INTRODUCTION

MANKIND IN AMNESIA
Immanuel Velikovsky

REPETITION-COMPULSION OF HISTORY
Immanuel Velikovsky

SPACE OR TIME, EXPERIENCE OR DOGMA, REALITY OR FACADE
Vine Deloria Jr.

NATURAL AND HYBRID PEOPLES
Vine Deloria Jr.

AMERICAN ARROGANCE AND CRIMINALITY
Ward Churchill

A LITTLE MATTER OF GENOCIDE
Ward Churchill

ON THE JUSTICE OF ROOSTING CHICKENS
Ward Churchill

ARE WE STEPPING BACK AND LISTENING?

INTRODUCTION

Sometime after I emancipated myself from a longstanding psychotherapy practice, I stumbled on a book called Wielding Words Like Weapons: Selected Essays in Indigenism, 1995-2005 written by Ward Churchill. Indigenism means to make the rights of Indigenous peoples a first priority, although first priority does not mean only priority.

I had read most of Churchill’s work as preparation for my first book Tyrants Among Us: Sacrifice in the Family, the Dynasty, and the Nation (2016), yet missed Wielding Words Like Weapons at the time, since it was published after 2016. Though born in the Netherlands with no claims on Native ancestry whatsoever, I have been listening to Indigenous voices since I was 12 years old.

In Wielding Words Like Weapons, Ward Churchill talks about his close fifteen-year relationship with Vine Deloria Jr. who freed and inspired generations of American Indians:

“If we as a species are to have a future, much less achieve liberation from the condition imposed by the collectivity of our blinders, it is because he [Deloria] has forced us to see things in new ways, equipping us with the minds to free ourselves from a fate that had come to seem preordained.” ¹

Churchill calls Deloria “counter-hegemonic” as well as “a consistent and explicitly liberatory figure” and refers to Deloria’s works regarding the theological dimension of the Indian Protest Movement:

“The imperative, as Deloria saw it, was to reclaim the insights and understandings lodged within our own nonwestern traditions, employing them first as a counter to the distortive outlooks imposed by the West and then as the basis on which to determine for ourselves the form and meaning of the relations we should pursue not just with other cultures but with the natural world in totality.” ²

Churchill describes Deloria as a veritable frontal assault on the entire conceptual structure by which the system of eurocentric global dominance has come to be rationalized, justified, and made to seem inevitable over the past five centuries:

“To this extent, if none other, the effects of his endeavor are potentially more radical and far reaching than anything those of us locked into the trajectory of mere political activism ever aspired to achieve.” ³

As I read on I discovered that Vine Deloria Jr. had been influenced by the research of the world-renowned, insurmountable Immanuel Velikovsky. He had introduced Immanuel Velikovsky to Ward Churchill.

I had worked my way through Velikovsky’s entire oeuvre, including Stargazers and Gravediggers, memoirs to the books Worlds in Collision (1950), Ages in Chaos (1952), and Earth in Upheaval (1955). I could hardly believe my eyes; three unrivaled redressers together on one book page!

Immanuel Velikovsky, Vine Deloria Jr., and Ward Churchill have something in common. The men are extraordinary brilliant, interdisciplinary educated, out of the box thinkers, who dare asking groundbreaking questions. They present clean, sweeping data which exposed existing systems of science, history, religion, politics, and governing, at its best as mediocre, at its worse as unscrupulously self-interested.
Velikovsky’s work had been the subject of intense controversy. So had Churchill’s work. Velikovsky and Churchill were singled out and targeted. Arrogant, presumed experts and authorities, among them state agents, kept trying to kill their character and career.

Geneticist H. J. Muller, the famous explorer of mutations of living organism who wrote the book Science in Bondage (1951) explained the cause of the presumed experts’ and authorities’ hostility:

“Even yet, the very findings of science that are of the greatest significance for a deeper understanding of ourselves and of the universe are the most apt to arouse concerted opposition from powerfully organized groups representing established ideologies and institutions that the new knowledge would upset; hence, even in Western civilization, persistent vigilance and endeavor are necessary in the defense of the honest search for truth.”

Muller stated “even in Western civilization.” Due to rampant intellectual imperialism, shameless propaganda media, a vicious global technological surveillance state, and the (ab)use of science as a “secular but very powerful religion,” I would say: especially in Western civilization, persistent vigilance and endeavor are necessary in the defense of the honest search for truth.

MANKIND IN AMNESIA – Immanuel Velikovsky

Immanuel Velikovsky was born in 1895, in Vitebsk, Russia, now Belarus. He studied natural science at the University of Edinburgh, history, law, and medicine in Moscow, biology in Berlin, the workings of the brain in Zurich, and psychoanalysis in Vienna.
Velikovsky and his family came to the United States in 1939 from Israel where he was part of the foundation of Hebrew University. Israel was at the time under British mandate. After eight months of research in New York City’s legendary library with millions of books on 42nd Street, the family settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where Velikovsky died in 1979.

Unencumbered by establishment dogmas, Velikovsky pioneered a new understanding of the solar system. With the help of Hebrew, Roman, and Chinese sources, as well as sacred writings from Egyptians, Hindus, Babylonians, Polynesians, Aztecs, and American Indians, he became aware of the fact that the planet worship of ancient peoples all around the world had its origin in real and terrible events of cosmic instability. He proposed, for instance, that Jupiter was in all probability a star that ejected Venus as a comet. Venus nearly collided with the Earth several times before she settled into a stable orbit.
Velikovsky’s catastrophic history of the solar system resolved countless historical, astronomical, and geological enigmas.

