Wielding Words like Weapons: Selected Essays in Indigenism, 1995-2005

by Ward Churchill, Barbara Alice Mann (Foreword by)

Overview

Wielding Words like Weapons is a collection of acclaimed American Indian Movement activist-intellectual Ward Churchill’s essays in indigenism, selected from material written during the decade 1995–2005. It includes a range of formats, from sharply framed book reviews and equally pointed polemics and op-eds to more formal essays designed to reach both scholarly and popular audiences. The selection also represents the broad range of topics addressed in Churchill’s scholarship, including the fallacies of archeological and anthropological orthodoxy such as the insistence of “cannibalogists” that American Indians were traditionally maneaters, Hollywood’s cinematic degradations of native people, questions of American Indian identity, the historical and ongoing genocide of North America’s native peoples, and the systematic distortion of the political and legal history of U.S.-Indian relations.

Less typical of Churchill’s oeuvre are the essays commemorating Cherokee anthropologist Robert K. Thomas and Yankton Sioux legal scholar and theologian Vine Deloria Jr. More unusual still is his profoundly personal effort to come to grips with the life and death of his late wife, Leah Renae Kelly, thereby illuminating in very human terms the grim and lasting effects of Canada’s residential schools upon the country’s indigenous peoples.

A foreword by Seneca historian Barbara Alice Mann describes the sustained efforts by police and intelligence agencies as well as university administrators and other academic adversaries to discredit or otherwise “neutralize” both the man and his work. Also included are both the initial “stream-of-consciousness” version of Churchill’s famous—or notorious—“little Eichmanns” opinion piece analyzing the causes of the attacks on 9/11, as well as the counterpart essay in which his argument was fully developed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781629631011
Publisher:	PM Press
Publication date:	04/15/2017
Pages:	616
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 2.10(d)

About the Author

Ward Churchill (Keetoowah Cherokee) was, until moving to Atlanta in 2012, a member of the leadership council of Colorado AIM. A past national spokesperson for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee and UN delegate for the International Indian Treaty Council, he is a life member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and currently a member of the Council of Elders of the original Rainbow Coalition, founded by Chicago Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in 1969. Now retired, Churchill was professor of American Indian Studies and chair of the Department of Ethnic Studies until 2005, when he became the focus of a major academic freedom case. Among his two dozen books are the award-winning Agents of Repression (1988, 2002), Fantasies of the Master Race (1992, 1998), Struggle for the Land (1993, 2002), and On the Justice of Roosting Chickens (2003), as well as The COINTELPRO Papers (1990, 2002), A Little Matter of Genocide (1997), Acts of Rebellion (2003), and Kill the Indian, Save the Man (2004).

Barbara Alice Mann (Ohio Bear Clan Seneca) is a PhD scholar and associate professor in the Honors College of the University of Toledo, in Toledo, Ohio. She has authored thirteen books, including the internationally acclaimed Iroquoian Women: The Gantowisas (2001), George Washington’s War on Native America (2005), Daughters of Mother Earth (2006, released in paperback as Make a Beautiful Way, 2008), and The Tainted Gift (2009), on the deliberate spread of disease to Natives by settlers as a land-clearing tactic. She lives in her homeland and is the Northern Director of the Native American Alliance of Ohio.

Table of Contents

Foreword "And Then They Build Monuments to You" xiii

Introduction A Few Thoughts on a Book Long Overdue 1

1 Remembering Bob Thomas 9

His Influence on the American Indian liberation Struggle

2 Subverting the Law of Nations 29

American Indian Rights and U.S. Distortions of International Legality

3 The United States and the Genocide Convention 56

A Half-Century of Obfuscation and Obstruction

4 Charades, Anyone? 81

The Indian Claims Commission in Context

5 In the Spirit of Gunga Din 111

A Response to John LaVelle

6 History in Service to Liberation 139

Ron Welburn's Roanoke and Wampum

7 Broadening Our View of the Penal Colony 142

Luana Ross' Inventing the Savage

8 Contours of Enlightenment 144

Reflections on Science, Theology, Law, and the Alternative Vision of Vine Deloria Jr.

9 Science as Psychosis 174

An American Corollary to Germany's Blood Libel of the Jews

10 American Indians in Film 217

Thematic Contours of Cinematic Colonization

11 Distorted Images and Literary Appropriations 279

Gretchen Bataille's Native American Representations

12 Finding A "Middle Place"? 282

Not in Joni Adamson's American Indian Literature, Environmental justice, and Ecocriticism

13 Kizhiibaabinesik 289

A Bright Star, Burning Briefly

14 The Ghosts of 9-1-1 363

Reflections on History, Justice and Roosting Chickens

15 "To Judge Them by the Standards of Their Time" 409

America's Indian Fighters, the Laws of War, and the Question of International Order

Appendix "Some People Push Back" 520

On the Justice of Roosting Chickens

About the Authors 544

Index 545

Editorial Reviews

Compellingly original, with the powerful eloquence and breadth of knowledge we have come to expect from Churchill’s writing.”  —Howard Zinn


“An important contribution that merits careful reflection, and an implicit call to action that should not be ignored.”  —Noam Chomsky


“Ward Churchill is important. I mean, Noam Chomsky, Emma Goldman important.”  —Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll


“This is insurgent intellectual work—breaking new ground, forging new paths, engaging us in critical resistance.”  —bell hooks


"When confronted with polemicists around whom such fiery debate has raged, it is always best to read them in their own words. Such is the case with Ward Churchill." —D.M. Cobb, CHOICE

From the Publisher