of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981) pp.
209-10; Stokely Carmichael with Ekweueme Michael Thelwell, Ready for the Revolution: The
Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) (New York: Scribner, 2003) pp. 507-8,
542-43.
142. While the "rhetorical excesses" of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali,
Stokely Carmichael, and other prominent black leaders in referring to Vietnam as a "white
man's war" are often decried, it is seldom mentioned that precisely the same terminology
was contemporaneously employed in confidential documents written by governmental offi-
cials like Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs William Bundy. See Stanley
Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking Press, 1983) p. 423.
143. "There is in Viet-Nam a test of wills [and] above all a test of military technology and tech-
niques and ideas. One side believes it can win with a combination of guerrilla warfare and
political ideology. The other side believes it can win with the use of massive military power.
America may be able to prove, as the Germans and Italians did in Spain, that superior fire-
power will carry the day in [any] such situât ion.... What we're buying is an example - for
Latin America and other guerrilla prone areas. What we're really doing in Viet-Nam is killing
the cause of 'wars of liberation.'" Bernard Fall, "This Isn't Munich, It's Spain," in his Last
Reflections on a War (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967) p. 225.
144. Rep. Lyndon B. Johnson, Congressional Record , Mar. 15, 1948, House, p. 2883; quoted in
Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins , p. 248.
145. Although U.S. combat troops sent to Vietnam were disproportionately nonwhite, Taylor, in
a missive to President Johnson dated Feb. 22, 1965, depicted the soldiers comprising any
American expeditionary force as being, apparently by definition, "white-faced," thereby pro-
viding a revealing glimpse into the intractably deep-set sense of whiteness imbuing élite con-
ceptions of U.S. national identity during the period. It's worth mentioning that, in the same
communication, the General went on to worry America's army of whites would be ineffec-
tual in a war on the Asian mainland, not least because - presumably since "all Orientals look
alike" - they'd be unable "to distinguish between a Vietcong and a friendly Vietnamese
farmer." See The Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decision-
making on Vietnam , Senator Gravel Edition, 4 vols. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972) Vol. Ill,
p. 389; Karnow, Vietnam , pp. 414-15. On the disproportionate assignment of African
Americans to combat units, and, correspondingly, the disproportionately high casualty
rates they suffered in Vietnam, see Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat
Soldiers and Vietnam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993) pp. 19-21; as
I IO A DECOLONIZING ENCOUNTER
Appy observes on p. 19, "For Hispanics [sic], A

the most basic statistical information about th
or inadequately examined." As regards both Am
are indications that their representation, both in
of casualties, was "grossly disproportionate"
Tom Holm, Strong Hearts , Wounded Souls: Na
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996) pp. 1
146. There are several useful studies in this r
Curry), Self Destruction: The Disintegration and
Vietnam Era (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981).
147. As Assistant Secretary of Defense John McN
still had fewer than 200,000 troops in Vietnam -
avoid humiliation. . .to preserve our reputation. .
rest of the world." Two years later, the ongoing
had required an increase in the U.S. troop leve
Americans were employed directly in the war
Vietnam," in David L. Anderson, ed., Facing My
University Press of Kansas, 1998) pp. 218-219
148. Paul Joseph, Cracks in the Empire: State Politi
1981).
149. The FBI reported some 140 "bombings or arsons" of campus facilities during spring semes-
ter, 1969, as well as thousands of bomb threats - 175 at Rutgers alone - each of which sig-
nificantly disrupted the institutions' usual routine. It is likely that the rate increased during
academic year 1969-1970.
150. See generally, Terry H. Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties: Protest in America from
Greensboro to Wounded Knee (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993): on campus bomb-
ings, p. 367; on student strikes, p. 299.
151. For a contemporaneous account of the strike, which lasted from early- November 1968 until
early-March 1969, by a faculty member fired as a consequence of aligning herself with the
students, see Kay Boyle, The Long Walk at San Francisco State (New York: Grove Press, 1970)
esp. pp. 3-63. Also see Lane Ryo Hirabayashi and Marilyn C. Alquizola, "Asian American
Studies: Reevaluating for the 1990s," in Karin Aguilar-San Juan, ed., The State of Asian
America : Activism and Resistance in the 1990s (Boston: South End Press, 1994) pp. 354-57.
152. See generally, Anderson, The Movement and the Sixties , pp. 299-300.
153. Ward Churchill, Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature , Cinema, and the Colonization of
America Indians (San Francisco: City Lights Books, [2nd ed., rev.] 1998).
154. For the most comprehensive account, see Jeffrey Haas, The Assassination of Fred Hampton:
How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther (Chicago: Lawrence Hill
Books, 2010).
155. The term "Weatherman" arose from the fragmentation of SDS during the summer of 1969,
beginning when a faction calling itself the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM) expelled
another belonging to/aligned with the Progressive Labor Party. RYM itself then split into
two entities - RYM I and RYM II - over the issue of whether armed struggle should be under-
taken in the U.S. To avoid further confusing an already confused situation, RYM I, the fac-
tion endorsing armed struggle, began referring to itself as Weatherman (from a line in Bob
Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," used as the title of the group's founding manifesto).
See, e.g., Dan Berger, Outlaws of America : The Weather Underground and the Politics of
Solidarity (Oakland: AK Press, 2006) esp. 75-124.
CONFRONTING WESTERN COLONIALISM, AMERICAN RACISM III
156. Ibid., pp. 193, 201-2, 207, 225-28.

157. Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: From Its Origins to the Pre
William Morrow, 1967) and Rebellion or Revolution ? (New York: William M
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Santo Domi
(London: Seeker and Warburg, 1938; since reprinted by various publishers
tions), Beyond a Boundary (London: Hutchinson, 1963; reprinted by Panthe
Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (Detroit: Facing Reality, 1971; repri
& Unwin, London, 1980).
158. Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals , p. 19.
159. Ibid.
160. See Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, After the Cataclysm: Postwar In
Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology (Boston: South End Press, 1979).
161. See, e.g., George Breitman, ed., Malcolm X Speaks (New York: Pathfinder
23-24.
162. On the nature of my relationship with and intellectual debt to Vine, see m
"Contours of Enlightenment: Reflections on Science, Theology, Law, and t
Vision of Vine Deloria, Jr.," in Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker, and
eds., Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance (Lawrence: Univ
Kansas, 2003) pp. 245-72.
163. Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins , pp. 23-158, 323-66; a
"Some Thoughts on Intellectuals and the Schools," pp. 309-22.
164. Lemisch titled his presentation "Present-Mindedness Revisited: Anti-Radi
of American Historical Writing Since World War II." It was subsequently
slightly revised form, as On Active Service in Peace and War: Politics and I
American Historical Profession (Toronto: New Hogtown Press, 1975).
165. Sterling Stuckey, The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism (Boston,: Bea
and Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black Americ
Oxford University Press, 1988). Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Blac
Freedom in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1981).
166. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The " Objectivity Question" and the Am
Profession (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988) p. 492.
167. Nathan Huggins, Black Odyssey: The Afro-American Ordeal in Slavery (New Y
1977); Mary Francis Berry and John W. Blassingame, Long Memory: The Bl
in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).
168. Harding, There Is a River, p. xix.
169. Quoted in August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, Black History and the Histor
19 1 5-1980 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986) p. 284.
170. Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: The Chicano's Struggle Toward Liberatio
Canfield Press, 1972).
171. Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in Nineteenth Century Amer
Alfred A. Knopf, 1978) and Strangers from a Distant Shore: A History of A
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1989).
172. Ronald Takaki, A Pro-Slavery Crusade: The Agitation to Reopen the African S
York: Free Press, 197 1 ), and A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural A
Little, Brown, 1993). Also see, e.g., Takaki's Violence in the Black Imaginat
Documents (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) and Debating Divers
Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America (New York: Oxford University
1 73. Vine Deloria, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (New York:
pp. 78-100. For Vine's reflections on the