Velikovsky’s research was very much in sync with countless origin stories and rituals of Indigenous peoples all over the world. Hopi, who lived in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah, had the most comprehensive understanding of world ages. Hopi legends look at world history as a sequence of ages marked by catastrophic fire, ice, and water, all of which the Hopi had been saved from. Before each destruction the Hopi were given special instructions for survival, and as each new world began they received songs and ceremonies for living in the new world.
Skidi Pawnee Indians of Nebraska pacify a dangerous Venus in a ritual of sacrifice. The Wichita, an Indian tribe of Oklahoma, tell a story of The Deluge and the Repeopling of the Earth. ⁴

Velikovsky’s startling theory required a basic change in thinking and a new vision of history and evolution. He had trouble publishing the material collected in his first book Worlds in Collision. Once the book was published the American academic world ripped Velikovsky to shreds and declared him incompetent and crazy.

“… Velikovsky … had the audacity to demonstrate that a profound rethinking would be necessary to rectify the many substantial inadequacies, inconsistencies, and full-fledged logical impossibilities embodied in orthodox geological and astronomical theory.
As Deloria recounts, he was thereupon subjected to a modern scientian equivalent of the medieval Inquisition: ‘Worlds in Collision’ was attacked by ‘respectable’ scientist even before it was published. A concentrated effort was begun to force the Macmillan Company, Velikovsky’s publisher, to stop the presses. Scholars began a boycott of Macmillan’s textbook division, its most vulnerable place. Macmillan could not withstand the concerted attack and transferred the book’s rights to Doubleday. A conspiracy of silence dropped over discussion of Velikovsky’s works. He subsequently published ‘Earth in Upheaval,’ which was an embarrassing revelation of geological shortcomings.” ⁵

The rejection of Velikovsky was compounded by the fact that he drew his information from natural science and human sources like excavated history, ancient calendars and texts, legends and folklore, and sacred writings from all over the globe. The intense controversy and attacks were undeserved since the vast majority of Velikovsky’s predictions and proposals were substantiated overtime.

REPETITION-COMPULSION OF HISTORY – Immanuel Velikovsky

A painful or frightening experience in a person’s life can cause trauma. The experience might be erased from conscious memory and relegated to the unconscious mind. A person might get fixated in trauma. This can lead to a compulsion, an inner pressure, an irresistible urge to repeat the original traumatic experience:

“In the traumatic experience terror and anguish play the decisive role. … a traumatic experience of psychic or physical nature often results in amnesia. The victim of amnesia caused by a traumatic experience lives under the urge to repeat the experience, often reversing the roles, himself becoming the aggressor and inflicting punishment on a new victim. A victim of trauma either denies the trauma or makes an effort to relive it.
… upheavals in nature, with the unleashing of frightful elements, shocked the minds of survivors and left there an indelible, heritable impression.” ⁶

A hidden spring of irrational behavior was revealed:

“The global catastrophes of ancient times, … had devastating effects on the human psyche. Collectively mankind acts like an amnesia victim seeking to relive a traumatic experience. Though surrounded by literary, geological, and astronomical evidence of our violent heritage, we try to avoid the realization that earth-wrenching cataclysm have occurred – as recently as a hundred generations ago.
The memory of the cataclysms was erased, not because of lack of written traditions, but because of some characteristic process that later caused entire nations, together with their literate men, to read into these traditions allegories or metaphors where actual cosmic disturbances were clearly described.” ⁷

A disordered group of European royals and obscenely wealthy European and American control freaks are currently acting out and exposing humanity to extremely dangerous manipulation. They want to transform the natural into the synthetic and the organic into the artificial. They dare to arrogate a divine right to meddle with humanity, the Earth’s atmosphere, the Cosmos, and the workings of fate. Gripped by a psychosis they believe they can decide who is essential, who is non-essential, who will be transformed into the artificial, who will live, and who will die.

“… only by understanding our past can we overcome the urge to reenact the scene of planetary devastation, this time with man the agent as well as the victim. The horrifying truth, so long as it remains unrecognized, is a powerful force urging us toward doom.” ⁸

SPACE OR TIME, EXPERIENCE OR DOGMA, REALITY OR FACADE – Vine Deloria

Vine Deloria Jr. (1933-2005) is an esteemed Hunkpapa Sioux scholar, historian, theologian, author, and activist. He was born into a distinguished family in Martin, South Dakota. His ancestor Frank Deloria is among the Ihanktonwan headman’s names listed on the Sioux Treaty Memorial Obelisk overlooking the Missouri at Greenwood. As a member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe Deloria Jr. attended the reservation school on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
Deloria studied four years at the Lutheran School of Theology located in Rock Island, Illinois and received a master’s degree in theology (1968}. He studied law at the University of Colorado. He taught law and political science at the University of Arizona and history, political science, law, and religion at the University of Colorado.

Deloria represents the true owners of America vis-à-vis the usurpers. His book Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969) is one of the most influential books written about Indian affairs. His book We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf (1970) describes the irreversible damage done by a global corporate and technical take-over. In God is Red (1972), Deloria presents a Native view of religion. Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific Facts (1975) puts the finger on white supremacy, colonial thinking, and racist assumptions of Western science.
Deloria validated Indian origin stories, cosmology, and oral histories. He advocated a holistic approach that combines Indigenous literal recapitulation of observed reality and scientific evidence.
In Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties (1974) Deloria continued his criticism of Congress and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

“… Vine set forth with greatest clarity his conception of American Indian peoples’ aboriginal and treaty-based right to the status of nations, separate and distinct from the United States. Most forcefully, he summarized the thrust of his arguments in testimony challenging U.S. jurisdiction over Lakota territory, and thus the Wounded Knee defendants, during the ‘Sioux Sovereignty Hearings’ of 1974. … it had galvanized a successful effort by the American Indian Movement (AIM) to establish a formal presence in the United Nations for purposes of (re) asserting Indigenous rights through available international mechanism.” ⁹

