Colorado Professor Faces Claims of Academic Fraud

Several professors have alleged that in his writings, Churchill distorted events surrounding a smallpox outbreak among Indians in North Dakota, as well as the facts concerning requirements for tribal identity.

"If you read his writings, you will find extremist Indian nationalist ideologies and claims of history that just don't feel right," said Thomas Brown, an assistant professor of sociology at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, who has researched Churchill's work. "Then I came across this story of genocide, and I thought: 'Why didn't I hear about this before?' As soon as you read his sources, you realize he is making it up."

Brown was referring to an essay in Churchill's book "A Little Matter of Genocide," in which he says the U.S. Army distributed blankets infected with smallpox to the Mandan Indians on the Upper Missouri River in 1837.

"The blankets had been gathered from a military infirmary in St. Louis, where troops infected with the disease were quarantined," Churchill wrote. "Although the medical practice of the day required the precise opposite procedure, Army doctors ordered the Mandans to disperse once they exhibited signs of the infection. The result was a pandemic among the Plains Indian nations which claimed at least 125,000 lives."

Churchill cited his source as Russell Thornton, an anthropology professor at UCLA specializing in American Indian studies.

Yet when Brown compared Thornton's account of what happened to Churchill's, he found serious discrepancies. Thornton, in a 1987 book, said nothing about the U.S. Army handing out blankets infected with smallpox.

Thornton said a steamboat came up the river June 20, 1837, stopped at Ft. Clark -- in what is now North Dakota -- then arrived at a Mandan village.

"Some aboard the steamer had smallpox when the boat docked. It soon spread to the Mandan, perhaps by deckhands who unloaded merchandise, perhaps by chiefs who went aboard a few days later, or perhaps by women and children who went aboard at the same time," Thornton wrote.

In Thornton's account, the death toll was between 20,000 and 30,000, not the 125,000 Churchill wrote of.