I admit this will largely be a cut and paste deal, and I beg your forgiveness. I'm ashamed to admit that it is so, particularly in light of some very well researched diaries which took a lot of time. The most I have been able to do is to keep up.
His speech made at University of Colorado triggered tremendous backlash from the wingnuts, who employed a favored tactic of twisting one's words till they are no longer recognizable and boiling them down into simple talking points and sound bytes.
For those who are unaware of the background of the story, here is a comprehensive link by Kurt Nimmo who has followed the story closely. link
Editors' Note: The following is a the first written transcript of Ward Churchill's February 8, 2005 speech at the University of Colorado. CounterPunch thanks Clarke Iakovakis for laboriously transcribing the introductions by Emma Perez and Russell Means, Churchill's speech and the rowdy Q&A.
And now I need to come back, a little bit, to what my argument actually was, once the diversion to one phrase out of one sentence, out of a 120 page essay, out of 24 published volumes, seventy book chapters and one hundred jury journal articles. That one little phrase. I'll come back to it. What did I really say? And why did I say it? Well there were certain questions being posed on the day that I wrote that essay. Before the building even came down, when I watched it in real time, I heard the whole thing described as 'senseless.' Not it 'seemed senseless,' it 'might be senseless,' no. Here's how you're gonna frame and understand this: it's 'senseless.' And I'm saying to myself, how could they possibly know this? Did they arrange it? No, I'm not making that accusation. The point is clear, however, they couldn't possibly know that it was senseless. Senseless means to have no purpose. Do you really believe that this operation was carried out for no purpose? You can agree with the purpose, you can disagree with the purpose, but you can't rationally consign this to having no purpose whatsoever. What might that purpose be? [applause]
Well I come from a certain context; I come from a certain set of experiences.
They're real experiences; they're not abstract experiences. And based on those experiences, I do a little kid's game called dot-to-dot. This dot connects to that dot connects to that dot, and hey, if you connect the dots you get a pattern, and actually on that pattern you start to understand something. Let me take the first dot.
You were addressed by someone from the Pine Ridge Reservation a few moments ago. There's a county on the Pine Ridge Reservation: Shannon County. Shannon County has been the absolute poorest county in the United States for fifty of the last fifty years. And by poorest, I don't mean unable to afford to get the new color TV, 'Gee whiz, I can't trade my truck.' I'm talking about a per capita income of less than $3,000 per year to try to survive South Dakota winters. I'm talking about an unemployment rate that runs into the ninetieth percentile every year. I'm talking about a life expectancy that's one-third shorter generation-in, generation-out than the average American. One-third truncation of a life span, and that's the overall data with regard to reservation based native North America. Urban based is not appreciably better. That's thirty-fifth percentile attrition of a population, and every generation for the last five generations. I don't know how you define a genocidal impact of policy imposition, but that comes real close in my book, OK? I call it genocide. [applause] It comes to a degree of impoverishment that results in a continuous tone of death from malnutrition, nutritionally related diseases. Continuous tone of death and immiseration from rarely communicated diseases. I'm talking about a third-world degree of impoverishment of an entire people, based on the racial definition imposed on us us by the federal government of the United States in behalf of each imagined constituency, which includes everybody else. Not on an even playing field, but in gradients. And a degree of impoverishment devolves from something called plenary power, that the federal government has assigned itself if there's any law professors in the room, you'll know what I'm talking about. Plenary power, in plain English rather than legalese, means absolute, unchallengable power to make disposition of our affairs and our assets. With that, they've assigned themselves a trust authority over those assets. When those assets are exploited by American corporations, they're exploited in a discount royalty rate, discount