CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

In Memoriam: Ward Churchill, 1947-2026

Churchill testifying in the civil trial of Ward Churchill v. University of Colorado – Public Domain

I write in remembrance of Ward Churchill, who died on August 11, 2026. I was a member of Ward’s defense team, headed by the civil rights attorney David Lane, both at hearings at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2007 and in state court in Denver in 2009, when he sued the university for his firing for charges of “research misconduct” and “plagiarism,” both of which I analyzed thoroughly in a 2008-09 edition of the journal “Works & Days.” The title of my essay is “Framing Ward Churchill: The Political Construction of Research Misconduct.” The title points to the political motivations of the charges against Ward. Those charges were manufactured to mask the attack on Ward from the Right (Fox News, the Colorado governor and legislature, and the UCB administration with the complicity of certain faculty committees) for his activism and speech on behalf of social justice, particularly focused on an essay he published a day after 9/11, titled “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” on which I will focus in Part II of this essay. Indeed, the Denver jury, to which I gave expert testimony as a scholar of American Indian Studies and federal Indian law, found that Ward’s “protected speech [was]a substantial or motivating factor in the decision to discharge [him]” and that the University had not “shown by a preponderance of the evidence that [Churchill] would have been dismissed for other reasons.” Nevertheless, on July 7, 2009, District Court Judge Larry Neves “denied Churchill’s motion for employment reinstatement as a tenured professor and concluded that back pay ‘is not an appropriate remedy in this case’” (CU Connections). The Colorado Court of Appeals and Supreme Court upheld the Neves verdict, which served the university’s agenda against Ward.

Ward was and through his writing still is a generative figure in Native studies with his focus on colonialism and imperialism as it played and plays out in the Americas. His wide-ranging influence was represented by the strong Native and non-Native support he received in his fight with  UCBoulder from both his students and certain colleagues, and national scholars such as Michael Yellow Bird,  then of the University of Kansas, who also acted as an expert witness. Ward’s support was national and international. I did not know Ward before I joined his defense team, but I necessarily knew his work, which had a significant influence on my own work in comparative settler colonialism as it did on the work of so many others; and it was my high regard for his work that led me to accept the invitation to join his defense team.

At this moment, with the genocide continuing in Gaza and spreading to the West Bank and Lebanon, I think particularly of Ward’s 1997 classic A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present, of which David Stannard, who testified in the Denver trial on behalf of Ward and is himself the author  of the 1992 classic American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, wrote in the Preface: “So it is a good thing that Ward Churchill, with this book, A Little Matter of Genocide, had decided once again to go looking for trouble. He will get plenty of it. But it is only because of trouble-makers like him that the deadened conscience of this nation might some day begin to stir. May his kind multiply.” I am reminded here of civil rights activist and Congressman John Lewis urging us all to “find a way to get in the way” and get into “good trouble, necessary trouble.” We need this kind of trouble more than ever as the United States continues to support Indigenous genocide both at home and in Palestine.

What follows in Part II of this essay is an excerpt from my essay, referenced above, “The Framing of Ward Churchill.” The excerpt looks into Ward’s essay “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” that got him into the “good trouble” that led to the Denver trial. We should remember that Ward’s case was centrally about academic freedom, which has been increasingly under fire since Ward exercised it and defended it, paying the price of his job for his activism, a price that so many faculty are paying today or are under threat of paying for their defense of Palestinian rights. In his obituary in the New York Times, Ward, speaking at UCB in 2017 is quoted as saying, “Academic freedom in America is dead….I had my identity before I was a professor. I had it while I was a professor, and I have it now.” If academics in America are to resurrect academic freedom, we must follow the example of Ward Churchill and give up the identity of professor, which is becoming more and more constricting, for the identity of activists for social justice in word and deed.

With a few small edits, the following section from my 2008-2009 essay “The Framing of Ward Churchill” is an example of Ward’s activism, of his courage and critical insight:

Issues that bear on the Churchill case began receiving national attention in late January and early February 2005. This attention focused on an essay Churchill published on the Internet between September 12 and October 7, 2001, when the United States invaded Afghanistan, titled, “‘Some People Push Back’: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.” The essay served as a polemical analysis of what Churchill terms the “counterattacks” on the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon on 9/11 by Arab militants. (Of this constituency it was later disclosed that 15 of the 19 operatives were from the U.S. ally Saudi Arabia.) Churchill argues that the attacks were a response to the West’s violent history in the Middle East, beginning with the Crusades and continuing in the present moment with the Israeli occupation of Palestinian homelands. But the focus of Churchill’s polemic is the 1991 U.S. bombing of Iraq’s water and sewage facilities—“‘aerial warfare’ constitut[ing] a Class I Crime Against humanity, entailing myriad gross violations of international law”—and the subsequent ten-year U.S. embargo of Iraq following the first Gulf War, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children from the interdiction of food and medicine, deaths that former U.N. Assistant Secretary-General, Denis Halliday, termed a “genocide.”

What public commentary seized on as particularly egregious in Churchill’s essay, and what was duly noted in the UCB chancellor’s review, is his comparison of the “technocratic corps” of business operatives in the WTC, all serving “America’s global financial empire,” to “little Eichmanns.”  Concomitantly in this essay, Churchill casts Americans in their passive acceptance of the Iraqi genocide in the role of “good Germans.” The........

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