More fun with the ersatz Indian

'The Water Plot' thickens:

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.

More precisely, Ward Churchill thinks otherwise and he's claiming credit for the text lifted from the pamphlet as part of his "scholarly research". Has this guy got a good racket or what?