deep ninety percent they're paying ten cents on the dollar for what they'd be paying on the open market for the minerals, and the money does not go to the people who's minerals they were. It's placed in trust accounts administered by the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Do you wanna know where the Indian destitution comes from? Do you wanna know why our life spans are truncated accordingly? Do you wanna know why our children are so desperate that they are committing suicide at fourteen times the national average? Do you wanna know why all those things come together? Right now there's a case in the federal courts [inaudible], in which it is conceded that the Bureau of Indian Affairs in combination with the Treasury Department of the United States government has "misplaced" one hundred and fifty billion dollars worth of assets. Cash, money. By federal account, there's two million Indians. You wanna divide two million into one hundred and fifty [billion] dollars and see what our standard of living would be if it wasn't being spent on designer overpasses? If it wasn't being spent on the accoutrements of the quality of life that every American yuppie has decided that they are divinely entitled to enjoy? [applause] Does that make me angry? Yeah, it does. Churchill's angry, he speaks angrily, he speaks forcefully. I don't think the issue however is why Churchill would be angry about that. The question is why Governor Bill Owens and the Board of Regents are not, and they have nothing to say on it. [applause]
And I link that up, in my mind, to what was then pronounced to be approximately five hundred and sixty-five thousand Iraqi children who had died needlessly in less than five years. By needlessly, they too were dying of nutritionally related illnesses. They too were dying of readily curable diseases, because of a set of sanctions that the United States hoisted off the pretext of it being UN and imposed in order to make the people themselves scream to the point where they would compel their leadership to become "free," as defined by George Herbert Walker Bush, meaning, to understand that "what we say, goes." This was no mystery. This was official, UN report it was confirmed. It was known, to be confirmed, by Madeline Albright, US ambassador, at the time, to the United Nations, on no less public a venue than 60 Minutes in 1996. Leslie Stahl asked her, are you aware of this, this half-million plus children of another people. And she said, yes, we're aware, we've decided it's worth the price. It's worth the price, in somebody else's children to ensure that they get the message that "what we say, goes."
And I thought about my brother Russell Means, in 1982, when we were engaged in a physical occupation of a piece of ground outside Rapids City. I learned from Russ, too, not just Phillip Dare. That was 1982, that was the time of the Battle of Beirut, and they had the PLO fighters sealed in and they were bombarding Beirut, and they were gonna kill Arafat, OK? They had a quid pro quo arrangement where he could go for sanctuary if he could leave, but no one could take him. And Russ convened a press conference and he said something that had to be pretty close to this: the Palestinians of North America offer sanctuary to the American Indians of the Middle East. We have that relationship; those dots are connected. [applause]
Now I was picking that up on 9/11, basically in streams of consciousness because they were asking this question 'How could this happen? Why do they hate us?' and my response is, look at this. How could they not? Every Palestinian child shot in the head for throwing a rock at the intifada is being shot with munitions provided by the United States; the munitions are being shot by a rifle provided by the United States. When they look up and see those helicopters that are taking out apartment blocks because they suspect that somebody they don't like is in there, collateral damage ensues. The helicopter and the missile are provided by the taxpayers of the United States and, you see, the problem is not just that the materiel, the monetary support and the political endorsements provided by the government of United States, but there's this overwhelming embrace of the policy by the general citizenry of the United States, and this tallies. This tallies in tens, and scores, and hundreds of thousands, and then millions and tens of millions of darker skinned others being piled up in the name of profit maximization, stability, for the strategic interests, and ultimately, economic interests of the United States.
