The charge: Misrepresentation (Special Report: The Churchill files series, part 5 of 5)

Are Ward Churchill's claims of American Indian ancestry valid? Our findings: Genealogical records, DNA dont support assertions.

Eleven-year-old Joshua Tyner was hiding in a tree near his family's backwoods Georgia home when marauding Indians shot him and he fell dead to the ground.

Searching for a link: Ken Tyner, 64, of San Diego, is a distant relative of Ward Churchill. Tyner underwent DNA testing last year and found that his ancestor Richard Tyner, who is Churchill's fifth-great-grandfather, wasn't Indian. Churchill's belief in the Tyner family legend of Indian heritage is at the core of his disputed identity as an Indian.

Joshua Tyner didn't die in that bloody raid sometime around 1778, although the Indians scalped his mother and kidnapped his two teenage sisters.

In fact, Joshua Tyner lived a long and fruitful life and produced many descendants - including University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill, whose disputed claims of Indian ancestry are tied to yet another family legend:

However, an extensive genealogical search by the Rocky Mountain News identified 142 direct forebears of Churchill and turned up no evidence of a single Indian ancestor among them - including Joshua.

The News also located two male descendants of Richard Tyner - Joshua Tyner's father - who underwent DNA tests last year. The tests showed that the Tyner line goes back to northern European ancestry with no hint of male Indian blood.

For more than a century, descendants of Richard Tyner's Georgia brood have conducted a fruitless search for proof of their rumored Indian roots, spurred on by a tantalizing story that Joshua Tyner may have spent the last years of his life living among Indians in Illinois, practicing herbal medicine.

In the 1890s, one of them pursued a case to the U.S. Supreme Court, demanding to be included in the formal allotment of land to Indians - and was rejected as a non-Indian.

In 1936, Illinois historian Nannie Gray Parks wrote to the National Archives seeking Revolutionary War pension information on Joshua Tyner, asserting the legend that he was the son of a Cherokee - a story Churchill has repeated.

Churchill has said he was 10 when his mother and grandmother passed on to him the family lore of Indian ancestry. Dan Debo, his younger half brother, backs that up.

"We were told when we were kids by our mom and grandma that we had Indian blood in us," Debo, who lives in California, wrote to the News.

Today, many of the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-generation Tyner descendants believe the legend and continue to search for the elusive Indian link. Others simply ignore it.

That decision lies at the heart of an investigation by CU, which has charged its standing committee on research misconduct with ruling whether Churchill's claim of Indian heritage has been a ruse by the professor to bolster his credibility as an Indian scholar.

Churchill has said that he is either 1/16th or 3/16ths Cherokee from his mother's side, while also claiming Creek Indian heritage on his father's side. But he has battled complaints for years - mostly from within the American Indian activist community - that he isn't Indian at all.

In 1993, when a campus news article challenged Churchill on his ancestry claims, he responded by naming several people and implying that they proved his roots.

But the News has determined that the people he named either were not Indians or were not his relatives.

Churchill also told the article's author that Joshua's father was a Cherokee named Tushali.

Records on Tushali - whose name was spelled by whites as Tsali, Toochalee and other variants - show that he was a Cherokee brave who was executed about 1838, ostensibly for killing U.S. soldiers who were removing his family from their home as part of a forced Indian exodus that came to be called the Trail of Tears.

Moreover, Tushali didn't live in the same part of the country as Joshua's family. Tushali lived near the North Carolina-Tennessee border, not in eastern North Carolina, where Joshua is believed to have been born in 1767.

Churchill's claim also is undermined by written records showing Richard Tyner was in fact Joshua's father.

Joshua is listed as a son in Richard Tyner's 1824 will. Joshua referred to Richard Tyner's farm as the home of "my father," and noted Richard's death in his family bible, calling him "my father."

Churchill reported last month to the CU committee that he meets three of the four criteria for determining whether he is Indian.

Those three criteria are self-identification as an Indian, acceptance within the Indian community, and tribal affiliation - none of which require proof of Indian parentage.

