Churchill's Geneology

At FrontPage.org, David Yeagley has an informative piece on the damage that the Ward is doing to real American Indians link. He also brings up a point that I have been thinking about recently, the massaging (if not the absolute fabrication) of geneology to gain favor. Ward Churchill did just that successfully, in order to get tenure at the University of Colorado. According to real geneological researchers, Churchill's only claim to any Indian blood lies in the fact that many, many generations ago a relative was married to an Indian woman. However, that happened after the relative's first wife, a woman with no Indian blood that mothered Churchill's relative, was herself killed by Indians. Therefore, no bloodline connection. That has not prevented Churchill from once boasting that he was a full-blooded Indian, then retracting and saying that he was a quarter Indian, and now ignoring the question altogether.

Yeagley also brings up the subject of geneological fraud, something that I have witnessed firsthand. A long-time hobby of the Boss Squirrel is family history (the family tree, if you will). About ten years ago I found an incredible resource, the local Family History Center of the Morman Church. The Morman Church has undertaken the job of preserving geneological records all over the world, and making them available to anyone to peruse. While I was doing my own family research, I noticed an awful lot of people (of all shapes, sizes, and colors) coming in and asking for local Indian ancestery records. I asked the head of the center why? She said that with the advent of the local casino (then it was only Foxwoods) everyone was trying to establish a link to a member of the tribe in their own families. This was because anyone with that could claim membership in the tribe and would be eligible for financial compensation from the casino. It made her uneasy, she claimed, because she felt that many of the people were not opposed to falsifying records to share in the windfall.

And that's what the Ward did. The Boss Squirrel has a great aunt (or perhaps a great-great aunt) who married a man known in the family as Injun Joe, a real full-blooded Narragansett Indian. They loved each other dearly, and had a long marriage. Perhaps I should call up the Ward and ask him if I could have his job at CU after he leaves...