Glenn T. Morris is an American academic and Native American activist.
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Morris was born c. 1955 [1] at Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri, where his father was stationed in the United States Army. He was the seventh of eight children. Morris grew up primarily in Denver, Colorado and Phoenix, Arizona and is a 1973 graduate of East High School in Denver. Morris claims to be of Shawnee descent through his father.
He is an associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado at Denver where he directs the Fourth World Center for the Study of Indigenous Law and Politics.[2]
Morris has also served as a delegate to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (now the United Nations Human Rights Council), and the U.N. Working Group on Indigenous Populations, where he provided contributions to the drafting of the U.N.Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
He came to national attention in the early 1990s for his anti-Columbus Day protests with the American Indian Movement of Colorado, of which he formerly served as Co-Director and is now a member of the Leadership Council. In 1991 he was arrested, then acquitted, for his participation in the first such protest. He was subsequently arrested and acquitted in 2000 and 2004 with hundreds of other indigenous people. In 2007, he was arrested with 82 others, and was convicted of a municipal code violation of disrupting a public assembly. That conviction is on appeal as of December 2008. Morris has said that the purpose of the protests is to expose the racism inherent to the Discovery Doctrine and the celebration of Christopher Columbus as a state and national hero. He has worked closely with Ward Churchill, and the two have written articles together.
The American Indian Movement, which is not associated with the American Indian Movement of Colorado, has called Morris "another Caucasian American masquerading as an Indian".[1]