The Try-Works

Let’s see, where to start? Maybe with a few admissions. Like the facts that we promised to post these clips more than a year ago, and that the reason we haven’t is because we were being coy. That’s to say that we were inclined to bait the trap and then wait to see how many folks out there in Ballerina-land—not to mention those Churchill himself once described as “white punks in the Denver press corps”—might be lured into going on record making really stupid statements as the months went by without our following up with the promised posting.

At this point, we think it fair to say that the litany of falsehoods put forth by Churchill’s detractors about the nature and meaning of his 1994 enrollment in the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians (UKB) has become enshrined as “Truth.” You know what we mean: The proposition that Churchill’s enrollment never really validated his identity as an Indian, because he was “only enrolled as an associate member” of the band, which is “no different than being an honorary member, like Bill Clinton,” and that Churchill was accorded even that status by the Keetoowahs because he made promises to the Band upon which he never delivered. In other words, the whole thing was a hoax on Churchill’s part, which—as the Rocky Mountain News put it on March 26—has been “debunked.”

Every single element of the story-line just recited is a lie, of course. So it seems quite fitting that we dedicate its exposure as such to some of the liars most prominently involved in its fabrication. Our initial selections for a place in that little Hall of Shame include Vernon Bellecourt, accused rapist/murderer-in-charge of “National AIM,” and his cronies — Suzanne Shown Harjo, Dennis Banks, and etc.; Jim Paine and Ernesto Vigil (alias “Noj”), codirectors of the Bellecourt’s Denver-area fan club; Kevin Flynn, ace racial propagandist of the RMN; as well as Daniel Crapless and Craig Silverfish, Flynn’s counterparts at Clear Channel radio station KHOW).

Honorable mentions go to UCB profs Payson Sheets (anthropology), William “Wild Willie” Wei (sales of self) and Paul Campos (fatness studies).

What follows are excerpts from a video record made of a meeting conducted by the United Keetoowah Band Council in June 4, 1994 (at which Churchill was not present). The full version, which runs well over an hour, should be available at wardchurchill.net in the near future.

The meeting was convened in response to a protest lodged with several members of the Council concerning the UKB’s enrollment of Churchill, who had been approved at the Council’s regularly-scheduled meeting in May, by David Cornsilk, who, as he himself admitted, was not a Keetoowah and really had “no business” raising issues about who was/wasn’t enrolled by the Band. In actuality, Cornsilk—who is enrolled in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (CNO), a completely different group—was representing Vernon Bellecourt’s “National AIM.” So confident was Bellecourt that this intervention would result in Churchill’s being dropped from the Keetoowah roll that he’d already announced the effort’s success.

Clip One is excerpted from Cornsilk’s presentation to the Band Council at the beginning of the meeting. As concerns the question of whether Churchill’s enrollment as an associate member by the UKB serves to validate his “claims” to native identity, it will be noted that even Cornsilk acknowledges that such enrollment “would legitimize him” as an American Indian. It should be mentioned that Cornsilk had for some time been representing himself as a “genealogist for the CNO,” a position he never held.

Clip Two shows UKB Council member Ramona Williams explaining that there is nothing “honorary” about a UKB associate membership. As she puts it, “they say they’re members, and they are.” The difference between full and associate membership in the UKB is that, while verification of Cherokee descent was required for enrollment in either category, full membership was restricted to those documented to be of one-quarter or more “Cherokee blood’; those of less than quarter-blood were classified as associate members. No verification of any Cherokee descent at all was required of those, like Bill Clinton, upon whom “honorary” membership has been conferred. Then-UKB Band Chief John Ross twice explained these distinctions in both Ojibwe News and Indian Country Today during the summer of 1994 (the articles aren’t online, but should be easily available from the publications in question).

