Rating: 
Summary: Finally, History that makes sense
Review: It doesn't take a brain surgeon to see that the orthodox version of history, that is presented as official, makes little sense at all. As a kid I remember feeling like American Indian History was the most worthwhile subject to study. I had many questions and the confusing answers I got made hardly any sense. I always got the feeling that teachers and history books were avoiding the subject where ever possible. Finally!! I found someone who is brave enough to speak the truth, I say truth because I've checked the sources and seen for myself that not only were my suspicions right, they were understated.
This book is a must, not just for American Indian matters, but for everyone who cares about people and cultures abroad. PEACE
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Summary: A book that deserves 10 stars
Review: A meticulously written book by Ward Churchill. This book has quickly become one of my favorite books. The amount of information and detailed descriptions with piles and piles of sourced materials. He did a suberb job on this book and he highlighted the truths concerning a destructive and damning part of United States and early Colonial History. I appreciate that I had the oppurtunity to learn of this book and read it. It makes me proud of my fellow Coloradoan! He is an asset to the University of Colorado (I am sure) and thank you for putting such effort into a book to share with all of us the atrocities delivered on the Native Americans.
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Summary: Another must read
Review: A very important book that encyclopedically details 5 centuries of genocide in North America. More bitter medicine that we need. This should be required reading - but that would throw the whole project of western "civilization" into doubt. Do not read if you have clinically significant depression. For the rest of us (including the mildly depressed)- suck it up. You might wake up stronger the next morning - and START DOING SOMETHING ABOUT IT. This treatise is complementary to Churchill's "Roosting Chickens". I am grateful for both.
Also recommended- Stannard's "American Holocaust".
Rating: 
Summary: A very well referenced book.
Review: Almost everything he quotes is backed up with references and it paints a logical picture of American/European hypocracy, past and present. I gave it 4 stars because it was fairly formal and intellectual which made reading it like reading a law book.
The likely truthes in this book will be painful to those who have a high emotional investment in the euphemistic version of history taught in schools.
The acidic remarks by the only negative reviewer here is the signature, kneejerk and strictly emotional response to information that would contradict the substance or foundation of what they base their "pride", in America, on.
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Summary: THIS IS THE MOTHER LODE !
Review: FROM:()Dear Reader, ... Listen-Up, spuds! ... If you want to read ONE book that puts it all into the proper perspective, then you've got to read THIS book. You GOTTA! ... It's "a good grab!" Not only does it cover the 500 years - from 1500 to 2000 - of European invasion and conquest; it covers them IN DEPTH. The footnotes, alone, are worth the price of the book. ... I took two courses in college on the Native Indigenous People of the western hemisphere. Almost everything that I learned ( and things that I didn't learn! ) on the Indians in those two college courses is covered in this excellent book.() ... Read this book! ... Read the whole thing, from cover to cover, and you will truly understand the meaning of the word, "genocide." Everything will finally appear before you in its historically appropriate and proportional perspective. When it comes to "man's inhumanity to man", it is absolutely UNQUESTIONABLE that there have been no greater victims, over a longer period of time, than the Native Indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere. ... There is only ONE solution to this madness: awareness. Reading this book increases your awareness - big time! Professor Ward Churchill ( who teaches in the Ethnic Studies department at The University of Colorado, in Boulder ) should be commended for a great, literary work of justice to the people of this continent - of which he is one. ... Unless and until we ALL realize the archetypal truth that we are ALL ONE and "all related" ( "mitakuye oyasin" - as The People say ) - and that we are ALL responsible for making right what was done wrong by all those "wasichu" ( white men ) who came before us - we will NEVER be on good term with the Indians. We ALL have benefited from the corrupt and greedy, unjust actions of the past. It is up to all of US - who live here now - to make honorable restitution. The FIRST thing we can do is to give them back some of their sacred lands that were stolen from them: THE BLACK HILLS. "The Shining Mountains" in western Colorado is another special place that should be returned to its rightful owners; and there are many others all across this great land, which once ALL belonged to its original inhabitants before Europeans arrived who conveniently forgot the meaning of the word, "share." Until these few good deeds are done, it will always be "more of the same old road apples" coming out of our collective mouths, as far as the Indians are concerned. ... Read this book - and then cry, get mad, and get up and DO something about it! This book is all you will ever need to put a fire in your belly that will glow like a firefly in heat! - The Aeolian Kid
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Summary: An incomparable volume.
Review: Funny thing. The earlier reviewer who alleged that Ward Churchill "has changed tribes several times" forgot to mention where, or what tribes he's supposedly claimed. I've got copies of things he's published and interviews he's given all the way back to 1969, and can find no evidence that he's ever identified as anything other than "Cherokee," "Creek/Cherokee" and, for the past few years, "Keetoowah Cherokee" (which is of course a particular Cherokee Band, to which Bill Clinton does NOT belong). One is certainly entitled to one's opinion of Churchill, but lies are not opinions. They're just lies. So much for the "issue" of Churchill's ethnicity, as if it had bearing on either the merits of his argument or the eloquence with which he presents it in the first place. A LITTLE MATTER OF GENOCIDE is a superb book, far more comprehensive and better documented than Stannard's AMERICAN HOLOCAUST (note that the reviewer who complained about inaccurate footnotes offered no examples). This is probably the best and most important work yet from one Native North America's best and most important writer/scholars.
