Kowtowing to pressure from left-wing groups, liberal arts colleges in Southern California have banned a tradition of passing a peace pipe at homecoming football games — at the same time that the schools brought fake Indian and mass-murder supporter Ward Churchill to campus.
Pomona and Claremont McKenna College in eastern Los Angeles County have exchanged a Native American peace pipe every football game since 1959, but Mike Sutton, director of athletic and physical education, announced an end to the tradition last week.
“The issue of the inappropriate use of the Peace Pipe as a trophy was not a topic of conversation until October when members of the CMS (Claremont McKenna-Mudd-Scripps) and PP (Pomona-Pitzer) Athletic leadership met with students who are members of our Indigenous Student Alliance (ISA),” Sutton said in an email.
“The Peace Pipe’s retirement rests on the spiritual context of this religious tradition,” Sutton wrote. “If a group holds an object as sacred whether a pipe, a cross or a menorah, our values here at the college and the other colleges as well lead us to respect that object.”
But while the colleges maintain a position of honoring Native Americans by removing the tradition, they didn’t object to having Ward Churchill on campus Nov. 14 to denounce U.S. “colonialism.”
Churchill is described as an “American Indian scholar/activist,” though in fact the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in 2005 announced that it had no record indicating his tribal affiliation was genuine.
Churchill spoke on his thesis that “colonialism equals genocide.” According to a brochure for his talk at Scripps College (Scripps, Claremont McKenna, Pitzer, Pomona, and Harvey Mudd are all part of the Claremont college consortium), Churchill assessed colonialism “within the context of the United States, both historically and currently, with an emphasis on the treatment of American Indian nations.”
After Churchill lied about being a member of the Keetoowah band, the tribe said that all of Churchill’s “past, present and future claims or assertions of Keetoowah ‘enrollment,’ written or spoken, including but not limited to; biographies, curriculum vitae, lectures, applications for employment, or any other reference not listed herein, are deemed fraudulent by the United Keetoowah Band.”
Churchill first came to public attention on Sept. 12, 2001, when he denounced the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a “technocratic corps at the very heart of America’s global financial empire … braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants.”
Churchill concluded his essay “Some People Push Back: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens” by endorsing the slaughter and comparing the 3,000 murder victims from the United States and 90 other countries to Nazis. “If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I’d really be interested in hearing about it,” he wrote.