Indians Are Us? Culture and Genocide in Native North America.

• Position: Brief Article

Indians Are Us? Culture and Genocide in Native North America By Ward Churchill Common Courage Press (P.O. Box 702, Monroe, ME 04951). 382 pp. $29.95, cloth; $14.95, paper.

American Indian Movement activist and University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill continues the work he began with his books Marxism and Native Americans and, more directly, Fantasies of the Master Race, with this collection of essays that will go far to explain--if you haven't yet got it--why Native Americans aren't amused by the Tomahawk Chop made famous by World Series fans of the Atlanta Braves, or by Chief Wahoo, the mascot of the Cleveland Indians. (Just take a look at two illustrations: Chief Wahoo side by side a cartoon image of a Jew reproduced from the pages of Der Sturmer, 1933.) Churchill's essays are intelligent and polemical and, like the polemics by members of minorities and otherwise-oppressed groups (women, for example), sometimes they go too far but in the process stretch our minds. An essay that explores the language...