My goal is not to recapitulate such arguments and the evidence used to support those arguments. However, one documented phenomenon that supports the idea of just how planned and systematic the destruction was involved the use of 'traders' who were not actually self-interested traders who wanted to make money off the indigenous peoples but army agents who knew how to spread smallpox. Even if they didn't understand germs or viruses, they understood that smallpox was contagious and that there must have been some physical thing that spread the disease coming from people who already had the disease. This is how vaccination against the disease was carried out for centuries before the advent of cowpox vaccination.
Another obvious technique to help the spread of smallpox would have been the herding of the Indians together into very crowded spaces. This would have been quite commonly understood to promote the spread of the disease (it was well understood, for example, that people who came from crowded cities and towns on the continent and E. US tended to have greater immunity to the disease than country folk, who had much less contact with large numbers of people).
As for whether or not Ward Churchill's arguments over a small pox epidemic that ravaged one tribe are true or not, let me point out that they were put forward in a very scholarly manner (hence the relative obscurity til he gave his opinion on terrorism and 9-11), were vetted, and published. Perhaps his arguments just aren't true and he somehow made serious errors with his evidence and his use of primary and secondary sources--it happens all the time. That doesn't undercut the scholarly nature of his work nor does it undercut the scholarly nature of the work that argues that yes indeed the US government and its military planned and carried out for over a century genocide against the native peoples of North America. Nor does it disprove or vitiate the theory (which has been supported by other work, independent of Ward Churchill) that smallpox was one tool of this extermination. Brazil (which is in many ways the US's counterpart in S.A.) also has to face such a reckoning, including the supported charge that smallpox was used there too. Ironically, the US military still plans to use smallpox as a biological weapon in warfare.
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