“What is History, but a fable agreed upon?” Napoleon asked that question; and the answer all these years later must still be something like “not much.” History is written by the winners, and these fables generally support the status quo.
1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, and discovered America. Here we have a little piece of history which has been taught in schools across America for all our lifetimes. The only problem is, in point of fact, it’s only half true. Columbus did sail the ocean blue, but there were people living on the land he found. According to white history, Columbus discovered something, but what about the history of the discovered, the ignored history? According to this version of history, and likely a more accurate interpretation of fact, Columbus and our ancestors who followed him were invaders, not discoverers. After all, if we acknowledge that we are all of us a human species, and therefore equal, we can’t very well have discovered a place where we, as human beings, were already living.
The Americas were conquered by Europeans; bit by bit, inch by inch, dead or displaced Indian by dead or displaced Indian. This is a fact that even fable cannot ignore, though it tries. Ward Churchill was just fired for retelling history: “fabrications, misrepresentations and plagiarism.” But how can a Native American studies professor teach the history of his trade if the content he is forced to adhere to is made up of fables of the winning team?
Ward Churchill has written more than 10 books, and published numerous peer reviewed scholarly articles which have garnered him critical acclaim in the Academic community. I’ve read quite a few, and must honestly say that the guy was pretty meticulous in citing his sources. He was saying far out things and it seemed to me as a reader that he tirelessly gave credit where credit was due, and as much as possible tried to let other sources help him along in his arguments. In all that written work, I’m sure there were fabrications, misrepresentations, and forgotten documentation, especially if the reviewers were comparing his work to accepted history, which by its nature is made up of fabrications, misrepresentations and probably some good plagiarism to boot. What Churchill did do, I’m sure, was try to give his students a more accurate picture of the truth than the one they had been provided by the biased western history that they’d been taught all their lives.
He was a professor of mine in College. The things he said were so foreign to me and flew so in the face of my whole conception of truth and reality as an American, that at first I battled him all the way; but I was forced by the weight of his work, and the logic of what he said, to come around and discover the limited nature of what I had come to accept as truth. He offered a new pair of glasses to students like me who were used to the classic American shades, which have always shown the conquerors of this land in a most favorable light. That new perspective may be why he was voted best professor again and again by the student body. In fact last year he was voted best professor again, but the school didn’t award him the prize because of the ongoing investigation into the accuracy of his work which had begun when an article he wrote, which likened some of the people in the World Trade Center to little Eichmanns, got picked up and turned into a story by the right wing media. I’m getting tired of this ridiculousness.
Ward Churchill is a passionate character, a big, wrinkly, smoky, grump of a man, who I wouldn’t defend if it wasn’t for the content of his work. He’s a prick. But he is an incredibly smart man, who sees things outside the box of the status quo, and who is rightly outraged at the wrongs this Country has perpetrated with impunity. He was probably the best professor I had in my college career. So what if he’s not that much of an Indian by blood quotient? We are all human, and should be allowed to call ourselves whatever we want. The Jerk was a white man born a poor black child for goodness sakes.
OK, we know that the people in the World Trade Center weren’t “little Eichmanns,” and if they were, they were really, really little. But what about the fact that there were CIA offices in the WTC which would have technically made it a legitimate military target? There are so many ways to look at one thing that the concept of “truth” is really a funny thing to try for. Truth is relative. The best truth is all we can look for as a people. What truth will best serve us as a species? That is the one we should be looking for.
The truth we are adhering to now is largely failing us. Just turn on CNN or FOX and you will most probably see some atrociousness of our American Country being defended, and made to look righteous. Where do I start, the Iraq War, Guantanamo, building a fence to divide our country from Mexico, the defense in our media of practices which destroy the environment and don’t encourage the use of alternative energies which would begin to help in the only “war” worth fighting (The War on Global Warming)?
We are the same as the fundamentalist terrorists who we call the enemy, they are telling lies as truth just as vehemently (often more so), and often more violently; but like us, they are also simply forgetting to look for the best truth for the human species. Thinking in terms of them and us is the problem, and we are just as guilty of it as they are. Too much of the collective consciousness in our country seems to be based in the idea that we are Americans before we are human beings. There can be no other explanation for what we are doing to peoples across the world. How could we legitimate doing those things to ourselves? If we decided to Shock and Awe Los Angeles as part of our response to 9/11, could we have pulled it off? We pulled it off in Baghdad, a city no more involved in executing the attack on the World Trade Center than Los Angeles was. In fact, there were likely more WMD’s in LA.
This firing of Ward is simply another symptom of an addiction to an out of date truth. Conservatives, who can’t stand the thought of thinking about reality in a different way, are trying to do to Academia what they are doing to our Constitution, tearing it apart so that people are controlled in what they can say and do. Access to the best information possible is being eliminated bit by bit. We need people like Ward Churchill in Academia because like Galileo he is willing to speak a different version of the truth. After being censured for heresy for saying that the earth was not the center of the solar system, Galileo was vindicated, his version of the truth became the best version of the truth by the best minds who followed him. I can only hope that in the not too distant future we can face the truth of our reality as Americans, and also as a human species. That means acknowledging the out-of-date truth we are working under. It means admitting our imperfections. We have been wrong, and wrong, and wrong again, we have perpetrated crimes against humanity. So long as we deny the truth, we are still wrong, and we will keep doing wrong because we are not acting out of truth. It does not have to be so.
Just because we admit to conquering this land as criminals, destroying the environment unremittingly, killing our fellow men across borders, allowing ourselves to be taken over by giant corporations which are taking control of reality and ending life as we once knew it, does not mean we will be punished. We will be punished for not acknowledging the truth. Admitting our faults would allow the space to start doing something different. Until then, welcome to the status quo.
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