Clip Three shows Chief Ross explaining that the UKB has “always” accepted associate members, and that a roll for that purpose was first established in 1939. He also endorses Felix S. Cohen’s definition of an Indian, which appears at page 20 of Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law (1982 ed.), i.e.: “a person meeting two qualifications: (a) that some of the individual’s ancestors lived in what is now the United States before its discovery by Europeans, and (b) that the individual is recognized as an Indian by his or her tribe or community.” Obviously, Churchill meets both criteria. Contrary to Kevin Flynn’s assertions in the RMN, Churchill was/is under no obligation to “prove” his genealogy to a “white punk reporter.” The obligation was Flynn’s to disprove what no only Churchill but even his most far-flung relatives were quoted as believing to be true. This, for all the spin he could muster, Flynn conspicuously failed to do.

Clip Four shows Mose Killer, then-chairman of the UKB Enrollment Committee, saying that although Churchill had already been approved for enrollment by the Committee—a matter which would automatically included a vetting of his ancestry by the Band genealogist (then the late Louis Griffin)—he would like an opportunity to have the material attending Churchill’s application rechecked before his enrollment was finalized. This was approved. Churchill’s Cherokee lineage was thus confirmed not once but twice before he was enrolled, assigned UKB roll number R7627, and issued the Band card he still carries (the fact is, he’s never been officially disenrolled).

Clip Five shows UKB member Shelly Davis explaining that Churchill did not “ask” to be enrolled in the Band. Nor had he “started coming around in 1992 or 1993,” as UKB member Ernestine Berry (Ramona Williams’ sister) is quoted as saying in a Feb. 3, 2005 story by Howard Pankratz in the Denver Post. Instead, as Davis makes clear, she made initial contact with Churchill in San Francisco during the spring of 1994, and subsequently solicited his application. In substance, Churchill honored a Keetoowah request that he apply for membership, not the other way around.

Clip Six is included just for the fun of rubbing the reality of how Churchill’s work resonates with grassroots Indians in the collective face of that gaggle of “Great White Experts” calling itself an “investigative committee” who crafted the official UCB hatchet-job on Churchill’s scholarship last May. In particular, it rejoins their repetitive assertion that he is “disrespectful of Indian tradition.” Most especially, it represents an entirely appropriate wood-rasping of the group’s leading intellectual skeezer, Prof. Marjorie McIntosh, who we understand to have actually written the offending passages.

Two additional matters should be addressed before we wrap this up. First, the UKB did in fact ask Churchill to help finalize a booklength history of the Keetoowahs. That he did so will be confirmed by the publisher, Peter Lang, of the resulting 1996 book by Georgia Rae Leeds, The United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma. Therein, at p. 215, it is also recorded that, at the request of Chief Ross, Churchill keynoted a first-ever conference on the Keetoowahs at the University of Arkansas, in February 1995. We understand that the list of his responses to requests by the Band could be extended to considerable length, a matter indicating that Ms. Berry, at least as Pankratz quoted her in the Post, was either ignorant of, or lying about that.

Finally, there is the matter of the UKB’s “disavowal” of Churchill—actually two statements, the second supplanting the first, were issued within 24 hours on May 18 and 19, 2005. It will be observed that in its final statement the then-current Council’s claim that associate memberships “were only issued during the term of former Chief John Ross,” beginning in 1991 is categorically false (see Clip 3). It will also be noted that, although they claim that there is no record on Churchill in the Band office—it was earlier stated that his file was “lost”—they had already addressed the contents of said file in the first paragraph of the statement. How they might know what’s in the file if they don’t have it, remains a bit mysterious.

Be that as it may, what motivated the UKB’s May 19 “disavowal” had been revealed in its statement a day earlier. This, in simplest terms, was that “reporters” like Flynn had so tied up the phones at the Band office—and its e-mail addresses had been so deluged with complaints from “concerned [white] Americans”—that the office could no longer conduct its normal business (or much of anything else, apparently). So, what they were really saying was, “Leave us the fuck alone you scumbag cocksuckers!” And, hey, it worked. Just like throwing a switch, the instant Kevin and his crew of “objective journalist” cronies got what they were after, the harassment stopped.

Which is why it’s both fair and accurate to conclude that none of this had fuck-all to do with whether Ward Churchill’s an Indian, with “fact-finding,” or anything other than constructing a Big Lie. Bottom line: Churchill’s most definitely an Indian, while Kevin Flynn and his ilk are self-certified slime-suckers.

Case closed.