"What's to address?" he said. "No, I'm not going to spend the rest of my life talking about my ancestry. That's a slam-dunk made case."

The News' genealogical research was conducted both in-house and in concert with several outside researchers.

Jim Paine, 51, of Hartsel, who heads several Internet database companies, maintains an anti-Churchill site at www.pirateballerina.com.

He worked with Bill Cullen, 35, a New Jersey police officer who plans to become a professional genealogist.

Ties to a past: William Cullen Tyner, one of the Tyner men who share a common ancestor with Ward Churchill — namely, Richard Tyner, a homesteader in Georgia in the late 1700s.

The investigation relied on census reports, colonial-era deeds, wills, veterans' records, draft registrations, marriage licenses, several Indian censuses, applications for Indian inclusion in a settlement of treaty violations, and state records such as lists of entrants in giveaways of former Indian lands.

The analysis also tapped into extensive research already conducted by genealogists in other branches of the family, none of whom were aware that Churchill was one of their relatives.

While the News found a large clan of Tyners among the Cherokee, they aren't related to the Joshua Tyner branch from which Churchill descends.

Dennis Ward, 65, a military career guidance specialist at Fort Sill in Lawton, Okla., and a registered Cherokee who is descended from the Indian Tyners, has tried for years to find any connection to Churchill's Tyners.

"I have never seen any real documentation as it pertains to Joshua Tyner having Indian blood," said Ward, one of the most active Tyner family researchers.

Ward, described by one Tyner genealogist as the most knowledgeable in the family, also had never heard of a link between Tushali and the Tyners.

On the other hand, the News' examination found plenty of evidence that Joshua - who became an Indian fighter in Georgia after the raid that killed his mother - was white, as was the rest of his family.

The legend that he went off during the last few years of his life to live as an Indian has been in the family for more than a century, although the first known mention came decades after his death.

There is no evidence to support it, just the odd circumstance that his wife of 45 years, who died in 1842, four years after Joshua, is buried alone in Wilson Cemetery in Cambria, Ill.

The legend is that Joshua was buried in an Indian-style mound by the Big Muddy River in Blairsville, Ill. In 1930, a state highway crew building a new bridge there unearthed a suspected Indian burial site. But the remains were never identified. They were reburied in an unmarked grave that is lost to history.

A local Illinois history book written in 1876, within folks' living memory of Joshua Tyner, referred to him and other pioneers as pure white with no Indian blood.

"We're not really sure, to be candid with you," said Ken Tyner, 64, a retired Army sergeant living in San Diego who is a sixth-generation descendant of Richard Tyner. "Everybody's always speculated about having Indian blood, but I don't know where it comes from."

Ken is descended from Joshua's younger brother, Noah, and is Churchill's fifth cousin once removed - a relationship he knew nothing about until contacted by the News.

Ken Tyner and his half brother underwent DNA testing last year as part of their own genealogical research, learning that Richard Tyner was of northern European descent, not Indian.

Some descendants believe Richard's first wife - the woman killed and scalped during the Indian raid - might have been Indian herself. Still others pin their supposed heritage on Richard's second wife, Agnes "Sookie" Dougherty, although the News found evidence that she, too, was white.

In any case, Churchill is descended from Richard and Richard's first wife, variously called Eliza Jane, Elizabeth and Abigail on family trees, through their son Joshua.

Even if Joshua's mother was a full-blooded Cherokee, something for which there is no supporting evidence, Churchill, as her fifth- great-grandson, would have only a tiny fraction - 1/128th - of Indian blood, not close to the 1/16th or 3/16ths he claims.

Despite the mounting evidence that Churchill isn't Indian, academic experts differ on whether it would constitute misconduct for him to pass as one.

If Churchill's work is authoritative, it shouldn't lose its credibility if it is revealed that he isn't an Indian, said ethics expert Kenneth Pimple at Indiana University.

"To some people, I have no doubt, Churchill's work would still be considered highly valuable," Pimple said. "To others, it might be fatally tainted by such a revelation.

