Benjamin Whitmer || There will be an official obituary coming to correct the nonsense ones that have been floating around. (As is typical with the NY Times, they can’t even get basic facts like the ages of people right, and half of it was just made up.)
In the meantime, this. Ward was my hero, my mentor, and one of my best friends. There aren’t words for how he changed the way I think, the way I live, and the way I work.
Of course, everything I know about US Indian and foreign policy begins with him. We were friends when he wrote the essay about 9/11, “On the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” that got him fired by the reactionary cowards at the University of Colorado. I even taught his classes for a bit during the run-up to his trumped up firing led by the pinhead fraud Mimi Wesson. As institutions go, there are few more risible than the University of Colorado, and a Denver jury found that he was absolutely fired for his protected speech and not for any purported academic misconduct.
Ward also fostered my interest in firearms, which has been lifelong. About a million years ago, we took our concealed carry class together from Rich Wyatt, who, like happened with most people Ward met, actually came around on some of Ward’s ideas. And I was with Ward when he bought his dream gun, an H&K clone in .308, at the Tanner Gun Show here in Colorado, a visit that turned fraught when they announced over the loudspeaker that he was in attendance and maybe everybody might stop by to tell him what they thought of him. I got on the phone with a buddy from Greeley and asked him to get down there with as many people as he could gather, and we ended up having a number of lively debates about the First and Second Amendments.
But Ward’s interest in firearms was different from my own. As a leader of the American Indian Movement of Colorado and a member of the Keetowah Band of Cherokee, he understood, deeply, the necessity of the right of self defense for oppressed peoples. Like with so much of what he taught me, this became my own stance.
As always, when the Denver and national media came after Ward for writing his 9/11 essay, they didn’t come after him for the substance of his essay. Instead, they came for his identity. He and Russell Means, co-leaders of the American Indian Movement of Colorado, had enemies in the movement who’d been involved in the particularly brutal rape and murder of an activist woman, and they came out in force to accuse Ward of not being a “real Indian.” The media ignored all context, of course, and ran with the headlines they wanted.
But Ward never gave an inch. Not one. He’d said what he meant, and he stood by what he said. And roughly 20 years later, there’s not a word he said that hasn’t been proven true.
With all of this, however, Ward was a man of letters. We don’t use that term very much anymore, but he was. I met him first some thirty years ago, and he altered the course of my life. It was in discussions with him that I started taking crime fiction seriously, along with the themes that have constituted my entire life’s work. No matter what book I named, be it White Jazz, The Confidence Man or Blood Meridian, he had read it, absorbed it, and pointed me at other works by which I might better understand what I was reading. My current project is almost entirely based on the discussions we’ve had.
Ward was not the kind of writer, academic or activist that we’re used to. He was not the kind which I’m sure even exists anymore. He was a Vietnam veteran who was so unmoored by what he saw over there, that he landed in the US after his deployment, Vietnam mud still on his boots, and called a number he’d seen in a magazine for the Students for a Democratic Society. I heard this from him about about eight years ago, when I interviewed him about Vietnam for my novel Evasion, which was dedicated to him. It was then that he told me about his radicalization. And it’s worth remembering that he stuck to the original definition of the word “radical,” which comes from the latin word “root.” To be a radical is to address the root of a problem and this is what he spent his life doing: Addressing the root of US imperial power and genocide, with the clarity that the subjects needed.
Clarity was one of his greatest gifts to those who knew him. Like so many of us, he taught me how to think. There’s not a morning I don’t open the NY Times and start reading against one of their horseshit articles, that I don’t think of him. Not too long ago, my girlfriend and I were visiting Ward and his wife, and I was relaying some hard shit I was dealing with, and was expressing a little too much unwarranted hope. He said, “Well, Ben, at some point hope should have a basis in reality.” Later my girlfriend said, “I’m sure glad he said that to you, because I’d been thinking it, and he’s the only person who you would have listened to.”
I’ve got about a thousand of these stories about times he was there with just the right word when I needed it, or nudged me in a way that changed everything. I’ve had the deepest conversations I’ve ever had with him, and I’ve shared a jail cell with him. Every time you see Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead of Columbus Day on your calendar, that’s in large part him. I know, I was there. The same when you see a young activist talking about colonizers or settler state colonialism. That’s him too.
And I’m hardly alone in this. There are more people than you can count that he did the same for. He was the fiercest intellect I’ve ever known, but he was also the most generous person. If the account of a life is the people you’ve touched, changed, there is no life I’ve ever known that ranked higher.
