*** URGENT *** *** URGENT *** *** URGENT ***
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE .........................................March 28, 1994
UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO PROFESSORS
ATTACK AMERICAN INDIAN WOMAN
AT PRESS CONFERENCE
o AIM Leader Suffers Fractured Wrist
o Ward Churchill Spits in the Face of Wounded Indian Elder
At approximately 10:45 on Monday Morning, March 28, 1994, Carole Standing
Elk, longtime Board Member of the National American Indian Movement and
Director of California AIM, was violently attacked and physically battered by
Ward Churchill and Marie Annette Jaimes, both professors at the University of
Colorado at Boulder.
Mrs. Standing Elk and three other Indian women - all grandmothers and
members of AIM, including Mrs. Standing Elk's 88-year-old mother, Mrs. Barbara
Eastman, a traditional Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota elder from Sisseton, South
Dakota - were attempting to leave the exclusive San Franciso Press Club,
which they had entered to attend a press conference scheduled by Mr.
Churchill, Ms. Jaimes and several of their associates. Churchill and
Jaimes's group were expected to announce the results of a scandalous
"tribunal" that this group had staged the previous two days, wherein this
group had purported to "convict" AIM co-founder Clyde Bellecourt and
National AIM Director Vernon Bellecourt of "complicity in genocide" and
other sensational charges.
As Mrs. Standing Elk and the three other Indian women were exiting from the
Press Club doorway, Jaimes leaped at Mrs. Standing Elk from behind,
knocking off Mrs. Standing Elk's eyeglasses, and began hitting Mrs. Standing
Elk in the face and clawing at the victim while shouting obscenities, leaving
Mrs. Standing Elk with a fractured bone in her wrist and open wounds on her
face and arm. Jaimes was immediately restrained by a nearby San Francisco
police officer; and as Mrs. Standing Elk was attempting to recover from this
violent, unprovoked attack, Ward Churchill lunged toward Mrs. Standing Elk from
where he had been standing near the street curb, leaned over the victim, and
spit in Mrs. Standing Elk's face. Both Mr. Churchill and Ms. Jaimes were
detained by the police for violently attacking Mrs. Standing Elk.
This incident is the latest in a series of vicious attacks on American
Indian people and AIM leaders coordinated and supervised by Ward Churchill,
who recently has been exposed by the national Indian press as a non-Indian
fraudulently posing as a "radical Indian activist" for purpose of marketing
his writings and artwork to an unsuspecting public. Presently, Churchill
is under investigation by the administration of the University of Colorado
for falsely representing himself as an Indian to the university and the
public, and for his long history of violent and threatening conduct toward
American Indian people and AIM leaders.
In November 1993, Mr. Churchill and his associate Glenn Morris, a professor
of political science at the University of Colorado at Denver, were
permanently expelled from AIM and all AIM chapters by unanimous vote of
AIM's National Board of Directors because of these two individuals' many
years of manipulative and subversive activities "misdirecting, disrupting,
and sowing division in order to discredit and neutralize the leadership of
the American Indian Movement." Churchill and Morris's involvement with the
International Indian Treaty Council had been similarly severed in 1986 in a
strongly worded directive issued by that organization's leadership because
of Churchill and Morris's "extremely divisive and damaging" activities.
American Indian Movement leaders believe that this violent attack on Mrs.
Standing Elk by Marie Annette Jaimes and Ward Churchill is in retaliation
for Mrs. Standing Elk's role in forwarding information concerning AIM's
serious grievances against Churchill to the office of Judith Albino,
president of the University of Colorado.
For more information, contact AIM National Director Vernon Bellecourt at
612-721-3914 (Fax 612-721-7826), or California AIM Director Carole Standing
Elk at 415-474-9373 (Fax 415-474-0511). end-end-end-end-end