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Summary: Our collective conscience would rather disbelieve
Review: The book is well written with meticulous citations. The author makes his points aggressively and with a degree of anger, and rightly so. While our collective conscience would rather put the Native American slaughter behind us, Churchill rebukes such apologism and reminds us that the destruction of native peoples and cultures has not ceased, it has simply become a victim of its own successes. It is tempting for the culpable to point to differences in intent to set the Nazi regime apart from European colonialism. While guilt may rest more heavily on Hitler and his Third Riech, it is merely because during the Indian holocaust there were greater numbers of guilty to share the crime.
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Summary: A great, if dry book
Review: This book is packed full of information for so relatively small a number of pages and at times, though not always, the prose style is, well, rather dry, to use the most polite term. There are streches where one cannot read more than two or three sentences without being directed to look down at large footnotes. But Mr. Churchill is man of immense learning and passion. In this inconclastic study he engages in a comparative study of genocide and its academic treatment with a specific focus on the history of Native Americans vis a vis the U.S. government and the dominant white race. He starts off by dissecting the opinions of such professional holocaust exclusionists like Deborah Lipstadt, Yehuda Bauer, and Steven J. Katz. These brethren have made it their duty, allbeit ito fully ingrain in mainstream ideology the idea that the holocaust of Jews was an utterly unique even in human history; in contrast, they have written, the genocide of Slavs and especially gypsies by the Nazis, to say nothing of the genocide of Native Americans, Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge, Africans by the European powers, etc. etc. is not worthy of the same consideration. Professor Lipstadt goes even far as to say that people who say that they are are anti-semitic holocaust deniers. Obviously they do this so as to provide an ideological bulwark of vicitimization so as to deflect criticism of Israel and its continuing dispossession and brutality against Palestinians. He goes on to examine the barbaric treatment of Indians in Latin America in modern times, two most prominent examples being that of the Ache indians in Paraguay by the U.S. backed neonazi dictator Alfredo Stroessner, whose fate managed to elicit a few crocodile tears from the great holocaust exculsivist Elie Wiesel, and the peoples of the Amazonian basin in Brazil. The next sections are probably the most important. He provides a pretty damm near exhaustive account of European-Indian relations. He examines the activities of the Spaniards, the first European colonisers as they conducted a campaign of wholesale mass murder, rape, pillage, starvation and slave labor against the Indians who crossed their path. He says that their is no real evidence for the Aztecs allegedly commonplace custom of "ritual sacrafice" of up to twenty thousand people a year and says that it was an excuse contrived by Hernan Cortes and the other conquistadors to justify their murderous policies and was only "confirmed" by indians being forced under torture to testify during the Inquisition in Spain. He compares this theory offered up by respectable intellectuals to the theory of "Jewish ritual murder" contrived by their counterparts in Germany in the 1930's. He goes on to examine the activities of the French (far less genocidal towards the Indians, if only for tactical reasons) and the greatest of mass killers of them all, the Anglo-Saxon races. He traces all the great Indian killers of American history and people who provide their ideological justification from Jeffery Ameherst to some of the soldiers marching through the streets of Denver after the Sand Creek massacre in 1864 with Indian male genitals for tabacco pouches and Indian female genitalia accross their saddles. The policy from the original Jamestown settlers to George Washington to Andrew Jackson to the settlers in Northern California to George Custer was pretty much along the following lines, often quite explicitly stated: destroy women and children, destroy their economies and infrastructure, exterminate or push them further west, disregard any treaties we might sign with them, they are only cockroaches. In the next section he traces U.S. Indian policy since roughly 1890 after the Indian Allotment removal act and the implementation of the "spare the man, kill the Indian policy." It was gradually discovered that Indian reservations were places of great mineral wealth, so they were prevented from being dismantled as they were scheduled to be and their indigenous tribal structures were eliminated in favor of a colonial type system that could put the government and corporations in a better position to exploit those resources. He points out that the high rates of cancer resulting among Indians who work or who are forced to live near, for example Uranium Ore or Plutonium based industries or weapons testing sites is more often than not deflected away from the hazardous conditions of the sites and towards theories about the victims getting cancer because of smoking or second hand smoke even though such descriptions fit very few of them. He ends with a discussion of the effort to get a decent revision of the United Nations convention on genocide and examines U.S. and other countries evasions of it. He describes the U.S. as a violent and lawless state, as evidenced by its withdraw from World Court jurisdiction as a result of the 1986 World Court ruling against its terrorist war in Nicaragua, eliciting widespread international condmenation, including from Thatcher's Britain.
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Summary: Another brilliant book by Ward Churchill
Review: This should be read by every student who is learning about "The" Holocaust. It shows that genocide is NOT limited to WW2 and the actions of Nazi Germany. Genocide has been happening all this time (to myriad groups of people) but most are too blind to see it and come to terms with the reality that it could happen in such a WONDERFUL country such as the U.S.
He provides extensive references and footnotes so that the reader could do the research on his or her own. You do not have to take Ward Churchill's word for it. He simply leads the way so one can make up his or her own mind.
Rating:
Summary: Essential reading for responsible US and global citizenship
Review: Today there is no more articulate, erudite, and disturbing writer on US politics than Ward Curchill.
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