Ward Churchill - Activism On Native American Issues

Activism On Native American Issues

Churchill has been active since at least 1984 as the co-director of the Denver-based American Indian Movement of Colorado, now an autonomous chapter of the American Indian Movement. In 1993, he and other local AIM leaders, including Russell Means, Glenn T. Morris, Robert Robideau, and David Hill, broke with the national AIM leadership, including Dennis Banks and the brothers Vernon and Clyde Bellecourt, claiming that all AIM chapters are autonomous. The AIM Grand Governing Council is based in Minneapolis and retains the name of the national group. It says that the schism arose when Means, Churchill, Glenn T. Morris and others openly supported the Miskito Indian group Misurasata that was fighting with the CIA-backed Contras.

Journalists such as Harlan McKosato attributed the split to Means and other AIM members dividing over opposition to the Bellecourt brothers because of their alleged involvement in the execution of Anna Mae Aquash in December 1975, who was then the highest-ranking woman in AIM but had been suspected of being an informant. It was a year in which other FBI informants had been discovered in AIM. On November 3, 1999, Means held a press conference in Denver, Colorado in which he accused the Bellecourt brothers of complicity in Aquash's death, and named three lower-level AIM members involved in her death: Arlo Looking Cloud, John Graham, and Theda Nelson Clark. This was the first time that an AIM leader active at the time of the Aquash murder had publicly accused AIM of having been involved.

Looking Cloud and Graham were convicted of murder in 2004 and 2010, by federal and South Dakota state juries, respectively. By then Clark was being cared for in a nursing home and was not indicted. Means attributed the split in AIM to divisions in the aftermath of Aquash's murder. The journalist Harlan McKosato said in 1999, "...her death has divided the American Indian Movement..."

The schism continued, with the national AIM leadership claiming that the local AIM leaders, such as Churchill, are tools of the U.S. government used against other American Indians. The leaders of the national AIM organization, now called AIM Grand Governing Council, claim that Churchill has worked in the past as an underground counter-intelligence source for the U.S. government, for example the FBI, and local, non-Indian, police forces, to subvert the national AIM organization. Specifically, they refer to a 1993 Boulder, Colorado interview with Jodi Rave, a former columnist for the Denver Post, in which Churchill stated that he "was teaching the Rapid City Police Department about the American Indian Movement." In addition, Vernon Bellecourt accused Churchill of having 'fraudulently represented himself as an Indian' to bolster his credentials. Bellecourt said he complained to the University of Colorado about this as early as 1986.

Churchill has been a leader of Colorado AIM's annual protests in Denver against the Columbus Day holiday and its associated parade. Colorado AIM's leadership has come into conflict with some leaders in the Denver Italian American community, the main supporters of the parade. As early as 2004, Churchill had claimed that such parades are unconstitutional, arguing that the Ninth Amendment to the Constitution provides Native Americans with a right not to be subjected to such displays, overriding the First Amendment rights of non-native Americans.