Deloria reveals the integrity of American Indian religious life and traditions that revere Nature and the interconnectedness of all living beings (living organism, not mechanism), the Earth, and the Universe. He wrote already in the 1970s:

“American Indians hold their lands – places – as having the highest possible meaning, and all their statements are made with this reference point in mind. Western European peoples have never learned to consider the nature of the world discerned from a spacial point of view. There can be no doubt that a major part of the Western World is now suffering from an increasingly complicated task of revitalizing institutions to prevent a collapse.” ¹⁰

American missionaries came to visit Indian tribes. When they arrived they had only the Book. Soon they had the land and the American Indians were left with the Book. Missionary thinking was irrational:

“Missionaries had been in a fifteen-hundred-year-old religion that taught them that the original man on Earth bit in an apple and thereby damned creation and the life species of all of creation. Their religion taught them that the universe is completely alien to them, that they have no relationship with it whatsoever. They were in the world but not of it.” ¹¹

Formulas, debates, definitions, abstract principles, beliefs, and dogma were anathema to American Indian societies:

“Sacred places are the foundation of all other beliefs and practices because they represent the presence of the sacred in our lives. They properly inform us that we are not larger than nature and that we have responsibilities to the rest of the natural world that transcend our own personal desires and wishes. Indian religion required a personal commitment to act. Holy men relied upon revelations experienced during fasting, sacrifices, and visions. Social in impact, most Indian religious experience was individualistic in origin. Visions defined vocations in this world rather than providing information about salvation in the other world. Religion was an undefined sphere of influence in tribal society. Mystery and reverence gradually surrounded rites and ceremonies, giving them the necessary mysterium tremendum [awe-inspiring mystery] by which they were able to influence social behavior. Indian religion integrated the functions of tribal society so that life was experienced as a unity.
Most mysterious was the Indian reverence for land. When told to settle down and become farmers, most Indians rebelled. For centuries they had lived as hunters, taking and giving in their dances and ceremonies. Earth they believed was mother of all. Most important was the land which their particular tribe dwelt on.
Missionaries looked at the feats of the medicine men and proclaimed them to be the work of the devil. They overlooked the fact that the medicine men were able to do marvelous things. Above all, they overlooked the fact that what the Indian medicine men did worked.” ¹²

Indian religion amplifies unity of life and kinship with all living beings. The Indian concept of creation asserts that any living species has the right to exist, in and of itself.
Even the humblest American Indian is considered a cosmic creator and everyone was aware that they had things in common with everyone else. And after you die you become part of the Earth. ¹³

American anthropologist came to visit. Soon they streamed into American Indian reservations. Western tradition is abstract. Anthropologists reduced humans to ciphers and catered to personal funding and personal prestige:

“Why should we continue to be a private zoo for anthropologists? Why should tribes have to compete with scholars for funds when the scholarly productions are so useless and irrelevant to real life?
Several years ago an anthropologist stated that over a period of some twenty years he had spent, from all sources, close to ten million dollars studying a tribe of less than a thousand people! Imagine what that amount of money would have meant to that group of people had it been invested in buildings and businesses. There would have been no problem to study!” ¹⁴

Then came the government agencies. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, founded in 1824, was a hotbed of inertia. Nothing was going to move that institution. Deloria liked to joke that General Custer stopped by the BIM before he went to Little Bighorn and told them, don’t do anything till I get back.
What the BIM did do in 1872 was cut and burn twelve-thousand acres of virgin cedar wood in Washington State and force Indian tribes into farming potatoes. Once the forest was cut and burned the land turned into tidal flats. Naturally the farming project failed
The BIM blamed the Native tribes and withdrew, which was a great blessing.
The Lhaq’temish, the Lummi People, the original inhabitants of Washington's Northernmost coast and Southern British Columbia decided to go into aqua culture. They created large oyster beds and studied marine biology. They became so successful that they trained Indigenous peoples in aqua culture and marine biology all over the world. ¹⁵

NATURAL AND HYBRID PEOPLES – Vine Deloria Jr.

Natural peoples believe they are part of Nature and seek to live connected to the natural world. They live close to the land and the land is like a blood relative.

“Indian songs and chants are directed to plants, birds, animals, and the Earth asking for assistance in performing rather mundane tasks. … all inanimate entities have spirit and personality, so that the mountains, rivers, waterfalls, even the continents and the Earth itself have intelligence, knowledge, and the ability to communicate ideas. The physical world is so filled with life and personality that humans appear as one minor species without much significance and badly in need of assistance from other forms of life.
Almost anyone can have almost any relationship with anything else. So much energetic potency exists that we either have to describe everything as religious or say that religion as we have known it is irrelevant to our concerns.” ¹⁶

Natural peoples practice their religion. It is not what they believe to be true that is important but what they experience as true. In addition, they live in reverence to the spiritual realm. Religion is integrated in the totality of life and into all of life’s activities.
Life could not be fragmented because of the binding and interconnected thread of the presence of the sacred.