"But should such a revelation have any impact on the assessment of his work? If his writings have any authority of their own, it should not."

But Churchill gains credibility by claiming Indian status, countered scholar Russell Thornton, an enrolled Cherokee and a UCLA professor whose work Churchill is accused of misrepresenting.

"I don't think the type of people who are his audience would give him near that much attention if he were not seen as an Indian," he said.

There's still another way to look at the question, according to Pimple, and that's what Churchill truly believes about his background, regardless of the objective truth of it.

"If Churchill's mother told him that he had Native American ancestry, it is reasonable for him to believe this to be true," Pimple said. "Even if further research should show that his mother had been wrong, it would be difficult to make a case that Churchill intended to fool anyone by claiming Native American ancestry."

Belief in the Tyner Indian legends is widespread among the descendants. The News found true believers in Illinois, California, Florida and Georgia.

"All the family believes, earnestly, they are descended from Indians," said Charla Schroeder Murphy of the Williamson County, Ill., Historical Society.

"I don't believe Mr. Churchill was trying to pass himself off as something he's not, but something that generations of Tyners have embraced and believed."

CU, however, could have cause for action if it found the legends are untrue and that Churchill knew it, Pimple said.

"I should think that in general, intentionally lying about one's credentials, which in this case might reasonably include ancestry, would be considered academic misconduct," Pimple said. "The key is demonstrating, by an appropriate standard of evidence, intent to deceive."

In his response to CU's investigation, Churchill said he qualifies as an Indian under three of the four methods his attorney said are commonly used for determining Indian heritage.

• One, Churchill calls himself an Indian, although experts say such self-identification is the least meaningful. CU, however, said in 1994, in response to a complaint about Churchill's claimed ethnicity, that it recognizes self-identification.

• The second test is whether a person is regarded within the greater Indian community as a member, although this acceptance doesn't need to be based on demonstrated Indian bloodlines, either. Churchill's acceptance primarily comes from a confederation of Indian rights activists who support his writings and teachings. One of them is noted Indian activist Russell Means.

"Ward is my brother," Means has said. "Ward has followed the ways of indigenous people worldwide."

• The third test is whether someone is enrolled in a tribe. Churchill says that his May 1994 associate membership in the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma fulfills this requirement. But as the Keetoowah noted during a war of words with Churchill last month, the associate membership was not an actual tribal enrollment, but more of an honorary membership "because he could not prove any Cherokee ancestry."

"Mr. Churchill was never enrolled as a member," the Keetoowah said, making a distinction between tribal enrollment and the associate status that didn't require proof of Indian ancestry.

The tribe voted a month after granting Churchill's associate membership to stop giving them out, and said it erased all of the existing ones.

Churchill said the tribe is free to revoke his 1994 associate membership, but not to deny giving it.

"What it does not have a right to do is falsify history at its own convenience," he said.

Churchill obtained his Keetoowah membership shortly after being involved in a run-in with a rival faction of the American Indian Movement led by Vernon Bellecourt, who accused Churchill of masquerading as an Indian.

• The final method for determining Indian heritage is to identify an Indian ancestor - the only method Churchill didn't use in his 50-page report to the university's investigating committee, according to a description of the confidential response by Churchill's attorney, David Lane.

For Churchill's claims of 1/16th or 3/16ths Cherokee blood to be true, between one and three of his 16 great- great-grandparents would have to be full-blooded Indians, or six of his 32 third-great-grandparents and so on.

If it all came from his mother, as he has sometimes said, she would have to be nearly half Indian herself.

But all of Churchill's 16 great- great-grandparents are known. Not a single one was a full-blooded Indian, nor is there evidence any were part Indian. All but two are listed as white on census records from the 19th century. For those two, who could not be located on a census, their children were listed as white.

Churchill has said he derives Creek Indian heritage from his father, the late Jack Churchill.

But in a 1993 interview with the CU student who wrote the campus newspaper article questioning his heritage, Churchill said he knew nothing about his father's ancestry.

His father and mother divorced when Churchill was an infant. Jack Churchill became a high school teacher in Petersburg, Ill., dying in 1989 at the age of 65.

