A prolific American Indian scholar/activist, Ward Churchill is a founding member of the Rainbow Council of Elders, and longtime member of the leadership council of the American Indian Movement of Colorado. 

In addition to his numerous works on Indigenous history, he has written extensively on U.S. foreign policy and the repression of political dissent, including the FBI’s COINTELPRO operations against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. 

Churchill has written over 20 books, including Fantasies of the Master Race, Struggle for the Land, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, From A Native Son, Critical Issues in Native North America, The COINTELPRO Papers, Indians R Us?, Agents of Repression, Since Predator Came, and A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas. Five of his books have received human rights awards.

Churchill is the former Chair of the University of Colorado, Boulder Ethnic Studies Department, where, until July 2007, he was a tenured Professor of American Indian Studies and where he received numerous awards for his teaching, scholarship and service. Churchill was fired after years of intense debate about issues that include academic freedom and academic integrity. He challenged his dismissal on a variety of grounds related to his First Amendment rights, and asked the Supreme Court to review the case after he lost appeals in Colorado's court system. The U.S. Supreme Court recently declined to hear the case.

In his lectures and numerous published works, Churchill explores the themes of genocide in the Americas, racism, historical and legal (re)interpretation of conquest and colonization, environmental destruction of Indian lands, government repression of political movements, literary and cinematic criticism, and Indigenist alternatives to the status quo.

Churchill is also a past national spokesperson for the Leonard Peltier Defense Committee, has served as a delegate to the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations (as a Justice/Rapporteur for the for the 1993 International People's Tribunal on the Rights of Indigenous Hawaiians), and as an advocate/prosecutor of the First Nations International Tribunal for the Chiefs of Ontario.