'The Water Plot' thickens

Essays listing professor as author mirror 1972 work by Canadian dams group

Laura Frank, Rocky Mountain News

Friday, June 3, 2005

He's a bit embarrassed about it now, but 33 years ago, Ulrich Wendt was convinced that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers intended to flood much of northern Canada.

The year was 1972. Wendt was an impressionable young college student who belonged to a grass-roots Canadian environmental group called Dam the Dams Campaign. And in a 12-page pamphlet titled The Water Plot, the group warned of a multibillion-dollar scheme to dam Canada's major rivers and redirect them to the nation's thirsty southern neighbors in the U.S. and Mexico.

But Dam the Dams disbanded a few years later, Wendt and other former members said, no longer fearing what it once thought was an evil, imminent plot.

"If you've read our pamphlet, you know our paranoia at the time," said Wendt, who lived near Thunder Bay, Ontario, when the group was based there. "But our organization died a natural death a long time ago because it turned out there was nothing to it."

Ward Churchill thought otherwise.

Nearly two decades after Dam the Dams released its pamphlet outlining the ill-fated plan, he republished virtually the same work, eventually claiming it as his own.

Dam the Dams published The Water Plot in 1972. In 1989, Churchill published a version of The Water Plot with the same structure, language and information found in the original. He credited that piece to Dam the Dams and his own research organization, Institute for Natural Progress.

In 1991, Churchill took sole credit for another version of The Water Plot that was largely identical to the 1989 version. In 2002, he published a third version of the essay under his own name.

Churchill declined to comment on why he took credit for work done by members of Dam the Dams.

The discovery of the striking similarity between Churchill's essays and the Dam the Dams pamphlet comes as the University of Colorado's standing committee on research misconduct investigates a plagiarism charge against the tenured ethnic studies professor, as well as other allegations of research misconduct.

In the case before the committee, officials at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, contend that an essay on Indian fishing rights - which also was published under the name of Churchill's institute - plagiarizes an essay from a professor there. Churchill has said he never claimed to have written the fishing rights essay, but merely "prepared" it.

The university began its review of Churchill's work in the wake of a national backlash against the professor for likening most victims of the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attacks to Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann, suggesting they deserved their fate.

After various complaints surfaced about Churchill - from the quality of his scholarship to the legitimacy of his claimed American Indian heritage - the standing committee was charged with determining whether he has committed research misconduct. His job could be at stake.

The discovery of an additional instance of possible plagiarism is significant, said Peter Hoffer, a plagiarism expert who helped write the American Historical Association's standards on the topic.

"If you find more examples, then you begin to believe this is someone who is systematically violating the canons of good scholarship," Hoffer said.

There were a number of problems with the Dam the Dams essay by the time Churchill claimed sole authorship in 1991.

The grandiose water-diversion scheme - which Omni magazine once called one of the top 10 worst ideas in U.S. environmental history - was widely considered moot years before Churchill started writing about it.

And Dam the Dams didn't give him permission to take credit for its work, the former members said. In fact, Dam the Dams was long gone by 1989, when Churchill said his research organization collaborated with Dam the Dams on the article.

"It's a sort of laundering or filtering of work," Hoffer said, "in which the reference is more and more diluted. He's gone through several stages until, in the end, he claims the work is his own."

Suggestion of imminence

Massive Canadian water-diversion proposals have been suggested over the years. The largest was championed in the 1960s by California-based engineering giant the Ralph M. Parsons Co. and came to be called the North American Water and Power Alliance. Nothing on the scale of the alliance has been seriously considered in decades.

But those reading Churchill's articles as late as 2002 could have been led to believe that a monstrous disaster was on the verge of happening.

Churchill wrote in a 1989 essay, again in 1991, and as recently as 2002 in his book Struggle for the Land: Native North American Resistance to Genocide, Ecocide and Colonization that the grand scheme was imminent. It awaits only the right "climate of public opinion" to be implemented, he wrote in each of his versions of the essay.

Not true, said Len Ring, an Alberta government water official. In 1972, Ring worked for a division of the Alberta Department of Agriculture that had received eight proposals for major water-diversion plans in Canada. The largest was Parsons' water and power alliance.

"I haven't even heard anyone even consider it for probably 30 years," Ring said.

Even Parsons, the company that hatched the largest plan, has long given up on the idea.