“Not only the natural physical world is regarded as integral to the human ambitions and activities, but also even the hypothetical geometrical structures of the world receive some form of religious acknowledgement. Thus, Indians pray to the ‘four directions,’ lay out elaborate sand paintings to represent the cosmos, and see in pipe bowls and sweat lodges a model of the larger cosmic whole. Indians virtually eliminate the human element in their religious ceremonies and concentrate on representing the physical Universe.
The sweat lodge and the kiva are designed to represent the larger Cosmos and basically have nothing to do with the subservience that characterizes churches and temples.” ¹⁷

Each sacred site contains its own revelation and no revelation can be considered universal because times and conditions change. People must always be ready to experience new revolutions at new locations.
Indians see themselves returning to Nature or sometimes being reborn in a new generation of the tribe:

“… their bodies become the dust of Mother Earth and their souls journey to another place across the Milky Way.” ¹⁸

Hybrid peoples are alienated from the natural world and from their natural self. They believe they own Nature and can control and exploit Nature, the Earth, the Cosmos and each other. Christopher Columbus re-named a Caribbean Island La Isla Española or Santo Domingo as if he owned it. From ship logs we know that he observed the Indigenous Tainos, who lived on the island, like a predator observing his prey:

“… they do not bear arms and they do not know them. Their spears are made of cane. They are well-built. They would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subject them all and make them do whatever we want.”

Columbus’ policies of slavery (euphemistically called encomienda, labor system) and systematic extermination reduced the Taino population from eight million to three million in 1496. By 1534 the Taino population had dwindled to two hundred souls.

The colonizer excused his presence by saying that he had been guided by the will of his God. This was a blatant lie. He had been guided by the decrees of megalomanic mortal popes.
The policy of colonization was at the very heart of the Inquisition. Popes behaved as if the Earth was terra nullius, a deserted landmass. They assumed that they owned the landmass and declared its inhabitants null and void. Pope Nicholas V used the papal bull Dum Diversas (doctrine of discovery) in 1452 to authorize the capture of Saracens, pagans, and all other enemies of Christ and allowed for the theft of their property and possessions, as well as perpetual enslavement. Pope Alexander VI, the Borgia menace, issued four 1493 bulls that granted the Crown of Castile the whole of the territory to be discovered between the poles. With that he authorized the enslavement of the entire population of the Americas.
Any Christian king, prince, or nation could take possession of any unknown land in the world. Christian monarchs were protected, but not the land rights of non-Christian Indigenous nations; the 1493 bulls called for non-Christians to be “subjugated” for the “propagation of the Christian empire.” ¹⁹

Hybrid people are more inclined to preach rather than practice their religion. Words and deeds often don’t match. They believe everything is dead, stones, Earth, animals, even their own people. They often do not see the world as a positive place.

“The physical world is seen as a vale of tears filled with unexplained human tragedies. Animals are definitely placed beneath humans in the hierarchy of things and religious ceremonies seek to purge nature from participation in the rituals, rather than acknowledge the existence of the material world. In many ways the human body is seen as evil. The goal of life is to win eternal life. The hybrid religions seek and guarantee salvation, which is conceived as an escape from this planet to a place where loyal followers can enjoy an eternal life full of delights….” ²⁰

Hybrid peoples have a propensity for building massive temples and tombs and gigantic cathedrals:

“Temples, churches, and synagogues separate the faithful from the secular world and from the natural world as if religion needs to be isolated from the rest of human activities.” ²¹

Hybrid peoples build a pantheon of powers and functions in which various of the powers and functions become subservient to others and often show symptoms of dogma and deadness. ²²  Hybrid people ab(use) the charge of “heresy:”

“Everywhere he turned, in ‘hard’ science such as physics, biology, and astronomy as much as among the pretenders of anthropology and the social sciences, Deloria encountered the same sort of unscientific or even anti-scientific claptrap passed off as the opposite of itself. The origins of Western science itself … could be located in an obsessive and usually subliminal desire to fulfill the biblical enjoinder, set forth on the first page of Genesis, for humans to dominate nature.
As a consequence, the very notion of scientific objectivity can best be understood as a myth designed to mask the underlying and utterly subjective motivations of those claiming alliance to it. The result is that science has been transposed into scientism – that is a religion-like belief structure – and its adherents have been transformed from scientists into beings more accurately categorized as ‘scientians.’ As a matter of practicality, scientism may be said not to have supplanted but to have subsumed Christianity as the ‘faith of choice’ in Western societies. Significant evidence of this may be found in the fact that the scientific establishment has incorporated the essential theological charge of ‘heresy,’ once deployed by the church against scientist such as Galileo, as a weapon in the arsenal with which it defends their own dogmas.” ²³

AMERICAN ARROGANCE AND CRIMINALITY – Ward Churchill

Ward Leroy Churchill, born in 1948, is a Vietnam veteran and member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a scholar and researcher, activist, and leading member of the American Indian Movement. He has been employed since 1978 by the University of Colorado in Boulder and has been its professor of American Indian studies at the Ethnic Studies Department of the University of Colorado in Boulder since 1998.

Professor Churchill has shown a lifelong commitment to the de-colonization of Indigenous peoples in the Americas. He asserts that American Indians have the right to fulfill all responsibilities to their land and their relations, and sustain their habitat and benefit from their resources, for their sake and the sake of their children, grandchildren and so forth, seven generations down the line. The de-colonization of American Indians deserves first precedence. The First Peoples of the Americas deserve first priority.

One third of the continental United States does not belong to the United States. Four hundred Indian Nations in North America are illegally occupied and usurped by the American government given the absence of agreements, treaties, or a longterm lease. Their way of life, their societies, and their cultures have been stolen.
This one third of continental America holds two third of America’s uranium holdings, 25 percent of America’s coal, 20 percent of America’s oil, gas and timber, and the salmon harvest. All these resources have been siphoned off from the American Indians, the owners of the land. America’s wealth is their poverty. And this does not even include Alaska, Porto Rico, the Hawaiian Islands, American Virgin Island, Guam, and American Samoa, all colonized as well.

