The first was something that happened during the run-up to the 1992 Columbian Quincentennial Celebration-to use the official designator-while I was working as a visiting professor at Alfred University.

There were also a few galvanizing experiences which help explain what propelled this particular book into being. So there’s that, and I suppose it speaks for itself. The truth is, although I’m best known by my colonial name, Ward Churchill, the name I prefer is Kenis, an Ojibwe name bestowed by my wife’s uncle. I’m also married to an Ojibwe woman of the Lynx clan, from the Onegaming Reserve in Northwestern Ontario. It comes with the fact that I am myself of Muscogee and Creek descent on my father’s side, Cherokee on my mother’s, and am an enrolled member of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians. This brings up a personal hook in addition to my intellectual motives.

And part of my objective is always to bring consideration of American Indians into the main currents of global intellectual discourse, rather than playing to the idea that we’re an exotic sideline, of relevance only to “specialists” of one sort or another. My purpose was to be able to really stretch out, explain, and fully contextualize my use of the term genocide and the appropriateness of its application to the question of what happened-and is still happening-to American Indians over the past five centuries.

The first question people ask about my book A Little Matter of Genocide1 is where it came from or why I wrote it.

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