Indians, and Planetary Reality," his contrib
eds., Indians and Anthropologists: Vine Delo
University of Arizona Press, 1997) pp. 20
174. Vine Deloria, Jr., We Talk , You Listen: N
God Is Red (New York: Grosset & Dunlap. 19
Indian Declaration of Independence (New
175. David Roediger, Towards the Abolition
176. Panther Minister of Information Geor
at SF State at the time of the strike and w
participation. See Boyle, Long Walk at San F
177. On Carter, Huggins, and Pratt, see Jack
of Geronimo Pratt (New York: Doubleday
178. Killed in the first car bombing on M
Una Jaakola (24), and attorney Reyes Mar
former UMAS leader Florencio "Freddie"
Dougherty (20). Antonio Alcantar (21) suf
a leg in the May 29 blast. Although it was
had constructed the lethal devices, no sub
case of Los Seis de Boulder remains unsol
'74 car bombings," Boulder Daily Camera
179. Oddly, despite his importance to UMA
Falcon has gone conspicuously unremarke
of the man and his murder will be found i
The Sabotage of Legitimate Dissent (San F
generally, Jesús Salvador Treviño, Eyewitne
(Los Angeles: Arte Publico Press, 2001)
180. The books at issue are Ward Churchill
End Press, 1983); Ward Churchill and Elisa
on Marxism in the Multicultural Arena (Den
Law and Politics, 1984). As examples of
Indigenist Examination of Marxist Theory
Churchill Reader (New York: Routledge,
Morris, "Between a Rock and a Hard Plac
and the Destruction of Indigenous People
Struggle for American Indian Liberation
181. See George Manuel and Michael Poslun
Free Press, 1974). Also see my "Self-Deter
Survey," in Arlo Kempf, ed., Breaching the
Canada (New York: Springer, 2010) pp.
182. See, e.g. "The New Face of Liberation
Reality of the Fourth World," in my Acts
183. For further explication, see "I Am Indi
in my Struggle for the Land: Native Nor
Colonization (San Francisco: City Lights

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CONFRONTING WESTERN COLONIALISM, AMERICAN RACISM, AND WHITE SUPREMACY

COLONIALISM, AMERICAN RACISM,

Ward Churchill and Pierre Orelus in Dialogue

Churchill: Tve never really compartmentalized my life in the manner implied

Churchill: I don't think it is the case. A number of others have

it appear to be something other than it is, often as the

Churchill: Sure. As I said, Hooton was a leading practitioner of what he called

basis, formulate socioeconomic policies producing

indiciai likenesses to all Negro groups," He therefore concluded that Indians

Genetics Association," It still publishes the Journal of Heredity

Orelus: And cultural anthropology?

There are a seemingly infinite number of contend

reaction to Arens' material was "near hysteria" a

Churchill: No. I responded to your question as I did simply because my use of

fact that chimpanzees and other primate speci

Churchill: Right. That refines the definition a bit, so allow me to reformulate

same failed procedure long enough will ultimatel

Orelus: You described this as "neurotic behavior."

76 sites could be mustered as in any sense supporting the Turners' sweeping a

the Turners claimed they were,102 would neither hav

This brings us back to the function of the master narrative, as we were di

evident, the Nazis began from a set of lunatic assumptions, a matter

Churchill: It's axiomatic that degrading portrayals of nonwhite

to diminish them in comparison to the purported nature and attainme

Both Indians and blacks were killed continuously throughout the en

whom I do know personally - Deward for upward

Orelus: Thanks. That should bring us back to wher

Churchill: Yes, it is. The place to pick up, I suppo

French colonialism in 1954, the beginning of the Algerian war of liberation,

Paul Joseph aptly described as "cracks in the empire

precious few of their "properly qualified" white counte

Orelus: I'm sorry to interrupt again, but your ment

Churchill: I had other things to do, quite frankly,

I've no inherent objection to doctorates, you understand. Some of my best

the circumstances prevailing in the late 70s and e

Orelus: Okay. Let's go back to what you were sayi

Churchill: Well, in addition to the student insurgenc

a New Political Science and the Chicano Caucus wi

faculty of colon I didn't take you to be indulging in hyperbole. Could yo

ities, as explained to me by Philip Deere, so maybe that

Orelus: Now the question about marxism. You seem

Churchill: Was that my cue to crack a lame joke abo

All that said, I do find some of the analytical methods employed in m

Churchill: What am I supposed to say? That I've spent my whole life do

expound on how well my students have turned out,

on the Weak , pp. 75-76, citing Hamilton Cravens, Triumph of Evolution

by Pearson's Institute for the Study of Man du

63. Torgovick concludes that "cannibalism, h

Dolina (Sierra de Atapuera, Burgos, Spain," Current Anthr

129. On massacres, see, e.g., LeeAnna Keith, The Colfax Massacre

Appy observes on p. 19, "For Hispanics [sic], A

156. Ibid., pp. 193, 201-2, 207, 225-28.

pp. 78-100. For Vine's reflections on the

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