Let’s take, for instance, the example of New York State. The 1922 Everett Report, compiled by the New York State Legislative commission led by lawyer Edward A. Everett asserted that the Iroquois Nation, part of the Haudenosaunee Six Nations were fraudulently dispossessed of over six million acres of land in New York State. The Haudenosaunee are the people of the extended lodge and their land and its resources had been used for centuries by the aggressive American colonizing power to the detriment of its owners. New York State’s wealth was the Iroquois’ poverty.
The American Indians advocated for the rights to possess their own land. Edward A. Everett facilitated the claim and the report concluded that the Iroquois Nation indeed had full rights to its land.
The report was buried by the New York legislature. It was never widely printed or distributed and copies were destroyed. Only one copy survived.

Papal decrees and bulls turned into American law. Via American judges, American courts incorporated papal megalomania and disordered thinking into their rulings. Courts declared that after the “discovery” of America the government responsible for that “discovery” had the right to acquire the soil from the Natives.
The cornerstone of the dominating mentality against Indian nations and peoples in U.S. law is the 1823 Supreme Court ruling by Chief Justice John Marshall who was following the policies of Christian popes that “barbarian nations” ought to be “overthrown [subjugated] and brought to the [Catholic] faith itself.” The decrees were based in the pure delusion that “Christian people” had “discovered” the lands of North America and that this event had given European Christians “dominion” over and “absolute title” to the lands of “heathens.” ²⁴

In 1927 a class action was filed by James Deere, a member of the Mohawk Nation, also part of the Haudenosaunee Six Nations, against the Saint Lawrence Company and others that occupied a one square mile portion of the land. The case was dismissed.
The legislature and American corporations used the judicial system to continue the illegal occupation of American Indian land. New York State’s policies regarding the First Peoples of the Americas were not just arrogant and entitled, they were criminal.

In 1954, when Congress debated passages of a law to terminate all Indian treaty rights, no academic came forward to the American Indians in their struggle against the unconscionable policy. ²⁵

A LITTLE MATTER OF GENOCIDE – Ward Churchill

The maintenance of order in aggressively occupied territories inevitably leads to genocide. Ward Churchill delivers proof of this fact with thorough research and encyclopedic documentation, as well as copious amounts of regular and explanatory footnotes in his book A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present, published in 1997. Russell Means, whom we came to know in my article Russell Means: Last and Only Hope for the Future, had this to say by way of introduction:

“All my life I’ve had to listen to the rhetoric about the United States being a model of freedom and democracy, the most uniquely enlightened and humanitarian country in history, ‘a nation of laws’ which, unlike others, has never pursued policies of conquest and aggression. I’m sure you’ve heard it before. It’s official ‘truth’ in the United States. It’s what is taught to school children, and it’s the line peddled to the general public. Well, I’ve got a hot news flash for everybody here.
It’s a lie. The whole thing’s a lie and it always has been. … there’s a little matter of genocide that’s got to be taken into account right here at home. I am talking about the genocide which has been perpetrated against American Indians, a genocide that began the instant the first of Europe’s boat people washed up on the beach of Turtle Island [as the North American continent was called by the Indigenous tribes and nations], a genocide that’s continuing right now, right at this moment. Against Indians, there’s not a law that the United States has not broken, not a Crime Against Humanity it has not committed, and it’s still going on.”

Professor Churchill followed the 1944 definition of genocide formulated by Polish lawyer Raphaël Lemkin (1901-1959) and dedicated the book to Mr. Lemkin and genocide’s many victims down through the ages. Lemkin’s definition of genocide was adopted in 1948 by the post World War II, United Nations. This was before severe systemic corruption began seeping into the organization.
To be colonized equals to be traumatized and destroyed. Colonization equals genocide. My Dutch mother, who suffered German Nazis, used to say “one man’s death is another man’s bread.” European governments and subsequent Anglo-American governments authorized the genocide of the original inhabitants of the Americas.

Puritans never called themselves pilgrim. They called themselves saint and called the other sinner. They turned out to be savage and began biting the Indigenous hand that had kindly fed them corn and saved them from starvation during the cold winter. They began stealing corn and ransacked Indian graves. They rejected durable, sophisticated Indigenous plant cultivation that had resulted in abundant harvesting.

They followed up with the Wessagusset massacre, the entrapping and killing of Chiefs Pecksuit and Wittawamut and several of Chickataubut’s most powerful warriors. Native villagers at Wessagusset were killed as well. Miles Standish, a military advisor to the Plymouth colony, thought to prove his superiority by cutting off one of the warrior’s heads and displaying it on a pole.
Buffalo herds were systematically slaughtered to deprive Indigenous peoples of food, shelter, and warm clothing. The buffalo symbolized Mother Earth and symbolized life. Killing the buffalo meant killing ceremonial life attached to the buffalo. .The “we come – they die” policy never stopped:

“… an Indigenous population estimated to be 125 million was reduced to something over 90 percent. The people had died in their millions of being hacked apart with axes and swords, burned alive and trampled under horses, hunted as game and fed to dogs, shot, beaten, stabbed, scalped for bounty, hanged on meat hooks and thrown over the side of ships at sea, worked to death as slave laborers, intentionally starved and frozen to death during a multitude of forced marches and internments, and, in an unknown number of instances deliberately infected with epidemic diseases… it is kept that way through carefully calibrated politics of impoverishment and dispersal, indoctrination, and compulsory sterilization.” ²⁶