Actually, I talked about 'Chickens coming home to roost,' after Malcolm X, but these chickens, I said, were more like ghosts. And I talked about those ghosts; the Iraqi ghosts first, the children. But then, there's another half-million adults in a country of twenty million people. And I talked about the Palestinians, and I talked about the Grenadans, and I talked about the Panamanians, and I talked about the Salvadorans and the Nicaraguans, and I talked about the Guatemalan upland Mayans, and I talked about the bodies that were stuffed in a well at No Gun Ri, and I went backwards from Korea to a couple of nuclear bombings. We're worried about weapons of mass destruction in a country that has the largest inventory in the world, and the only country that has ever used them on civilian targets, and intentionally on civilian targets. [applause] And pointed it out that while the nukes are best known, they weren't the worst of it, Curtis Lemay's carefully orchestrated fire raids conducted in the spring of 1945. At Tokyo, in one night alone, they inflicted 110,000 casualties, cremated civilians intentionally, they built burn-zones out in Utah to figure out the best way to ignite wooden paper cities. This was deliberate, intentional; this was a matter of policy. Probably a half-million Japanese were burned alive in a process of sending the message so that they too would understand that "what we say, goes." [applause] And back to the liberation of the Philippines from the Spanish Empire to make it an American colony and the deaths of 600,000 of 1.5 million so-called 'moral' is a pejorative term. [Tagaun?] speakers, called the Indians of the Philippines, entire provinces deliberately cleared of population by virtue of liquidating them, orders signed by American military leadership to kill every single male over ten years of age oh yeah, they didn't teach you that in high school history, did they? And Bill Owens doesn't want you taught about that now. [applause]
And that happened ten years after Wounded Knee, and the reconstituted Seventh Cavalry [inaudible] disarmed it's guns and immobilized people, butchered in the snow and dumped into a mass grave. And I actually used the imagery from Wounded Knee in a book on comparative genocide, juxtaposing the dumping of the bodies into the mass grave at Wounded Knee and the dumping of the bodies into mass graves by the Einsatz group in Eastern Europe, and people sometimes get them confused which is which. The symbolism and the reality are confused. The reality is what's at issue, and taking that string of massacres, running all the way back to when a group of people now known as the Wappinger, who supposedly sold Manhattan Island to the Dutch for a handful of glass beads and trinkets, objected to the idea that they sold their land, because what they understood they did, was accept rental payment for use of a particular portion of Manhattan Island as a trading center, which they could do business with the Dutch. And the Dutch, who knew fully well that this had not been a sale, but rather a rental, resolved the issue by sending a military expedition up the island to dispense with the Wappingers. Doing so, so rapidly, that they felt that no one would believe how successful they'd been when they went back, so they took the heads of the fighting age males and the leadership, and carried them back in woven baskets to display to make proof of the fact that they had butchered the lot. And the citizenry was so happy they gathered around to watch a jolly sporting contest, kickball, in which the heads of the slain owners of the land were used as a ball. Roughly on a place where the foundation of the World Trade Center was situated.
That's the history of the place, which sits approximately at the end of Wall Street; we know about Wall Street in terms of its economic importance, its influence, its symbolic value. What most of us don't know is that it takes its name from the wall of a slave enclosure, which formed the economy of the city, which is now considered the economic head of empire. That's the history of those ghosts; those transatlantic ghosts were there, too. And the Chinese that laid the track of the railroad and did the deep shaft mining, who had not a 'Chinaman's chance' of surviving yeah, that's where that term comes from. Oh yeah, they were all there. There was a load of karma too.
And what I said was when you treat people this way, when you kill their babies as a matter of force and say it has no consequence, when you devalue, deviate and degrade others to this point, naturally and inevitably what you're putting out will blow back on you, and that's what happened on that day. [loud cheers & applause]
And the question, the question was in everybody's lips as they wind 'innocent American' as if they fused it into all one word. If by American, by definition, we're innocent; that no matter what it is we do in the world, what we embrace, what the consequences are: we're Americans, we're innocent; we're consequential, they're valueless; get the symmetry straight. How do we keep ourselves safe from this sort of thing coming back? Oh, how could they do this? They hate our freedom, they're evil. Tiger cages in Guantanamo Bay, licensing of torture techniques (which we have Harvard constitutional lawyers now arguing should be permissible), deploying of more and more Delta units, commando teams, assassination squads, counter-terrorism, wanding the people, they wanded me apparently to see that I wouldn't commit suicide while standing at the podium tonight. [laughter] Actually I've got my 357 terrorism weapon right here in my bed for all the good it did impounding my tweezers did not save anyone. Who heard the last time an aircraft was kidnapped by a terrorist using tweezers, plucking the eyebrows of a frantic stewardess? I mean, that's the level of insanity we are; when you get serious about security and some aspects of it are security you think that's gonna work against people who are embittered and hate you for the (very good) reason that you're butchering their children with presumed impunity? Ask the Israelis. They've got the most highly perfected, developed security state on the planet, and you got fourteen year old kids walking in there with bundles of dynamite and blowing them right out [inaudible]. You want to put your well being, and that of your children, on a system and structure and a set of priorities like that? Go ahead, but count me and mine out, OK? [applause]
