From: Ecology Center <ecologycntr@igc.apc.org>
Subject: Ward Churchill Interview
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: ?
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 19:13:39 GMT

Encountering the Other: An Interview with Author & AIM Activist
Ward Churchill

Copyright 1992 Ecology Center Terrain. Posted by Terrain. This
text may be reproduced electronically or in hard copy so long as
no profit is made by such reprinting.

Ward Churchill (Chippewa-Creek metis ) is codirector of the
Colorado American Indian Movement, and coordinator of Native
American Studies for the Center for Studies of Ethnicity and Race
in America at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His numerous
books include Critical Issues in Native North America, The
Cointelpro Papers and Agents of Repression (with Jim VanderWall),
and Culture versus Economism: Essays on Marxism in the
Multicultural Arena. He is a frequent contributor to Z Magazine,
and has served as a delegate of the International Indian Treaty
Council to Cuba, Libya and the United Nations.

Chris Clarke: Why should people in the (largely white)
environmental movement pay any attention to the quincentenary?

Ward Churchill: Partly because the quincentenary symbolizes the
whole complex of attitudes, perceptions, ideas, etc., that go with
the predatory impulse that has consumed not only native people,
but the natural order, the environment itself. That's what the
consumption of native population was about. That's why it was
done. That consumption having been accomplished, of course, it has
opened up the doors to environmental devastation, which is what is
opposed by the environmental movement.  Two components cannot be
taken apart, all right? And coming to grips with the symbology
involved, you create a counter-symbology, which leads to a
sensibility of allowing for attainment of the kinds of goals the
environmental movement has always espoused, rhetorically at least.
You're starting to concretize those goals, but you have to change
consciousness in order to accomplish that, and the
counter-celebration of the quincentenary is a fine symbol for the
transformation of consciousness which is required.  That's the
best answer I can give.

CC: There's this image that's held in the white environmental
movement of the indigenous inhabitants of this continent, a kind
of one-dimensional image, perhaps, of living in harmony with the
environment ...

WC: Bambi.

CC: Right. What's the best way to challenge that image? Or does it
need challenging? Is it a useful image?

WC: Well, it's not a useful image, because it's a false image, and
false images are never useful in the end.  They always lead in
false directions, ultimately, and we've had enough false
directions.  We don't need more.  Enough damage has been done as a
result of them.

Vine Deloria, in another context, came up with the perfect line
for this one.  A white scholar from an East Coast institution
called him up and explained at some great length how he was this
national resource and therefore was obligated to do A, B, C, and D
that she felt was important. And he said, "Lady, let's play a game
of let's-pretend." Alright? "...Let's pretend for about ten
seconds that instead of a national resource, I'm a human being."

The environmental movement, and everyone else in this society,
ought to try that little let's-pretend game, and pretend that
rather than whatever aspect of their fantasies they require
Indians to be, that Indians are, in fact, human beings. And as
human beings, devised societies which were not perfect, which were
not ideal, which were not Rousseauian, but were real human
societies predicated in a concrete understanding of the natural
order that allowed them to exist in place for a thousand
generations without appreciably disrupting the habitat. Alright?
They didn't do it by being something other than what they were.
They didn't do it by being Bambi-type deers, they didn't do it by
being Chuck Connors playing Geronimo. They did it by manifestation
of concrete reality.

It's about time people started trying to apprehend the reality
rather than the fantasy, and perhaps devise ways and means of
altering their own perceptions of their place in the cosmos so
that they can begin to actualize the rhetorical hypotheses they
put out in the name of environmentalism, in the name of class
transformation, in the name of all the other progressive agenda
items that we find ourselves confronted with.

These issues are not new. They've just never been actualized in
anything other than a rhetorical form in the dominant culture.
That needs to change.  And the quincentenary is perhaps the key to
changing it.

CC: What are some of the specific aspects of that concrete reality
that you speak of, that differ from those of the dominant society,
that allowed native people to live in a sustainable fashion?

WC: You're free to do anything you want. That's sort of a cardinal
rule.  You're free to do anything you want. You have an absolute
latitude of action ... that's what's usually called freedom ... so
long as you do not permanently disrupt or disturb the equilibrium
of the habitat in which you live. OK? You cannot re-engineer it,
you cannot transform it. You must sustain it. And that establishes
an entirely different parameter for human conduct than exists in
this society that we inhabit today. It also establishes an
entirely different paradigm of consciousness from today's.

Past, present, and future are all part of the composite whole, and
they interact. You can understand what's been done in order to
sustain things, figure out how to apply that to your comportment
in the present, so that those who come seven generations after you
will inherit the exact same set of prerogatives that you enjoy.
It's very, very, very different from current assumptions. It
sounds kinda simple when you posit it, but look around today for
an example. There's nowhere in this cultural matrix that we
experience where that's put into practice as a working assumption
of how one should live one's life.

