On Tue, 8 Feb 2005 22:05:30 -0800 "Michael Dawson" <mdawson at pdx.edu>
writes:
> If this is true, it's even more evidence that the ugliness is all
> Churchill's. Anybody got a refutation of this paper? Seems quite
> solid at
> first glance.
>
The post from Proyect that I posted a little while ago offers the following:
-------------------------------------- Turning to Brown's article, we learn that there is nothing in the author Russell Thornton cited by Ward Churchill to support the claim that soldiers gave blankets infected with smallpox to the Mandan Indians, a group that was part of the Lakota nation. Brown writes:
>>Note the discrepancies between Churchill and Thornton. Thornton locates the site of infection at the Mandan village, not at Fort Clark. Nowhere does Thornton mention the U.S. Army. Nowhere does Thornton mention “a military infirmary in St. Louis where troops infected with the disease were quarantined.” Nowhere does Thornton mention the distribution of “smallpox-laden blankets as gifts.” On the contraryThornton clearly hypothesizes the origins of the epidemic as being entirely accidental.<<
While coming to work this morning, I discovered that Thornton is *not* the exclusive source for his recounting of the Fort Clark incident. Thanks to
history student Noah Schabacker, who posted the following rebuttal to Brown on crookedtimber.org, I was spared the trouble of answering Brown and Farrell myself:
>>This “essay” by Prof. Brown is flat out false. Which is to say, Mr. Brown falsifies or deliberately misreads at least two notes in Ward Churchill’s work in order to accuse Churchill of academic dishonesty. Specifically, Brown accuses Churchill of misrepresenting sources in A Little Matter of Genocide (among other places). However, by simply looking at Churchill’s footnotes, one finds that the sources Brown attributes to Churchill and the sources Churchill actually cites are not the same at all. Churchill describes the incident on page 155 of A Little Matter…; Brown asserts that Churchill’s source is Russell Thornton’s American Indian Holocaust and Survival. Churchill’s description is tied to endnote #136; note #136, on page 261, reads thusly: “Stearn and Stearn, The Effects of Smallpox, op cit., pp. 89-94; Francis A. Chardon, Journal at Fort Clark, 1834-39 (Pierre: State Historical Society of South Dakota, 1932).” Nowhere is Thornton cited as the authority for the Mandans and the smallpox blankets. As a nod to “peer review” (if such a thing exists on the internet), I invite (indeed, request) other readers to look at the sources I’ve referenced here.
It is 11:30 PM. I have a BA in History, a copy of A Little Matter of Genocide, and an internet connection. If I can find the relevant information in the relevant book in less than ten minutes and write a detailed post on it, it would seem that Dr. Brown, with the resources of Lamar University behind him and his years of training in reading academic
sources, should be able to do the same thing. I haven’t seen the trial brief, but the preceding information would seem to discredit the entire sorry exercise.
As an aside to Henry Farrell, who originally linked to this hit job, I must say that it seems the height of irresponsibility to link to work accusing
an academic of falsifying his sources and committing perjury without actually evaluating the accusing work first. This is not hard to do, requiring only a copy of A Little Matter of Genocide, available at fine bookstores everywhere. As a professor, you of all people should know the harm that can result from even mendacious claims of academic dishonesty.<< ----------------------------------------------------------------