"I met my father one time," Churchill told then-CU student Jodi Rave. "I didn't ask him too many family questions or other questions, and I really never tried to pursue it, or never really pursued him, because it seemed kind of bad for him."

Yet the next year, when he was up for associate membership with the Keetoowah, Churchill told the tribe that his father had Creek Indian heritage. The Creek Indians inhabited the area that became the southeast U.S., bordering Cherokee lands. They frequently warred with the Cherokee.

"I was asked if I wanted to try to document my father's side of things," Churchill said in a July 1994 statement published in an Indian newspaper after the Keetoowah meeting, "because he was at least as much Indian as mom. But he's dead now. I never knew him, and I don't know my relatives on that side. So I just let it go."

The News' genealogical search, however, found that his father's ancestors came not from Creek Indian territory, but from New England, Virginia, Tennessee, Iowa, Canada, Ireland, Scotland and England.

Great-great-grandmother Jane McNeeley, for instance, told an 1880 census taker in Illinois that her father was born in Scotland and her mother in Ireland. She was born in Canada.

McNeeley's husband, Nicholas Gorsuch, came from parents born in Maryland, census records state, and the family hailed from England.

His father's father, also named Ward Churchill, is listed as white in the 1920 census, His draft card listed him as "Caucasian." He and his wife, Ethel Janes, were restaurant keepers in Rushville, Ill., where he later served several terms as city clerk.

In the 1930 census, they were still in Rushville, as was their 5-year-old son, Jack Churchill, who became Ward's father 17 years later. Jack is listed as white.

Churchill, in his 1993 interview with Rave, also was mistaken about the record for Joshua Tyner.

Churchill moved Joshua up at least one generation, misplaced him in Indian lands and said that Joshua was moved from Tennessee in the mid-1830s, implying that he was part of the forced removal of Cherokees along the Trail of Tears.

"Now on my mother's side, their people coming up north, well, they got moved, they didn't just come north out of southern Tennessee," he told Rave. "Beginning about 1835, to around 1845, that's when they shifted."

Joshua and his brother, Noah, married sisters Winifred and Priscilla Teasley. Together they left Georgia between 1800 and the fall of 1801, according to family historians, moving to Tennessee's northern border with Kentucky - not the Cherokee lands of southern Tennessee as Churchill said. The area where Joshua and Noah went had been settled by whites 20 years earlier.

Contrary to what Churchill told Rave, Joshua wasn't moved out of Tennessee in the 1830s, but left with his family about 1816 and is recorded as being one of the first white settlers in what soon would become Franklin County, Ill.

By the mid-1830s, when the government forced Cherokees, half Cherokees and white spouses of Indians from Georgia, Joshua was actually at the end of his pioneer life in Illinois.

Facts surrounding the infamous U.S. Indian Removal Act of 1830 give more indication that the Georgia Tyners were not part-Indian.

Descendants of Richard Tyner and both his wives remained in northeast Georgia rather than being rounded up and sent to Oklahoma.

Joshua Tyner was 71 when he died near Blairsville, Ill., on the day after Christmas in 1838, leaving behind his wife and numerous children who went on to have families of their own in the area.

One of those descendants, Maralyn Allen, married Jack Churchill and gave birth to their son, Ward, in 1947.

While some family speculation has centered on Joshua's mother - the unfortunate woman scalped by Indians - the scant history on her indicates she was white.

The most prevalent version of the legend is that Joshua's mother was kidnapped as a girl by Cherokees in South Carolina and forced to marry a Cherokee chief. She bore him a son, said to be Joshua, and when he was 3, the girl's father tracked them down and rescued them.

This account is improbable. Joshua's mother was not a girl at the time he was born; she had at least three older children and had been married in North Carolina to Richard Tyner.

That's unlikely, too. A baby born to a Cherokee mother and white father in late 1700s Georgia would have been raised as Indian, according to Indian scholar John Finger, a retired University of Tennessee historian. All of the Tyner children, including Joshua, were raised as white.