If you want to be secure, if you want to be able to live a human life, in all of its full dimension, if you want to have the security of that to pass along to your children, if you want to be valued, in other words, as a human being, I don't want to get Biblical here, but do unto others as you would expect to have done unto yourself. That's my first proposition. [applause] If you want to be secure from that natural and inevitable response to what it is America's putting out on the world, start with stopping the killing of their babies. Afford them the fundamental dignity of being human, not 'collateral damage.' And America's been able to provide the world with an endless stream of glowing rhetoric, but how, on that basis since they've violated all of it, since they've always said one thing but acted precisely the opposite is anyone out there going to believe anyone here if those insurances are made? Here's my real, crushing blow. Here's the real radical finale of the whole thing: let's just try pretending for a moment that the United States of America, like every other entity on the planet, is bound to obey the law. [loud applause, standing ovation]
That's my argument reduced to its bare bones. I can flesh it out in Q & A; I'm not the Board of Regents, we will have interchange, you will not be arrested for attempting to engage in it. [loud applause] But understand, since that is as it was, I had every right to say it, indeed the obligation, not only as a citizen but under the terms of my contract, and as a human being. I'm not backing up an inch; I owe no one an apology. [loud applause]
Clarification's one thing; that's my job, too. Apology's another. For those who have been trying to elicit that, in some cases, I think, have simply been asking the wrong question. Wanting to know if I experienced sorrow or mourning; something like that with regard to the children who died on the aircraft and in the buildings on 9/11 that day. And the answer is: Yes, of course; and for the firefighters and for all the food service workers, and for the broom pushers and for the random passers-by; yeah, I do. And it's absolute, it's unequivocal, and it's not one whit more proportionally significant than the mourning, the sorrow I experience for every single one of those Iraqi children, for every single one of those Palestinian children; [applause] none of whom have been mentioned in the criticism in any way at all, it's a one track record leading back to 9/11 victims and nothing else. I even had an Air Force colonel tell me about the last group of people who [inaudible] a civilian occupied facility, meaning the hijackers of 9/11. Afghanistan and Iraq either didn't happen, or the people there weren't. I'll show you that e-mail. And even if, seriously, he did not mean it maliciously, that is a genocidal mentality; that is the core of the problem. When I start hearing equal sorrow for those brown skinned others out there dying in the millions, maybe we'll get to someplace where all the children will be saved and all the people will be saved. [applause]
And I learn from where I am. I am not Cheyenne, but this is Cheyenne land, and I have been here as long as many of you have been alive, and I've learned something about their ways. It's about the picket pin and stake. Sometimes you stand up because there's an attack coming, and you stake yourself to the ground so you can't get out; you can't retreat. That's your statement. It comes with red paint. Well, there's no red paint here literally, but see it now. I drove my picket stake, my picket pin is in. I'm staked out, there is not an inch of give in this, not at this level of whether I get to speak, what I say when I speak, or what the function of this institution is, all right? This institution needs to be protected from the ravages of the rabid right wing, but it has to be protected on the grounds to save the institution itself. [loud applause, standing ovation]
With that, I think we got commonality, we got solidarity, we got everything we need to prevail and keep this institution what it is what it's supposed to be, and actually to improve it. We can what doesn't kill you, they say, gives you strength. We come out of this stronger, and clearer about what our institutional mission and our rights are than we went in, in the first place, and on that score, we ought to be thanking O'Reilly, we ought to be thanking Joe Scarborough, we ought to be thanking Kevin Flynn, we ought to be thanking the yo-yos in the local paper, and we ought to be thanking the Board of Regents and Governor Owens as well. [loud applause, standing ovation]
You all give me hope! You all give me hope. Power to the people! I'm just gonna take these in no particular order; not feeling greatly professorial at the moment, so you got a question, just rotate among yourselves, back and forth. As it was requested, keep it short so more questions can be asked.