The New York Times obituary headline for Ward Churchill states what was most noteworthy about the controversial academic. It makes explicit reference to his statements on 9/11 that led to a university investigation for “academic misconduct” and later to his firing from a tenured faculty position at the University of Colorado Boulder. That text pairs with the black-and-white photograph of Churchill, resting his head in his palm, black hair parted down the middle, and eyes gazing directly into the lens while a desk lamp casts a halo over his head. Taken together, the headline and the photo frame a central question: was this man a sinner or a saint? Was he a martyr for academic freedom, or what we might call in today’s hyper-online parlance an “edgelord,” intentionally shocking the public by comparing the people who died in the Twin Towers during the 9/11 attacks to Nazi war criminals, calling them “little Eichmanns”? Either way, “the paper of record” only grants thousand-word retrospectives to those whose fame or infamy rises to a certain level of importance to justify the ink spilled.

Yet the obituary airbrushes the longest-standing controversy dogging Churchill’s legacy. Since at least the early 1980s, many Indigenous people have called into question Churchill’s self-proclaimed Native identity, which was as much a part of his persona as his professed “radical” politics. Today, critics label him a “Pretendian”—a colloquial term used to describe non-Indigenous people falsely claiming Indigenous identity, ancestry, or heritage. Scholars like Daryl Leroux term this “self-Indigenization,” which Dakota scholar Kim TallBear defines as a modern form of colonial theft. After taking land and stripping resources, settlers extract Indigenous stories, steal dead ancestors, and assume institutional positions and moral authority by claiming to be Indigenous people themselves. While this issue burned quietly in Indigenous circles for decades before reaching mainstream headlines, media outlets—especially in the alternative press—lionized Churchill as a symbol of free speech. In doing so, they erased the critics who should have mattered most: the very Indigenous activists, academics, and tribal nations Churchill claimed as his base as a scholar and co-director of the Colorado American Indian Movement.

What follows are preliminary notes based on years of research into AIM and Ward Churchill. As an undergraduate during the height of the controversy, Churchill remained an abstract figure absent from my American Indian Studies syllabi. Only in graduate school did I read his co-authored books, The COINTELPRO Papers and Agents of Repression, valuing their extensive research on FBI surveillance files. (Revisiting those books, their cited sources, and conclusions years later led me to different interpretations of AIM history, though that is an essay for another day.) Throughout my education, only one professor encouraged me to read Churchill; most Indigenous academics discouraged it, citing his........

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