The Truth Is on the Reservation: American Indians and Conspiracy Culture

Homeland security "Fighting Terrorism Since 1492." - slogan on t-shirts, posters, and bumper stickers printed with image of Native American warriors As we enter the '90s, the FBI's slaughter of "AIM militants" has long since been completed and hidden from view. ... concerning the form and function of the FBI, things have never been "OK." -Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, The COINTELPRO Papers "The history [of US treatment of Native Americans] is bad enough -there's no need to embellish it." - Russell Thornton to Scott Jaschik in "A New Ward Churchill Controversy," Inside Higher Ed American Indian conspiracy theories evoke a particular sense of uneasiness in a society built upon Native lands, a phenomenon evident in the controversy surrounding Ward Churchill, a writer, activist, academic, and self-identified Native American who has himself been denounced for spreading lies. For several decades, Churchill has been piecing together a narrative of American history in which a conspiratorial US government perpetuates crimes and covers them up with propaganda and lies. With Jim Vander Wall, he published two polemical exposes characterizing the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as a government agency whose main function is not to fight crime-and thus keep Americans safe-but to actively repress political diversity through counterintelligence programs targeting Indians and other citizens: Agents of Repression: The FBI's secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement and The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI's secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent. In addition to challenging the public image of the heroic G-man, Churchill has repeatedly flaunted the ugly g-word that undermines many cultural myths of America's founding: genocide. The colonization of the Americas is explicitly linked to acts of genocide in the titles of a full four of Churchill's books, most recently in A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present? Churchill's version of American history takes issue with the common understanding that the decimation of Native American populations by European diseases such as small pox was "accidental" and not part of a larger conspiracy to commit genocide. Despite the controversial nature of this earlier writing, Churchill did not receive national attention until 2005 when the media noticed an essay he wrote on September 11, 2001, "Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens." Whereas Churchill's books protesting govern ment-sponsored domestic terrorism and genocide failed to raise public outcry against him or the government, this article's invocation of Malcolm X's response to John F. Kennedy's assassination-"it was merely a case of 'chickens coming home to roost'" -gained him instant notoriety. After protestors at Hamilton College cited the 9/11 essay to oppose the Kirkland Project Panel with Ward Churchill-scheduled for February 3, 2005 but officially cancelled "due to threats of violence"2 - a media frenzy and national debate ensued. Churchill's writing and speeches had compared the United States to Nazi Germany in previous discussions of genocide without receiving much notice, but his description in this article of the "little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers" evoked widespread indignation. The reference stems from his argument that many of the workers at the World Trade Center were specifically targeted by terrorists as "a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire," not as "innocent civilians." The attack, he contends, was retaliatory, a strike back for years of oppressive US policies aided by the stockbrokers, lawyers, and government employees in the World Trade Center. Beyond blaming foreign policy for eliciting this strike, Churchill argues that many of the citizens who died were guilty of complicity: he connects government and civilian employees as coconspirators driven to protect their capitalist interests. …