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American Indian Movement

WRA 125 Assignment 2
28 October 2005
An Internal "Cold War" – U.S. Government Versus AIM
For the past 50 years, the United States Government has been conducting disinformation campaigns against minority groups such as the Black Panther Party, Black Liberation Army and the Palestine Solidarity Committee. The American Indian Movement (AIM) was not an exception. Propaganda was only one of the many tactics adopted by the government that AIM encountered. Others include assassinations, unprovoked armed confrontations and "fabrication of evidence in criminal cases" (Churchill 219). I will be evaluating Ward Churchill's article "Renegades, Terrorists, And Revolutionaries" on the government's propaganda war against AIM and will also be analyzing his claims as well as some of his rhetorical strategies within his writing. Were the U.S. government and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) really guilty of oppressing AIM as Churchill claims?
Ward Churchill is Creek-Cherokee, a member of Keetoowah Band Cherokee, and was born on October 2, 1947. In addition to being a professor of ethnic studies of American Indian studies at the University of Colorado, Churchill serves as a co-director of the Colorado chapter of AIM and vice chairman of the American Indian Anti-Defamation Council. Not only was Churchill a past national spokesperson for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, he is also a prolific writer on issues affecting indigenous people and has written numerous articles and books including Indians Are Us?, Since Predator Came, Marxism and Native Americans and From A Native Son.

Choo 2
Churchill claims that during the 1970s, the U.S. government carried out a "counterinsurgency war against the American Indian Movement" (Churchill 219) and their objective was to oppress and halt the American Indian Movement's ability to "pursue an agenda of Indian treaty rights, land recovery, and national sovereignty in North America" (Churchill 219) making them a target of negative...