“As a symbol, then, Christopher Columbus vastly transcends himself. He stands before the bar of history and humanity, culpable for not only his deeds in Española, but, in spirit at least, for the carnage and cultural obliteration which attended the conquests of Mexico and Peru during the 1500s. He stands as exemplar for the massacre of Pequots at Mystic in 1637 and of Lord Jeffrey Amherst’s calculated distribution of smallpox-laden blankets to the members of the Pontiac’s confederacy a century and a half later. His spirit informed the policies of John Evans and John Chivington as they set out to exterminate the Cheyennes in Colorado during 1864, and it rode with the 7th U.S. Cavalry to wounded Knee in December of 1890. It guided Alfredo Stroessner’s machete wielding butchers as they strove to eradicate the Aché people of Paraguay during the 1970s, and applauds the policies of Brazil towards the Jivaro, Yanomami and other Amazon Basin people at the present moment.
And the ghost of Columbus stood with the British in their wars against the Zulus and various Arab Nations, with the United States against the ‘Moros’ of the Philippines, the French against the people of Algeria and Indochina, the Belgians in the Congo, the Dutch in Indonesia. He was there for the Opium Wars, for the virtual extermination of the Apaches in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona from the 1840s to the 1880s, for the systematic slaughtering of the indigenous peoples of California in the 19th century, for the ‘secret’ bombing of Cambodia in the late 1960s and early 1970s and the systematic slaughtering of the Mayans in the 1980s.
Nazism was never unique: it was instead only one of an endless succession of ‘New World Orders’ set in motion by the ‘discovery’…” ²⁷

Professor Churchill’s purpose and goal is to deconstruct conceptual blinders imposed by the master’s narrative and assault Eurocentrism. He is committed to opposing genocide and he is committed to ending genocide. He stands for the restoration of American Indian self-determination. American Indians ought to be able to be who they are.

ON THE JUSTICE OF ROOSTING CHICKENS – Ward Churchill

Like the German philosopher, sociologist, and psychologist Theodor W. Adorno and like Vine Deloria Jr., Ward Churchill came to the realization that alterations in the political status quo, irrespective of their extremity, accomplish little in terms of correcting the core problems that confront us all, oppressed and oppressor alike. As always, Churchill cuts to the heart of the matter and delivers the big picture:

“Until the original colonial domination and the issue of its entitlement are addressed we are fighting symptoms rather than causes. As long as the mentality is one of entitlement by some sort of divine right to comfort yourself at the expense of another person or people and their sustenance and survival, you are locked in a genocidal mindset and you are destined to repeat what you claim to oppose.” ²⁸

Remnants of aggressive colonization were repeated over and over again on thousands of ranchers in Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona in the latter part of the 20th century. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), an agency of the executive branch of the American government, began using militarized enforcement against ranchers. Ranchers were entrapped and imprisoned by federal prosecutors who violated due process rights and trumped up charges. The objective of the federal government was to seize land and own water reserves and mine minerals worth billions of dollars. Pinned on the wall of the BLM office was the war slogan, “no moo by eighty two, cattle free by ninety-three.”
Just like federal judges had turned against American Indians, federal judges turned against American ranchers. Just like colonists killed the buffalo, the BLM shot bulls from helicopters and left baby calves to die without water. Wild mustangs were caught and killed in Utah and used for cat and dog food. The Obama-Biden-Clinton government sold uranium to the highest bidder in China and approved the sale of uranium deposits to a Russian firm in exchange for multi-million-dollar donations to a Clinton Foundation, operating illegally from New York City. ²⁹

By 2020 the American food supply and livelihood and the American society and population as a whole were under attack with the involvement of every American governmental branch possible. Just like the Indian reservations were designated by the Defense Department as prisoner of war camps, the entire United States of America was designated to become a prisoner of war camp too. The proof was is the pudding. A National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has been passed every year by Congress for more than half a century. There has always been bipartisan support by huge margins for the American killing machine that carries out America's predatory policies. Every president signed off on the military budget, including Donald J. Trump and the subsequent illegally installed figurehead. The budget increases every year and was $858 billion dollars for 2023, close to double the amount of the defense budgets of China, Russia, India and Germany combined. The United States’ first priority is colonization at home and abroad.

Ward Churchill had long enraged people who prefer to wrap themselves in a convenient cloud of denial regarding the “discovery” and “founding” of America. There was nothing to discover. Turtle Island, as America was originally called, the entire of the Americas, and all other continents were mapped by advanced mapmakers thousands of years before the birth of Christopher Columbus. Throughout the centuries many foreign ships had landed on the shores of the Americas. ³⁰
There are no founding fathers. Warren D. Harding who had coined the phrase in 1916 created a grandiose illusion, a whitewash, a soothing lie, a cover-up for the fact that those who fancied themselves as the bringers of liberty and democracy had destroyed liberty and democracy to begin with. They had become what they hated the most.
There was nothing to be founded. It had all been there already. The inalienable rights of life, kinship, liberty, independence, a Confederacy of Nations, abundance and the pursuit of happiness and spiritual fulfillment, it had all been there. The Europeans had been given the rare and precious opportunity to start anew and live in accordance with the whole genius of all the peoples, yet they squandered the gift and merely repeated same old, same old.

It had all been there already. It had been there for centuries. Most Indigenous leaders considered themselves trustees rather than rulers. The Sioux of the Great Plains believed that they are placed on Earth to be an independent individual and to rely upon itself, yet every individual is safely embedded in the tribal community. The Iroquois ridiculed obedience to kings. They considered each individual sovereign in his/her own mind. The sovereign mind could not be seduced into acknowledging any other power than the power of the Great Spirit and the Great Mystery.
The Iroquois were part of the Haudenosaunee League of Six Nations who lived in the area East of the Saint Laurence river in what is now Canada, all the way past Long Island as far as the Ohio River. The Six Nations were proud to adhere to the Great Law of Peace. The Great Law of Peace was considered a prerequisite for prosperity and happiness.
Indigenous women were equal to Indigenous men. Iroquois women had the privilege of nominating leaders and were considered progenitors of the land. Cherokee women were the soul of tribal councils.
The Wampanoag, the Wôpanâak, the People of the Dawn, who lived along the stretch of Narragansett Bay and on Nantucket, Cape God, and Martha’s Vineyard, translated the word woman as “the one who has complete say or judgement.”

