This is what they wrote, below. They did not say that no one ever spread smallpox. They were talking about one specific incident, below -- the one that Charles mentions. Technical errors in fact are not what was at issue. It was how he made those errors -- questions of his research conduct.
WC wants to find evidence that the US government did it, because he wants to argue that, not only is the genocide of American Indians like the Holocaust, he's interested in arguing that Hitler got his ideas _from_ the United States. (This is why, John, it was important to establish the Allotment Act as what prompted the blood quantum policy. The other policies you pointed to happened to late for them to have influenced Hitler. But, from reading the committee's report, there was evidence _before_ 1887. But what he's fixated on, if you read some of his Znet essays, he the Allotment Act _because_ that ties it directly to the need to appropriate land. You have to read some of his essays to get this. But, as the committee showed, there was no basis for his claim about the Allotment Act of 1887 and thus he didn't have the proof of the connection to a federal policy of racialization directly tied removing indians. As the committee pointed out, scholars have pointed out that the act was used to forcibly integrate american indians into US society, not to wipe them out.
http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/dec95barsamian.htm
<quote> Hitler took note of Native Americans, indigenous people of the Americas, specifically within the area of the U.S. and Canada. He used the treatment of native people, the policies and processes that were imposed upon them, as a model for what he articulated as being Lebensraumpolitik, the politics of living space. In essence, Hitler took the notion of a drive from east to west, clearing the land as the invading population went and resettling it with Anglo-Saxon stock, primarily, as a model by which he drove from west to east into Russia, displacing, relocating, dramatically shifting or liquidating populations to clear the land and replace it with what he called "superior breeding stock," meaning Germanic peoples. It was essentially the same process, and he was very conscious of the fact that he was basing his policies in the prior experience of the Anglo-American population, or Nordic population, as he called it, in the area north of the Rio Grande River. </quote>
In another essay, he takes pains to show that the Holocaust was more hodge-podge than it was, not to diminish it, but to insist that there were other horrible genocides, etc.
Regardless, technical errors are not what's at stake. Right or wrong, if Churchill came to correct conclusion, but did so by engaging in ethical misconduct, he would still be in violation of the things he's been accused of. It's not about getting facts wrong.
The committee had to look at what others said since what others said is what Churchill sometimes misrepresented. They also had to look and see if there is other, disputed evidence, since the charge of a scholar is to present that evidence in an even-handed way. If one makes a bold claim, but it's disputed, you are misrepresenting the actual situation. If you make that claim with no argument and evidence, you are misrepresenting the state of knowledge on the topic: it's a no-no.
>Based upon what Professor Churchill wrote in the essays cited in this
>allegation and our own investigation, our conclusions are as follows.
>
>1. We do not find academic misconduct with respect to his general claim
>that the U.S. Army
>deliberately spread smallpox to Mandan Indians at Fort Clark in 1837,
>using infected blankets. Early accounts of what was said by Indians
>involved in that situation and certain native oral traditions provide some
>basis for that interpretation.203
>
>2. Professor Churchill has not, however, respected those Indian
>traditions. He did not mention native oral sources in any of his published
>essays about Fort Clark. Instead he raised the possibility that he had
>drawn on oral material only in an attempt to produce after-the-fact
>justification for his claims during the course of this investigation. At
>that point, he purported to defend the legitimacy of his account by
>referencing oral tradition, but he provided no evidence that he had done
>any research whatsoever into the traditions of the Mandan or other
>relevant tribes regarding the smallpox epidemic of 1837 before publishing
>his essays. The Committee concludes that this behavior shows considerable
>disrespect for the native oral tradition by employing it as a defense
>against research misconduct while failing to use or acknowledge it in his
>published scholarship. In doing so, he engaged in a kind of falsification
>of evidence for his claims.
-----
he even tried to lie during the investigation! Can you not see how this is wrong and offensive to people? He comes before them and then tries to tell them that he was using oral tradition, but he has never once honored that by referencing it. I've seen plenty of research that does that. He has no excuse.
Below, they tell you that several of the things he's said are, in fact, not supported by the evidence. He admitted it and then was stupid enough to cop an attitude about it all. Would you advise a client to go before a job with a chip on her shoulder? Improperly dressed etc? No? Well, Churchill, a grown adult in a similarly medieval institution, did precisely that. Not surprisingly, he won no friends in the process.
-----
>3. Professor Churchill engaged in poor scholarly practice but not research
>misconduct in providing incomplete references: citing a book without page
>numbers and giving no citation for specific numerical information
>mentioned in the text.
>
>4. We found serious problems in the following areas:
>
>a. Professor Churchill misrepresented some of the published sources he
>cites, which do not in fact support his accounts.
>
>b. Because neither his own statements nor our investigation produced
>evidence to support some of his more detailed claims, we conclude that
>Professor Churchill has created myths under the banner of academic
>scholarship. Those points are:
>
>(1) That infected blankets were taken from a military infirmary in St.
>Louis. 82
>
>
>(2) That an army doctor or post surgeon advised the Indians to scatter
>once smallpox broke out among them, thereby spreading the disease.
>
>(3) That the army had stored rather than administered a smallpox vaccine
>distributed for the purpose of inoculating Indians.
>
>c. Professor Churchill provided insufficient evidence in his essays to
>support his assertions that as many as 100,000, 125,000, 250,000, or
>400,000 Western American Indians died in the smallpox pandemic of
>1837-1840 (different numbers appear in different essays). Nor did he
>provide further information when requested by this Committee.
>
>
>5. The problems mentioned here appear in printed form over a period of ten
>years and generally become more extreme over time.
>
>6. Although Professor Churchill appeared in his submissions to our
>Committee to acknowledge that several of his claims are not supported by
>the evidence, he emphasized that he plans to re-publish with only minor
>changes in wording, not substantive revisions, the essay that provides the
>fullestand most extremeaccount of the Fort Clark situation.204
>7. We therefore find by a preponderance of the evidence a pattern of
>deliberate academic misconduct involving falsification, fabrication, and
>serious deviation from accepted practices in reporting results from research.
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