Ward Churchill brings controversial lecture to SCC

Andrew Garten

Copy Editor

Ward Churchill will be addressing Shoreline Community College Nov. 8 in the school gymnasium. General Admission is $12, seniors and students pay $10 and kids are $6. For tickets, call (206) 546-4606 or buy them at the door.

According to the SCC lecture series web page: Fresh from the spotlight of national media attention, Ward Churchill discusses the recent controversy, academic freedom and much more. In his lectures and numerous published works, Churchill explores the themes of genocide in the Americas, racism, historical and legal (re)interpretation of conquest and colonization, environmental destruction of Indian lands, government repression of political movements, literary and cinematic criticism, and indigenist alternatives to the status quo. Churchill, a Keetoowah Band Cherokee, is one of the most outspoken of Native American activists and scholars in North America and is a leading analyst of indigenous issues. He is a professor of Ethnic Studies and Coordinator of American Indian Studies as well as the Associate Director of the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race in America at the University of Colorado. He is also co-director of the Colorado chapter of the American Indian Movement and vice chair of the American Indian Anti-Defamation Council. Churchill’s many books include, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, From A Native Son, Critical Issues in Native North America, Indians R Us?, Agents of Repression, and A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas. Churchill is also a past national spokesperson for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, has served as a delegate to the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations (as a Justice/Rapporteur for the for the 1993 International People’s Tribunal on the Rights of Indigenous Hawaiians), and as an advocate/prosecutor of the First Nations International Tribunal for the Chiefs of Ontario.

Churchill has taken the position that the 9-11 suicide hijackers made a “gallant sacrifice” when they crashed the planes into the World Trade Center. He also compared the victims of 9-11 terror attacks to Nazis. He has also supported the act of soldiers killing their line officers in Iraq and that anti-war activists should do the same. Churchill has gone so far as to say he want the “U.S. off the planet. Out of existence altogether.”

In a promotional photo supplied to the college, Churchill is posing with an AK-47 in is right hand. However, the photo was doctored to remove his arm along with the gun for use in posters and on the Internet. According to a report on WorldNetDaily, Judy Yu, SCC’s director of communications, said the alteration of the photo was justified because the school cannot support guns. The school also had decided against a promotional photo of Churchill smoking a cigarette on the same grounds.