Like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Professor Ward Churchill was hounded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation via the counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO), established in 1956. The program was illegal and so was the FBI. President Theodore Roosevelt’s acting attorney general had established the FBI in 1908 without legislative approval, leading one Congressman to label the new organization a “ bureaucratic bastard.” ³¹
Churchill’s file was opened on August 20, 1969. He wrote two books about the illegal program: The FBI’s Secret War Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement (1988) and The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret War Against Domestic Dissent (1990).

Churchill stood at the cradle of the fiction called war on terror. The war on terror is, in fact, a war of terror engineered and committed by the state and its state agencies at home and abroad. While writing the above mentioned two books Churchill and co-writer Jim Vander Wal discovered that the FBI kept changing the definition of their targets to generate optimum public support and confidence. Or so they thought.
Overtime, the linguistic subterfuge changed from hippies and peaceniks, into agitators and extremists, into guerrillas and insurgents, and then settled on terrorists. Naturally the word terrorist was a projection. Those who were designated as so-called terrorist used, like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., non-violent ways to simply defend their constitutional rights. The real terrorists were the trigger happy snipers of the FBI and its depraved, racist director J. Edgar Hoover, as well as future diabolical directors, since the illegal program was never abolished. On the contrary, it mushroomed underground, while the pool of targets was conveniently extended from “suspects” to “predicated subjects.”
At the time of this writing public trust in American security agencies is at an all-time low.

All charges in or out of court leveled against Ward Churchill throughout the years were dismissed.

On the very day of the 2001 criminal attacks on New York City’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon, Ward Churchill wrote an article called “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.” In the article Churchill used the term little Eichmanns, American bureaucrats and technocrats who do not obey international laws, refuse to refrain from relentlessly bombing innocent children and families in schools, hospitals, wedding venues, and private homes and, in general, make evil possible all over the world.
Churchill had used the term before, yet this time the governor of Colorado, egged on by a spin doctor mired in harassment scandals, declared that, yes, Churchill’s use of the term “little Eichmans” was embarrassing for the state of Colorado. The governor decided Churchill did not deserve a taxpayer-money-sponsored job and salary. The governor proposed Churchill’s termination from the University of Colorado. This was the same governor who supported vulture capitalist Mitt Romney and unlimited governmental spending of taxpayer’s money. And the same governor who mingled with war criminals and filthy rich mass murdering eugenicists in Washington D.C. and at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
The governor chose the comfort of denial and blaming. Ward Churchill was made designated scapegoat. Scapegoating is a way of escaping the reality and responsibility of one’s own intent and actions. Those who scapegoat dissociate from intent and actions through projecting them onto another person. Scapegoating is the pathological and evil process of sacrificing an innocent person. Scapegoating is the process by which every single genocide throughout the ages has been committed.
Did Professor Churchill supply Saddam Hussein with American produced anthrax before the first war in Iraq, plan and execute the September 11, 2001 attacks, destroy the crime scenes, use the false flag to initiate a series of colonial wars, lie about weapons of mass destruction to initiate a second war in Iraq, sacrifice countless American soldiers and innocent families in said colonial wars in the broader Middle East and Libya?
Did Professor Churchill plan and execute the 2005 scheme to completely militarize the United States with, among other insanities, a healthy person containment mandate, usher in a prison-quarantine state with endless, trumped up emergency policies, and inflict premeditated, sadistic damage to the health of peoples and the economies of the people and the nation?
I didn’t think so.
The governor of Colorado was using projection, aka skunk spraying, to cover up embarrassing filth in the backyard of his state and country and erect a fake image of his own perfect goodness. Never mind the fact that Professor Churchill’s brilliant research and thought processes went way over the governor’s head.

Churchill sued the University of Colorado for wrongful dismissal. He won his lawsuit on April 9, 2009:

“In 2011, the Colorado Council of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) published an exhaustive, two-year investigation of Churchill’s case, ultimately publishing a 135-odd page report detailing the deviousness and even outright fraudulence of the charges against him. The AAUP not only found that Churchill was not guilty of any of the scholarly offenses of which he had been ‘convicted’ by the Colorado University committees, but also that the university administration had systemically rigged the process while its committees deliberately suppressed, distorted, and in some instances literally falsified evidence in order to create the necessary appearance of wrongdoing on Churchill’s part.” ³²

ARE WE STEPPING BACK AND LISTENING?

Queen Liliuokalani, the last sovereign monarch of the Hawaiian Kingdom, witnessed the illegal seizure and stripping of her palace and subsequent theft of the Hawaiian Islands from the Hawaiian people by an American Masonic Mafia, with the assistance of the U.S. government and military.
After she was released from her illegal imprisonment she tirelessly prayed and lobbied for the re-establishment of the Hawaiian throne from 1898 to her death in 1917, yet to no avail. The Masonic Mafia and U.S. government agents and military were illegal aliens on foreign soil, yet they behaved as if they were some sort of superior specimen.