"And I don't think it will happen in my lifetime," said Liz Moore, Parsons' vice president of engineering and technology. "I think there are alternate technologies that for a long time will be able to meet the water needs of the country."

Parsons' retired chairman did make a quiet attempt to persuade some U.S. lawmakers to reconsider the water and power alliance in 1989, according to the Los Angeles Times. That was the same year Churchill first republished The Water Plot, but his versions make no mention of that unsuccessful effort.

Meanwhile, no one contacted by the Rocky Mountain News who worked on the document recalled Churchill ever getting in touch with anyone from Dam the Dams to ask permission to use their work.

In two versions of The Water Plot, Churchill includes an address for readers to contact Dam the Dams for more information.

"You're kidding me," Wendt said. "You're kidding me. Oh, ho, ho. I can tell you for certain that Dam the Dams no longer existed in 1989."

The address provided by Churchill is for a Toronto residence, although the postal code is incorrect. Records show that the parents of Indian rights activist John Hummel lived there in 1989.

Hummel told the News that he did alert Churchill to Dam the Dams' concerns in the mid-1980s after he found the pamphlet in a box of old documents at the Canadian Alliance in Solidarity with Native Peoples.

Although he had met the CU professor only once, he decided to send Churchill the Dam the Dams pamphlet, along with other documents on Canadian water-diversion issues, in hopes that Churchill would research the issues and write about them.

Hummel said it "was sort of a mistake" for Churchill to list his address as Dam the Dams.

"I'm not Dam the Dams," he said. "I was a little surprised to see that."

Hummel said that in the 1980s, he received permission to try to form a new Dam the Dams group from someone he thought was a founding member of the original group.

Former members of the group said they had never heard of the person Hummel contacted.

"I think this is a dry well," said Simon Hoad, one former member. "None of this rings a bell."

Hummel said he no longer lived at the address Churchill listed by the time Churchill published his first version of The Water Plot, but Hummel's parents received several letters there addressed to Dam the Dams. Hummel threw them away.

Hummel said he is still glad that Churchill wrote about the water-diversion plan. That issue, he said, is far more important than any plagiarism concerns - even if the plan Churchill called imminent is no longer on the radar screen.

"It's not viable, but common sense says if the U.S. is running out of water, something is going to happen," Hummel said. "He did with it what he did with it. If it's plagiarism, it's plagiarism. I don't like plagiarism . . . (but) it might have been an oversight."

Same language used

The Dam the Dams pamphlet describes how the group appointed a 23-member committee to conduct research on the eight massive water-diversion plans. The group used the committee's information to write the pamphlet."Considerable evidence has accumulated over the past four years," the group wrote in 1972, warning that diversions were about to take place.

Churchill used the same language, as if the evidence were current. In 1989, in Critical Issues in Native North America Volume II, he wrote: "Considerable evidence has accumulated over the past four years . . ."

In 1991, in Z Magazine, he wrote: "Considerable evidence, collected over the past four years, . . ."

At the end of two of Churchill's versions of The Water Plot, he lists the sources that were cited in the Dam the Dams pamphlet, implying that he had reviewed the original documents.

Hummel said he was disappointed when Churchill sent him a copy of his first article.

Hummel said he had sent Churchill much more than just the Dams pamphlet, including newer information on such issues as the Great Recycling and Northern Development, or GRAND, project.

"I thought he'd take the information and do more research because there was much more newer stuff there," he said.

In Churchill's 2002 version, he adds a great deal of information into the middle of The Water Plot, including a section on the GRAND project.

His first version of The Water Plot contains a note at the end listing the 23 people who "assembled the original paper from which the present essay was written . . . Rewriting/updating for this volume was accommodated by Ward Churchill of the Institute for Natural Progress."

If Churchill had stopped there, or continued to give at least that much credit to the original work, he probably would have been OK, said Hoffer, who chronicled plagiarism throughout history in the book Past Imperfect.

But Churchill started to claim the work as his own and listed his 1989 piece - the one crediting Dam the Dams as co-author - in his endnotes as simply one source among many.

"He's no longer claiming to be the editor. He's claiming to be the author and using them as one of his sources," Hoffer said. "It really is a violation of the statement on (plagiarism) standards. That's a clear violation. That lights up all the bells."

frankl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5091