CC: You're more likely to hear "we need more study before we make
any changes in our current practice".

WC: Some things, common-sensically, don't require study. You know
they're wrong. OK? The purpose of study is to figure out a way to
get around what you know is wrong so that you can do it anyway
despite the fact that fundamentally, essentially, bedrock level,
you know it's a wrong thing to do, but you want to do it anyway.
And so you spend a whole lot of time and energy coming up with a
plausible rationale which would allow you to do it. That's the
purpose of the studies.

Maybe that's still too abstract. Indians attained a certain
population level which was saturation in terms of the carrying
capacity of this land and a little less. They had discovered,
bioregion by bioregion, what level of sustained human occupancy
the land could support without being permanently altered. They did
not make a premium out of the idea that more humans would be a
better thing. Birth is celebrated in indigenous cultures the world
over precisely because a birth is not something to be regretted,
because they were never overbalancing the habitat in which they
lived.

OK. Look what happens when you bring up the question of the need
for population reduction in any sector of contemporary society.
Third Worlders accuse you of genocide, although they're literally
suffocating themselves in population which is still growing. First
Worlders I [laughs] I we end up with Phylis Schlafly. I don't
think I need to go into the contradictions embedded in that
particular point of view. Even the white left, in exercising
choice, presume to choose to have more themselves, because they
feel that they are a superior product and they wouldn't want too
many Schlafly clones running around so they feel compelled to have
more and more children of their own as well.

CC: The more workers, the more production, the better things are
gonna be...

WC: Yeah. There's also a very skewed way of looking at population
anyway, and I just did it to a certain extent. You have gross
numbers of people and the gross numbers of people are far too
high, because the bulk of the planet has been intellectually
colonized by the European expansion, and people view things the
way the Europeans taught them to view them.  Whatever particular
little cultural values they happen to interject or interpose on
their own, they are still guided in that paradigm. So more and
more bodies.

But the most overpopulated sector of the planet is right here in
North America. We've only got a quarter of a billion people here
as compared to, say the Chinese who are coming up on two billion,
on approximately the same land base, you'd think the Chinese would
be vastly overpopulated, and they are...

CC: But they don't all have refrigerators.

WC: Yeah! By and large, they exist at what we'd call a third world
level of material consumption. One good American yuppie counts for
seventy of them. Probably the mean multiplier for the entire US
society ... including poor people, and Indians included in that, a
very narrow percentage of Indian societies today live in a truly
traditional manner. There are some ... but if you average it all
out you'd probably have to multiply the US population by thirty to
arrive at a comparable impact on the environment as evidenced by
the Chinese population, and that makes, what? seven and a half
billion North Americans as compared to two billion Chinese.

CC: Seems like about three or four times a week we get information
at the Ecology Center about a different small struggle, whether
against a garbage incinerator, or a small hydro project, or a road
going through a roadless area, or a toxic dump being put somewhere
on the North American continent. More and more, these projects are
being planned for native land.  If it's not the Oldman River Dam
in Alberta, it's the Campo Reservation down in San Diego getting a
toxic dump, or the G-O road in Northern California, or James Bay.
Why do you think that is? Why the concentration on Native land for
this environmental devastation?

WC: Actually, it's nothing new, it's just that you're hearing
about it more than you have been in times past. It's been going on
ever since about 1930, in terms of the so-called development, or
the focus of certain types of development on Indian land.

Partly, it's as I've said before, "Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind".
Nobody in the broader society tends to give a good goddamn what
happens to the Indians. Half the dominant population probably
isn't even aware that there still ARE Indians in any meaningful
sense, reservations are viewed kinda like National Parks, with
these curiosities who stand there in feathers and sell postcards
and get their pictures taken for five bucks. That's their
conception of Indians.

And so things like uranium mining and milling have been not just
preponderantly but absolutely, totally, completely lodged in
reservation land. About two-thirds of the uranium is there, which
makes it obviously sensible, in a way, to mine there, but the
mining is not pro-rated so that two thirds of it happens on Indian
land and another third happens on non- Indian land. It's all on
Indian land because it has the kind of consequences that must be
visited on populations and landscapes where the general population
doesn't give a damn, in order to be maximally profitable, . They
don't care. Well, they don't. You bring it up, they say "that's
terrible" and go right on about their business as if nothing
happened because it's not affecting them.

The Indians are definitely, in this hemisphere, the other, the big
'O', a sort of Sartreian, Camusian, other. Might as well be from
Mars for most Euro- Americans and, frankly, for most non-Indian
people of color as well. That's changing but it's changing very
gradually and slowly. That's part of the transformation of
consciousness which is required if things are to be ordered in a
fashion different from the way they are now. You can take all the
progressive agenda items you want, including environmentalism and
ecology, OK? The movement to combat sexism, the movement to combat
racism, the movement against oppressive class structures, all of
it. And if in the end, you come up with a scenario in which all of
those goals are suddenly realized, do you know what you end up
with? You end up with a society that is still predicated
fundamentally in colonialism.

