>This is why Jews that died of starvation and disease in concentration
>camps are rightly considered to have been murdered but NA's who die of
>starvation and disease after having been put onto a reservation that is
>under the command of someone who has openly stated that "the only good
>Indian is a dead one" are considered victims of a tragic accident.
I was just thinking that there's a woman who I read because she annoys the crap out of me. Recently, she said that it is pure misogyny that there is a court system that requires that it's not good enough for women to say that they were raped for it to be seen as rape. She thinks that a woman's word about this is enough. Others don't go that far, such as Pandagon, and say that the reason why the right advances abortion policy the way it does is because it is about woman=hating: misogyny. These men hate women and that's why they want to get rid of abortion, get rid of contraception, etc. Other women say that the whole of scientific research is based on misogyny and is part of a concerted effort of men as a class to suppress women as a class. Etc.
There's a woman who repeatedly tells me and others that the problem with us is we don't understand: it's the nature of men to band together over women, so talk of class and racial and ethnic divisions are just so much bull. When push comes to shove, men of all races will band together to keep women down. the evidence is plain to her and you can look at films, books, history, advertisements, everything to see men out to oppress and dominate women.
These women say: it's the nature of male privilege to demand proof because you are expecting women to prove it while you're are assuming men couldn't hate women. And there's a lot of evidence that this is true, they say, for otherwise, you wouldn't have a history of the world where, in virtually all societies, women are second class citizens, women are oppressed and treated as property, etc. etc. If that's the case, then what could explain this other than men's deeply rooted misogyny -- misogyny that's inculcated in them from birth and is inculcated in virtually all societies.
There is no need to prove that men are misogynists and they act, in concert with other men, to keep women oppressed. Having to prove this means having to assume that, in the context of a global history of women's oppression, that men naturally don't want to oppress women or that they are neutral to the issue. The assumption is that it's an aberration when men oppression women, not the other way around.
At any rate, to answer the question about the report. This is what is wrong. Churchill cites scholars who do not say what he said they say. I don't know about you, but I would be really annoyed were I someone who didn't say what was attributed to me.
1. In "Bringing the Law Home" (published in 1994), Professor Churchill writes: "Such tactics [deliberate spread of disease by the British among American Indians during the colonial period] were also continued by the United States after the American Revolution. At Fort Clark on the upper Missouri River, for instance, the U.S. Army distributed smallpox-laden blankets as gifts among the Mandan. The blankets had been gathered from a military infirmary in St. Louis where troops infected with the disease were quarantined" (p. 35).
He does not give a year for when this happened and provides no references for those sentences, but at the end of the paragraph, he provides the following note: "The Fort Clark incident is covered in Thornton, op. cit. [American Indian Holocaust and Survival], pp. 94-6."
That wording indicates that his account was based on Thornton, whereas in fact Thornton says something quite different about the Fort Clark situation. On pp. 95-9 (not 94-6), Thornton discusses the Mandan situation in some detail. He says that that the disease was spread by people on the steamboat who had smallpox and/or by Indians who came in contact with them after the boat had first stopped at Fort Clark and then gone on to the Mandan villages. He says that this started a "pandemic," but he does not mention blankets or suggest deliberate infection on the part of the U.S. Army or the American Fur Company. Professor Churchill therefore misrepresents what Thornton says.
2. In "Since Predator Came" (published in 1995), Professor Churchill writes (after mentioning Amherst in 1763): "In a similar instance, occurring in 1836, the U.S. Army 62 knowingly distributed smallpox-laden blankets among the Missouri River Mandans; the resulting pandemic claimed as many as a quarter-million native lives[10]" (p. 28). Note 10 says, "The dispensing of small-pox-infected blankets at Fort Clark is covered in Russell Thornton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival, pp. 94-96. As above, that is a misrepresentation of Thornton.
By saying that the Army "knowingly" distributed the blankets, Professor Churchill has intensified the accusation.
3. In "Nits Make Lice" (published in 1997), Professor Churchill writes: "Only slightly more ambiguous [than Amherst's order in 1763] was the U.S. Army's dispensing of 'trade blankets' to Mandans and other Indians gathered at Fort Clark, on the Missouri River in present-day North Dakota, beginning on June 20, 1837. Far from being trade goods, the blankets had been taken from a military infirmary in St. Louis quarantined for smallpox, and brought upriver aboard the steamboat St. Peter's" (p. 155). He provides no references for those sentences.
4. In "That 'Most Peace-Loving of Nations'" (published in 2003), when describing several different events in 1836 (again the wrong year), Professor Churchill says: "At Fort Clark, on the upper Missouri River, army officers distribute as 'gifts' blankets taken from a smallpox infirmary among Mandan leaders assembled at a parlay requested by the military" (p. 48).
He provides no notes for any of his chronological statements, although the general opening pages of the essay are referenced. At the back of the book is a list of "Sources Used in Preparing the Chronologies" (pp. 302-09). It does not include works that discuss Fort Clark.
5. In "An American Holocaust?" (published in 2003), Professor Churchill presents a narrative that is very similar to previous statements (including the wrong year), but it contains several new and more extreme claims:
(a) "In 1836, at Fort Clark, on the upper Missouri River, the U.S. Army did the same thing as Amherst. It was considered desirable to eliminate the Mandans, who were serving as middlemen in the regional fur trade, and, by claiming a share of the profits in the process, diminishing the take of John Jacob Astor and other American businessmen. So the commander of Fort Clark had a boatload of blankets shipped upriver from a smallpox infirmary in St. Louis, with the idea of distributing them during a 'friendship' parlay with the Mandans" (pp. 54-5).
Professor Churchill provides no specific reference for those statements, which go beyond his earlier essays in saying that the goal was to "eliminate" the Mandans so as to remove middlemen payments in the fur trade.
(b) "There's a bit of confusion as to whether they [the U.S. Army and/or the commander of Fort Clark, subject unclear] actually started passing them out, or whether some young Indian men 'stole' a couple of blankets, but it really doesn't matter, because the army was planning on distributing them anyway" (p. 55).
No reference is given here, but at the end of that paragraph, four sentences later, Professor Churchill cites Stearn and Stearn, The Effect of Smallpox on the 63 Destiny of the Amerindian, 89-94. On pp. 89-90, Stearn and Stern reproduce the unidentified letter written from New Orleans the following year, apparently by someone who had been at Fort Union.159 That letter provides no support for Professor Churchill's account. Nor do the later pages cited in Stearn and Stearn, which discuss the 1840s and total numbers who may have died.
The Committee therefore finds that Professor Churchill has misrepresented the sources he cites and that they do not support his claim.
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