Today, the Rocky Mountain News examines the charge that Ward Churchill falsely represented two pieces of federal Indian legislation. Churchill is accused of mischaracterizing the 1887 Dawes Act, which divided a number of reservations into private homesteads, and the 1990 Indian Arts and Crafts Act, which aimed at preventing people who cannot claim Indian ancestry from selling their work as "authentic" Indian wares; in each case, he argues that the government established a "blood quantum" system to determine who is and is not Indian, and that this system was implemented with the ultimate aim of legislating tribes out of existence. The News found that neither law makes any mention of anything resembling a blood quantum.

If only he was right: having dealt with a number of tribes, I'm inclined to wish Congress WOULD abolish them.