It would still be a colonial society because it would have been
implementing these relations, however on their face progressive
they may seem, on somebody else's land without somebody else's
permission. You've still got an imperialist culture. You've got an
imperialist culture, you've got a culture which will reinvent all
those forms you just combatted and destroyed, you thought. You
gotta deal with the fundamental issue first and work out from
there. You gotta lay a foundation for a different social order, a
different social consciousness and all the rest of it. and a place
to begin that, of course, is in relation to the land.

I have Marxists and non-Marxist socialists arguing that "that's a
self- serving premise and all the rest of it is far more
important; there's vastly larger numbers of people oppressed by
different sorts of social manifestation". And I can't escape that
basic premise. It's a settler state population rearranging its
social order for greater profit; people looking out for themselves
at the expense of those who were colonized in the first place and
avoiding the issue, in fact, denying the issue, perpetuating the
oppression in the process. Willfully! It's very uncomfortable for
them to acknowledge somebody else's oppression may just by
definition, fundamentally more important than their own. I keep
using that word, fundamental, but that's the word.

If you cannot unlock the equation of your rights to occupancy on
the land, none of the other equations ultimately are going to be
resolved in a positive manner. And no one's ever been able to give
me a convincing response to that, rather than just saying "we
don't want to deal with it."

CC: So why are we hearing more about these local issues than we
had been?

WC: Well, partly because we've got this vast proliferation of
communications here, which is a by-product of the centralization
of state information. So you got a negative which has a somewhat
positive fallout.  You'll have to draw your own conclusion as to
whether the positive or the negative outweighs the other in this
equation. But that's exactly what it is.  Consequently you're
hearing more about things in relatively remote areas than you ever
have before.

It's not that those struggles have not been going on: they have. I
could give you a litany, for example, as I said, dating back to
the 1930's. But you hear about them more now. You've also got, as
I say, a sort of incipient shift of consciousness beginning to
emerge within the broader population, partly because a lot of
things have been tried, that seemed obvious, and they failed. So
they cast about for different keys to the equation, and maybe
something else will work. So they're paying more attention to that
now.

Partly it's because of Wounded Knee, and the emergence of what
could be understood as some kind of comprehensive articulation of
a militant indigenous rights agenda, in terms that could be
understood by the general population rather than simply in Indian
terms, as happened in the '70's. So a number of factors are coming
together there.

CC: What concrete goals are part of this militant indigenous
rights agenda?

WC: Oh, the simplest response to that is to get the citizenry of
the United States reconditioned to have an expectation that its
government will abide by the fundamental (there's that word again)
elements of its own law.  Which would go, for our purposes, to the
treaties.  The terms and provisions of the treaties to be honored
by the United States. That's not the end of it, but it's such a
monumental step in itself that I think you could see where it
leads. Thirty five percent of the lower forty-eight states was
never ceded by any indigenous nation to the United States. It has
no pretense of legal title, or right of occupancy, to a third of
its own claimed territorality.

Now if you were to dismantle, and that's probably the only
appropriate word, dismantle the United States to the extent that
it lost internalized control over a third of its domestic
territorality and the resources therein, I think you could see
that the relations of power between the central government and the
oppressed sectors of its population, not just Indians, but ALL the
oppressed sectors of its population, the glue of the social order
itself would begin to dissolve and you'd have a situation of flux
in which all kinds of positive social transformation that almost
everybody in the progressive movement is pushing could be
realized.

REALIZED! Not just approached, not just a coherent rap put
together, not just some organizing done, but put into some form of
practical reality. So I'd say that that would have to be construed
as number one.  Not because we have some grandiose, abiding
respect for Euro-law, but because that's a medium of discourse in
which all sides HAVE to pay credence. It's comprehensible to the
average American to some extent. They understand that there are
principles of law that need to be articulated, and given that our
ancestors were participants in the negotiation of the provisions
that go into those treaties, we have an interest in them too.

It goes beyond the land, but the land is a key. Certainly you can
see there's an indigenous interest in recovering ten times the
land base that is now allotted to us.

CC: How likely do you think it is that this belated recognition of
the treaties will come about?

WC: Given the status quo? Zero. In fact, the exact opposite would
be true.  But then, what we're banking on here is that the
non-Indian sectors of the population have the sensibility,
inclusive of morality and self-preservation, to allow them to be
supportive of it to the extent that it can be realized. If the
status quo disappears, in other words.

CC: You've made a comparison on various occasions between the
United States and Nazi Germany.

