Ward Churchill of "little Eichmanns" infamy

If you have the foggiest interest in the Ward Churchill brouhaha, the Rocky Mountain News has started a series apparently intent on showing him to be a fraud from start to finish.

University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill fabricated historical facts, published the work of others as his own and repeatedly made false claims about two federal Indian laws, a Rocky Mountain News investigation has found.

That's pretty unequivocal. Not much wiggle room: they must be pretty sure of themselves.

The two-month News investigation... also unearthed fresh genealogical information that casts new doubts on the professor's long-held assertion that he is of American Indian ancestry.

• He accused the U.S. Army of deliberately spreading smallpox among the Mandan Indians of the Upper Missouri River Valley in 1837 — but there's no basis for the assertion in the sources he cited. In fact, in some instances the books he cited — and their authors — directly contradict his assertions.

• He published an essay in 1992 that largely copies the work of a Canadian professor. But the piece is credited to his own research organization, the Institute for Natural Progress. Churchill published that essay — with some minor changes and subtle altering of words — even though the writer, Fay G. Cohen, had withdrawn permission for him to use it....

• He mischaracterized an important federal Indian law in repeated writings in the past two decades, saying that the General Allotment Act of 1887 established a "blood quantum" standard that allowed tribes to admit members only if they had at least "half" native blood. Churchill has accused the government of imposing what he called "a formal eugenics code" as part of a thinly veiled effort to define Indians out of existence. The News found that the law — while a legislative low point in Indian history that resulted in many tribes losing their lands — does not contain any requirements for Indian bloodlines.

In addition, the News found, Churchill similarly mischaracterized a more recent piece of legislation, the Indian Arts and Crafts Act of 1990.

• He has repeatedly claimed to have American Indian ancestry, but an extensive examination of genealogical records that traced branches of both sides of Churchill's family to pre-Revolutionary War times turned up no solid evidence of a single Indian ancestor.

In a related article about other scholars' work...excuse me, make that: In a related article about scholars' work which Churchill published without their permission, he apparently added endnotes of his own. Robert T. Coulter, one of the authors, commented upon that to Rocky Mountain News reporter Laura Frank:

He doesn't have the skill or expertise to add (endnotes) to a paper on my own subject.

Churchill has been "...characterizing his scholarly standards as typical..." I hope not.