Last year's DNA testing on Richard Tyner's male descendants is silent on whether Joshua's mother was or wasn't Indian. That would require a different test.

The DNA test on a male descendant can only trace the male's Y chromosome to one of the 18 major groupings of human ethnicity, according to Bennett Greenspan of Family Tree DNA, the organization that did the Tyner testing.

DNA mutations can mar efforts to link male lines, cautioned Ranajit Chakraborty, professor and director of the Center for Genome Information at the University of Cincinnati's College of Medicine.

Even if Churchill tested his own DNA, it couldn't show Indian heritage from the Tyners. That's because there are four female ancestors in the line of seven people from Joshua to Churchill.

To find out if Joshua's mother was part Indian, Greenspan said, the mitochondrial DNA of a direct female descendant must be tested.

With the DNA trail to Richard Tyner showing that he was white, turning to the paper trail indicates much the same.

Richard Tyner was a slave owner. While some Cherokees owned slaves as time went on, that would have been rare in the late 1700s.

"It would be unusual for Cherokees to hold slaves that early," historian Finger said.

There is also evidence that the legend of Richard Tyner's second wife being part Cherokee is untrue. Old Georgia records list several of "Sookie" Dougherty's offspring as white. Richard Tyner Jr. is listed with his father as an entrant in the 1807 Georgia Land Lottery. That giveaway of land that the state acquired from Creek Indians was restricted to free white males or their widows.

Marriage records from the early 1800s show the Tyner sons and daughters listed in the pages of "whites" rather than "coloreds."

And in another lottery in 1827 to parcel out former Cherokee lands - also restricted to whites - three Tyner descendants were eligible.

While these are strong indications that there was no Indian blood in the Tyner family, it is not clear and final proof.

But of all the records that make a racial distinction, not a single one says Indian.

What complicates the written record is the "cultural" fact that in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, there were instances of mixed- blood Indians passing for white.

Finger, the Tennessee historian, said it is possible that backwoods whites who had children with Indian women could pass them off as white.

"In a frontier area, there may be more acceptance of a person of mixed blood being perceived as white," he said.

Still, none of the documentation that Joshua Tyner left indicates that he considered himself part Indian.

Joshua identified himself as white to census takers in both the 1820 and 1830 Illinois censuses. He later wrote an account of fighting Indians in Georgia as part of the Revolutionary War army.

On Sept. 3, 1832, shortly after his 65th birthday, Joshua applied for a federal pension based on his military service. In court testimony, Joshua said he was a private and enlisted as a spy, "ranging the frontier against the hostile Indians."

In an 1876 history of Williamson County, Ill. - which was formed from the part of Franklin County that Joshua Tyner homesteaded - author Milo Erwin minced no words in his praise for the area's pioneers, Joshua included, who he said settled on the Eight Mile Prairie in 1816.

They were all pure-blooded white men, Erwin avowed. "They were poor, but of unmixed blood. There were no half-breeds, neither of Indians nor other obnoxious races."

Churchill Responds

June 06, 2005

Ward Churchill responds to our series

Posted by John Temple at 12:34 PM

The CU professor refused to answer any questions from the Rocky Mountain News in the week leading up to publication of our 'Churchill files' series, but on Saturday he sent reporter Charlie Brennan an e-mail contesting several aspects of our report.

Read his e-mail, my response and reader comments, which are found after Churchill's e-mail.

Here's Churchill's e-mail.-----Original Message-----
From: Ward.Churchill@colorado.edu [mailto:Ward.Churchill@colorado.edu]
Sent: Saturday, June 04, 2005 1:05 PM

To: Brennan, Charlie
Cc: dlane@killmerlane.com
Subject: Re: World Trade Center question

Charlie, Charlie, Charlie.

Go back and listen to the mass media reportage for the afternoon/evening of 9-
11. THAT'S the relevent date, 'cause that's when I turned the "little
Eichmann's" phrase? Eh?

You're gonna hear the 4,500 number tossed around repeatedly (that is, of
course, before Orin Hatch decided that 7,000 sounded better).