WC: I find it a very useful comparison to make.  Partly because
this society has been so conditioned to view Nazism as bad. I
don't argue with that, it certainly was bad. A lot of things that
I think are bad people want to debate me about. That one, they
usually don't. You can make a point by point comparison of the
policy and the motivations underlying the policy between the
United States and the very government that it went to such great
lengths to condemn and convict, establishing, again, points of law
which are articulable that stand, as George Bush would put it,
"The Nuremburg Doctrine will stand"... just against Saddam
Hussein, or is it applicable here as well?  You can provide people
with analytical tools which allow them to see things through a
less confusing lens than is usually available to them, by using
comparative devices like the Third Reich.  You have to do it in a
non-rhetorical fashion; you have to do it by pointing out the
match, policy-wise, motivation-wise, results-wise. Which can be
done. Ultimately, you're left with one big difference between
Germany and the United States. Germany lost, the United States
won. Your average hardhat in Pittsburgh doesn't want to hang his
hat on that particular claim to fame.

CC: One of those suspect policies you happen to be expert on,
namely COINTELPRO-type policies of the different police agencies
in the United States, and of the United States. People here in the
Bay Area are very FBI agent, was ultimately responsible.

WC: Richard Held the Younger. Yes.

CC: How likely is it, in your opinion, that the environmental
movement will continue to see the kind of attention paid to it by
these agencies that AIM, the Panthers, the labor movement and
other effective organizers have been visited with?

WC: It's proportionately likely to the extent to which the
environmental movement, in accomplishing what it says it wishes to
accomplish, renders itself tangibly threatening to the status quo,
bearing the potential to seriously disrupt the order of things
that it opposes. To the extent that it achieves THAT threatening
capacity is exactly the extent to which it will be repressed in
the manner that the Black Panther Party, and the American Indian
Movement were. And Judi Bari! Because what was done in her case
was entirely in character with what was done to the Panthers, what
was done to AIM, I mean, it's what is STILL being done, when you
think about it, to the Panthers and to AIM. It has not stopped.
The moment of its peak intensity has passed, but Geronimo Pratt is
still in prison, they're still trying to put Yoruba Bin Wahad back
in prison, Rice and Poindexter are still in prison, I mean you can
name off thirty or forty Panthers who are doing life, for reasons
which are, to be most politic about it I'll say "extremely
suspect." There's no inclination to let them out.

CC: And there's the hundreds of thousands of African American men
arrested as "potential Panthers".

WC: True, yeah, potential Panthers in the broadest, most abstract
sense, you've got the social engineering that's going on, but what
you've got going with the Panthers is a much more surgical
imposition of repression. Very precise. They know exactly who they
want to take out and why they want to take them out. That's never
why they say they took them out, but that's why they keep them
buried where they are. Same with AIM. Peltier is still in prison.
You've got a whole lot of other people who are scattered as a
result of that, and that's a continuing thing. It's maintained by
the armed force and the other forms of force available to the
repressive agencies of the United States government.

The process which is going on with Earth First! is in that mode.
In Judi Bari's case, it's PRECISELY in that mode. The odds-on
probability was, when that bomb detonated, she and Darryl Cherney
would have been dead. That was the intent. There's no other way
you can construe it, there's no way you can be so precise with a
pipe bomb that you can blow off the doors of a car, destroy the
seat, and leave the passenger and driver. Well, you cannot do that
if you are an agent of the US government. You can do it if you are
a member of the Red Army Fraction in Germany, they have the
capacity to be that precise,  but these guys are relatively low
tech. They're more like the IRA, these guys that work for the
Feds.

CC: Yeah, it seems like they're not as competent as we give them
credit for a lot of the time.

WC: No, they're not! They have a colossal imbalance of resources
available to them to pursue what it is they're doing, so if they
don't do it right the first time, they'll just do it ten other
ways, it's almost like alchemy, one of them's gonna work.

CC: Is there anything in conclusion you'd like to say to the
environmentally-concerned public in the Bay Area?

WC: Yeah. "No smoking, you must be joking." I know that every
yuppie environmentalist in the Bay Area has themselves convinced
that the Center for Epidemiology and the Surgeon General of the
United States are absolutely on target in saying that the major
environmental health hazard facing the population of the United
States is really indirect cigarette smoke, and they think that
precisely because that's what they want to think, because it
serves their own narrow, stupid purposes, alright? Just remember,
boys and girls, that's the same people that told you a little
plutonium not only doesn't hurt you but might just be good for
you, that have spent the last thirty years unable to determine
whether or not direct dioxin contamination might be hazardous to
the health of Vietnam Veterans and on and on and on, and if you
believe one, you're gonna have to believe the other. And if you
believe plutonium's OK, and if you believe dioxin contamination is
OK, then I don't even want to talk to you, and later for your
anti-cigarette campaign.

There.

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