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February 08, 2005
Ward Churchill and Ethnic Studies
Evidently it's pretty hard to find any Native Americans who support Colorado University professor Ward Churchill. There are a few however. According to Native American Times(emphasis mine)
One of the few to defend Churchill is Don Trent Jacobs, an associate professor at Northern Arizona University and a faculty member at Fielding Graduate Institute who also goes by the moniker of "Four Arrows." Jacobs, who says he is part Cherokee and Creek, believes that Churchill’s questionable Indian roots are not important.
"As for whether Churchill is 'Indian,' I refer to a piece I wrote in Red Ink a while back, entitled, 'On Being Indian' that quotes [novelist N. Scott] Momoday's belief that this ultimately has more to do with consciousness and experience and a spirituality than it does with blood. Far too many of our blooded brothers and sisters, including those who have become Christian fundamentalists, may be losing all three to the growing presence of U.S. dominant culture influences," Jacobs writes.
This is a classic example of academic moral relativism and the hot war being waged by the liberal arts academy on the value of empirical proof. The fact of a person's lineage doesn't matter; the things that do matter are "consciousness", "experience", exposure to "dominant culture".
The phrase "dominant culture" is the flashing strobe light here. It is a sure-fire indicator that we're dealing with an analysis grounded in cultural Marxism, and it highlights an important point about the Ward Churchill brouhaha: The basic premise of Churchill's "Some People Push Back" essay should have surprised no one. Although couched in incendiary terms, the basic ideas of the piece would scarcely raise an eyebrow in any state university graduate English department.
As Glenn Reynolds and many others have pointed out, the real scandal lies in how this non-Ph.D.-holding quasi-Native American could rise to the top of a very competive professional pyramid.
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