So, I didn't get anything "wrong." I simply laid out what my thinking was,
generally speaking, AT THE TIME. I told you that in my e-mail last night --
note the words "immediate aftermath" -- but apparently you "overlooked" it?

How embarrassing for a guy concerned with others' "glaring errors" (yeah,
yeah, I know... It wasn't your fault).

And what the numbers in the 911 Commission Report might have to do with
anything at all -- given that it was published in 2004 while my book was came
out in 2003 -- is a mystery I'm eager for you to resolve.

On the broader front, your colleagues -- Bernie, the Kevins and Laura --
managed to "fabricate" a number of basic facts in their expositions.
Highlights include the following:

* I never set foot in Vietnam in 1967, and never said I did. Nor do any of the

records y'all have bandied about say I did. My tour was January-November 1968.

* I was not promoted to full professor in 1991. That was the year I was hired
as an associate professor.

* I did NOT say I "rewrote the Cohen essay" at Jaimes' request, and I defy
Bernie/Kevin to produce the segment of tape wherein they claim I did.

Such "fraudulent" reporting, and in so few column inches (I mean, the
journalistic profession DOES have "standards" on factual accuracy, doesn't

it?) THIS, after Bernie so mercilessly plagiarised John LaVelle in his initial
piece comparing my prose to Jaimes' (juxtapositions lifted straight out of
LaVelle's end notes, with no attribution whatsover).

Boy, I'd love to see what y'all could do with a booklength effort.

Pass this around to the crew, along with my expectation that there'll be the
usual round of retractions/corrections, based on the collectivity of
your "scholarship."

And, by the way, tell Laura she can relax now. She did me such great service
with her piece on the "Water Plot" that I'm inclined to bestow the Paula Zahn
Award on her.

Carry on.
WC

Here's my response.

Point 1 regarding his 9/11 essay.

Ward Churchill on May 26 was presented in writing a question pertaining to his source for the "standard media figure" of 4,500 killed at the World Trade Center - from which he calculated that 3,100 of the dead fit his label of "little Eichmann." He did not respond. He was then e-mailed at 10:46 a.m. Thursday with the same question. He did not respond until 7:58 p.m. Friday, at which time Charlie Brennan had finished work for the day and was not at the office to receive his e-mail. Churchill followed up with a second e-mail (which I've included above) at 1:05 p.m. Saturday, the day the contested story appeared in print.

In the story we said:

The University of Colorado professor overstates the number of people who died there by at least 1,500, even after having two years to revise the Internet essay he says he wrote "from the gut" on the night of Sept. 11, 2001.

Churchill has said that his critics haven't given adequate consideration to the revised, fully annotated version, titled The Ghosts of 9-1-1, published in his 2003 book On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality. (emphasis added)

It is in the newer version from AK Press that he assigns a number to those he describes as the "faceless bureaucrats and technical experts who had willingly (and profitably) harnessed themselves to the task making America's genocidal world order hum with maximal efficiency."

On page 33, in footnote 127, he wrote: "For the record, using the standard media figure of about 4,500 dead at the WTC, my own arithmetic is as follows: Subtracting 300 undocumented workers, 600 documented workers, 100 temp workers, 100 bystanders and 300 firemen from the toll leaves approximately 3,100 little Eichmanns (a tally in which 200-odd police and FBI personnel are most emphatically included)."

But at the time Churchill's book was published, the total number of fatalities had stabilized at a figure far short of 4,500.

It's clear that nowhere in his footnote does Churchill indicate that he is addressing the World Trade Center fatalities only as they were reported in the immediate "aftermath." (Those numbers did go as high, in the first day as 10,000, but soon started dropping dramatically.) The word "aftermath," or a synonym for "aftermath," appears nowhere in the footnote at issue, published by Churchill two years after the fact, when numbers had stabilized for the World Trade Center alone at 3,000 or lower. The News included the 9/11 Commission Report figure of more than 2,981 for all three 9/11 attack sites, merely to indicate that the numbers continued to go down, and made note of the fact that the 9/11 Commission Report was not published until 2004, after Churchill's essay.

