"Colonialism = Genocide"

Somebody youtubed Ward Churchill's speech on "Holocaust Denial as Academic Orthodoxy" from his Canadian visit last month. It's in 14 parts and well over two hours, but as usual the Q & A at the end (part ten on) has the best examples of Wardismo. But nothing new as far as I could tell, maybe a little more emphasis on Indian residential schools (since he's in Canada and all).

The D-blog did look for info on the lost silent film Churchill mentions (in part 11, I think), The Indian Wars Refought (1914; Churchill says 1904), which Ward claims shows Indian women throwing their babies at U.S. cavalry during the Wounded Knee Massacre (and thus provoking them to open fire). He also mentions the film in Fantasies of the Master Race, but pretty much all I could find elsewhere were this short paragraph and a somewhat more detailed account from War and American Popular Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia:

Thousands of silent films have disappeared since they were first shown in the early decades of the twentieth century, but few were more important than Buffalo Bill Cody's The Last Indian Battles, or from the Warpath to the Peace Pipe (also known by such titles as The Indian Wars Refought, The Wars for Civilization in America, Buffalo Bill's Indian Wars, and The Adventures of Buffalo Bill). In September 1913, Fred Bonfils and Henry Tammen, owners of the Denver Post, in tandem with Chicago's Essanay Company, founded a new production firm to make a film that would chronicle the Indian wars in the trans-Missippi frontier after the Civil War. The elder Cody, who was less than four years from his death, was supposedly paid $50,000 to star in the picture. Thanks to his participation, the army sent three troops of U.S. cavalry, uniforms and materiel to South Dakota's Pine Ridge Reservation to recreate various events, including the battles of Summit Springs (1869) Warbonnet Creek (1876) and Wounded Knee (1890). According to many Sioux residents of the reservation who appeared in the picture, the screenplay, by General Charles King, was well-researched and the depiction of the battles between white and Native Americans were reasonably accurate. Lieutenant General Nelson Miles, who served as technical advisor, insisted on shooting the action on the actual battlefields. Consequently, the reenactment of Wounded Knee took place exactly where, 23 years earlier, he and the U.S. Army had massacred hundreds of Sioux men, women and children. . . .

Read the whole thing, but, sadly, there's no mention of baby-throwing. Annie Proulx also wrote a short story in which her characters find the missing film. It's collected in her Bad Dirt and is called, amazingly, "The Indian Wars Refought."

(via Horrible Hilda over at PB)

Update: Funny how Wart has quit bringing greetings from "the elders of the Keetoowah Band of Cherokee," but added greetings "from the South" to make up for it.