"Wielding Words Like Weapons is a collection of acclaimed American Indian Movement activist-intellectual Ward Churchill's essays on Indigenism, selected from material written during the decade 1995-2005. It includes a range of formats, from sharply framed book reviews and equally pointed polemics and op-eds to more formal essays designed to reach both scholarly and popular audiences. The selection also represents the broad range of topics addressed in Churchill's scholarship, including the fallacies of archeological and anthropological orthodoxy such as insistence of 'cannibologists' that American Indians were traditionally maneaters, Hollywood's cinematic degradations of Native people, questions of American Indian identity, the historical and ongoing genocide of North America's Native peoples, and the systematic distortion of the political and legal history of U.S.-Indian relations. Less typical of Churchill's oeuvre is an essay commemorating the passing of Cherokee anthropologist Robert K. Thomas, and another on that of Yankton Sioux legal scholar and theologian Vine Deloria Jr., to each of whom he acknowledges a deep intellectual debt. More unusual still is his moving and profoundly personal effort to come to grips with the life and death of his late wife, Leah Renae Kelly, thereby illuminating in very human terms the grim and lasting effects of Canada's residential schools upon the country's Indigenous peoples" -- Provided by publisher.