Point 2 regarding Vietnam

We were mistaken about when the professor was in Vietnam. We will publish a correction in Tuesday's paper. The article has already been corrected on our Web site. Churchill was in Vietnam in 1968.

Point 3 regarding when he was appointed full professor

The professor mischaracterizes what we said in the story. In this case, he's wrong.

Here's what the story said:

Tenure: Appointed associate professor in 1991 in the communications department. Received tenure in 1991 in same department after sociology and political science departments rejected him. Memo to communications faculty said that by adding Churchill, the department would be "making our contribution to increasing the cultural diversity on campus (Ward is native American)." CU skipped the traditional six-year period of writing, teaching and reviews by outside scholars at three and six years. Former Dean of Arts and Sciences Charles Middleton pushed for tenure, fearing Churchill would accept offer at California State University at Northridge. But no offer was made by Northridge because he lacked a doctorate and his writings contained more advocacy than scholarship, said George Wayne, a former Northridge official. Appointed full professor and his tenure transferred to ethnic studies department in 1997.

Nowhere does it say he was promoted to full professor in 1991. It says he was appointed full professor in 1997.

Point 4 regarding plagiarism
One of Churchill’s assertions is that he never told News reporters Berny Morson and Kevin Vaughan that he “rewrote” Fay Cohen’s original essay.

However, after listening to his exact words in his interview with Berny and Kevin, it is clear to me that is what he said.
The reporters asked Churchill about the allegations that he had published portions of an essay by Cohen, a Harvard-educated professor at Dalhousie University in Canada, without her permission. Portions of that essay were included in a longer piece in a book compiled by Marie Anne Jaimes, also known as Annette, who at the time was married to Churchill. Churchill had a hand in preparing the essay for the book.
Churchill said he was given material that he then reworked.
Here are his exact words on the subject from his interview with us:
“All I’m going to say about the Fay Cohen essay is that I didn’t write the piece. She didn’t say I wrote the piece. And my function in that, and again is a service, is a function basically about, in the capacity of what you guys call rewrite men. You turn your stuff in tonight. I don’t know whether you still do it that way, but I’ve been at this a long time, and that’s what they used to call it in newsrooms, I remember. Rewrite men. Goes over the injections from the various reporters … Factually, you presumed it’s OK. Your rewrite guys don’t go check your facts. But they make your copy, your composite copy, flow.
“…I’m the only link she (Cohen) can make to it and it’s because of a line that Annette Jaimes, in finalizing the copy for going to press, in the credit section, said that I took the lead role in preparing the piece. And I think I know what she meant. And she was probably trying to give me a thank you or a complement or whatever. I don’t sit around reading credit sections. It’s not my light reading. So I wasn’t aware of that particular framing of it until it came up lately. I probably would have had it changed. I functioned - I have a role in that, and it was to take what was handed to me by the authors, specifically by Jaimes, which may or may not mean she was the lead author, I don’t know. She was the link. She was the book editor. And said, can you go over this and make it read well, which I did. But your rewrite guys are not the authors of your pieces. You are.”

This is what we wrote in the story Saturday Churchill refers to in his e-mail.

Churchill told the News he rewrote Cohen's work and added the work of others at Jaimes' request.

I believe ours is a fair description of what happened based on Churchill's interview with us and his description of himself as a rewrite man.

I wish the professor would answer more of our questions.

===

The series

• Saturday: Overview of the findings

http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/news/churchill/indexDay1.shtml

• Monday: Fabrication charge

http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/news/churchill/indexDay2.shtml

• Tuesday: Plagiarism charge

http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/news/churchill/indexDay3.shtml

• Wednesday: Mischaracterization charge

http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/news/churchill/indexDay4.shtml

• Today: Misrepresentation charge

http://denver.rockymountainnews.com/news/churchill/indexDay5.shtml

Ward Churchill responds to our series

http://blogs.rockymountainnews.com/denver/temple/archives/2005/06/ward_churchill.html#more

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