Turtle Talk

The trial in a Boulder court over whether the University of Colorado was legally justified in firing Ward Churchill is ongoing. Here is the trial blog. Interestingly, the trial is mostly about Chuchill’s First Amendment rights, and whether CU fired him because of public statements he made about 9/11. However, part of CU’s defense is that Churchill committed acts of academic malfeasance, including some of his work in Indian law, that justifies his dismissal.

While the trial has been going on for a while, yesterday it appears that the dispute over whether Churchill got the Allotment Act all wrong in some of his writings finally reached the trial on Monday. The dispute is not new — something that probably does not help CU, which could have acted years ago. Now-UNM prof. John LaVelle had written pieces in the mid to late 1990s disputing Churchill’s views of the Allotment Act, and raising other questions as well. Here are his key writings on Churchill, from his profile page:

The General Allotment Act “Eligibility” Hoax: Distortions of Law, Policy, and History in Derogation of Indian Tribes. 14 Wicazo Sa Review 251 (Spring 1999).

Review Essay: “Indians Are Us?” 20 American Indian Quarterly 109 (Winter 1996).

In the trial, Churchill called a non-Indian law scholar to refute CU’s position, taken in the investigative report that lead to Churchill’s firing. Quoting the blog, here is the relevant language from one of Chuchill’s writings, derived from the investigative report:

“one of the first of these was the General Allotment Act of 1887, “which unilaterally negated Indian control over land tenure patterns within the reservations, forcibly replacing the traditional mode of collective use and occupancy with the Anglo-Saxon system of individual property ownership.” [63] The Act also imposed for the first time a formal eugenics code dubbed ‘blood quantum’ – by which American Indian identity would be federally defined on racial grounds rather than by native nationals themselves on the basis of group membership/citizenship.[64]

Churchill’s witness, Dr. Paul Lombardo, testified (according to the trial blog): “Dr. Lombardo further opined that the General Allotment Act of 1887 was an eugenics law and that Churchill correctly interpreted it as such.”

I wonder if the investigators or Dr. Lombardo had the benefit of Paul Spruhan’s excellent work on the history of blood quantum. Regardless, interesting stuff, how academics translates in a trial setting. More interesting will be how the jury reacts to this testimony.