Queen Liliuokalani knew from personal experience what was in store for America and she issued her alert:

“My story is a universal one. The same betrayal of all peoples can happen if they do not understand. Appearances are deceptive. The devil never sleeps. The conspirators work day and night. Plans are made and committees are formed… the agitation was always the work of the same clique who were never satisfied, always conspiring, always determined that they would either rule or ruin. Such men … quite distinct from the real American people … having no covenant with their own consciences, suspicious even of their own shadows, in power or out of power, are always a menace to the peace of the community.” ³³

Liliuokalani’s wake-up call went unanswered. More than half a century later President Dwight Eisenhower and President John F. Kennedy exposed the same element and issued an alert about the dangers of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines secret, premeditated military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations to subvert the people of the world.

Immanuel Velikovsky warned the world about the danger of amnesia of history and repetition-compulsion of history:

“If the human race is not made able to face its past, the traumatic experience that caused cultural amnesia will demand repetition. Velikovsky’s message is imperative, for in the nuclear age disaster may come not from the unchained elements, but from the handiwork of man himself.
Disaster may come, not from another planetary collision [or aliens in UFOs], but from man himself, a victim of amnesia, in possession of thermonuclear [or worse] weapons.” ³⁴

Vine Deloria Jr. cautioned that adding more and more mechanics and technology will pry you loose from the Earth.

“Pretty soon you are totally abstract. You find yourself part of the machine and there is no way out. It’s going to blow and humanity will become extinct.” ³⁵

Deloria and many American Indians want no part of the colonial system and actively demand de-colonization. This should be the model for all Americans today.

Ward Churchill exposed the predator who runs the highly effective machine and is compelled to endlessly repeat his bottomless thirst for extortion and annihilation on a global scale:

“At this junction the entire planet is locked, figuratively, in the room with the sociocultural equivalent of Hannibal Lecter. An individual of consummate taste and refinement, imbued with indelible grace and charm, he distracts his victims with the brilliance of his intellect, even while honing his blade. He is thus able to dine alone upon their livers, his feast invariably candlelit, accompanied by lofty music and a fine wine. Over and over the ritual is repeated, always hidden, always denied in order that it may be continued. So perfect is Lecter's pathology that, from the depths of his scorn for the inferiors upon whom he feeds, he advances himself as their sage and therapist, he who is incomparably endowed with the ability to explain their innermost meanings, he professes to be their savior. His success depends upon being embraced and exalted by those upon whom he preys. Ultimately, so long as Lecter is able to retain his mask of omnipotent gentility, he can never be stopped.” ³⁶

Professor Churchill stresses that the solely legitimate function of information compiled about Lecter is to unmask him and thereby lead to his apprehension – not to visit retribution but to put an end to his activities. The point is to understand what he is and what he does well enough to stop him from doing it.

Over and over the ritual is repeated, always hidden, always denied in order that it may be continued. In 2020 Lector’s premeditated, calculated use of healthcare infrastructure to maim and kill in the context of yet another “New World Order” involved the majority of human beings on Earth. The point is to understand what Lecter is and what Lecter is doing to the world population well enough to stop him from doing it.
Ward Churchill’s phenomenal body of work has become the guiding light, the inspiration, the ultimate demand for fundamental change:

“Solving the problem of the American Indians in North America is the absolute ingredient to solving problems in the world at large.” ³⁷

© May 2023, Sophia Wien, M.A., Drs., All Rights Reserved.

Notes:
1. Ward Churchill, Wielding Words Like Weapons: Selected Essays in Indigenism, 1995-2005, 160
2. Ibid, 153
3. Ibid, 157
4. Immanuel Velikovsky, Worlds in Collusion, 186-190 & Vine Deloria Jr., God is Red: A Native View of Religion, 101
5. Ward Churchill, Wielding Words Like Weapons: Selected Essays in Indigenism, 1995-2005, 152
6. Immanuel Velikovsky, Mankind in Amnesia, 28, 32 & 35
7. Ibid, backflap & viii
8. Ibid backflap
9. Ward Churchill, Wielding Words Like Weapons: Selected Essays in Indigenism, 1995-2005, 147
10. Vine Deloria Jr., God is Red: A Native View of Religion, 61, 62 & 65
11. Vine Deloria Jr. on Native Americans, 1972, YouTube
12. Vine Deloria Jr., God is Red: A Native View of Religion, 285 & Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto 101-103, 105, & 119
13. Vine Deloria Jr. on Native Americans, 1972, YouTube
14. Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto, 93
15. Vine Deloria Jr. on Native Americans, 1972, YouTube
16. Vine Deloria Jr., God is Red: A Native View of Religion, 152, 151
17. Ibid, 152-153
18. Ibid, 153
19. Steven T Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Discovery, 125
20. Vine Deloria Jr., God is Red: A Native View of Religion, 152-153
21. Ibid, 153
22. Ibid, 160
23. Ward Churchill, Wielding Words Like Weapons: Selected Essays in Indigenism, 1995-2005, 151
24. Steven T Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Discovery, xv-xvi
25. Where White Men Fear to Tread: The Autobiography of Russell Means, 17
26. Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present, Lie for Lie, 1492-1892
27. Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present, 92
28. From a Ward Churchill Lecture at Bingham University, YouTube
29. As per extensive, longterm research from Charles Ortel, New York City
30. Charles H. Hapgood, Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings
31. David Grann: Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI, 113
32. Ward Churchill, Wielding Words Like Weapons: Selected Essays in Indigenism, 1995-2005, xxxiii - xxxiv
33. Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen Liliuokalani
34. Immanuel Velikovsky, Mankind in Amnesia, backflap & viii
35. Vine Deloria Jr. on Native Americans, 1972, YouTube
36. Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present, 93
37. From a Ward Churchill lecture at Bingham University, New York, YouTube