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NOTE: Earth Matters will not appear on November 19 and 26. It will return December 3.
One hundred fifteen years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Winters v. United States that American Indian tribes had an inherent right to water because treaties were written with the idea that tribes would become self-sufficient, and without water they couldn’t be. It was one of the most important recognitions of Native sovereignty that ever emerged from the high court. Unfortunately, for most of the tribes of the basin, the 1908 promise in Winters has yet to be fulfilled.
The ruling was ignored in the 1922 Colorado River Compact that divvied up the shares of water each of the seven upper and lower basin states would get. The tribes were expected to beg their water from each state’s share, a losing prospect given the racist hostility toward Natives found among government officials of that era. Meanwhile, the federal government, in the midst of terminating 100 reservations and tribes in the 1950s and ‘60s, grabbed pieces of Native land for massive water projects, with paltry compensation and no guarantee the tribes would themselves benefit from the dams and reservoirs built on land taken from them.
Anna V. Smith and Mark Olalde at High Country News and ProPublica recently collaborated on a lengthy investigative story on how Indigenous Americans in the Colorado River Basin were left out of their share of the river’s water 100 years ago, and that the seven states in the basin, most particularly Arizona, have ever since aggressively fought to keep the tribes from securing their share. Thus, to this day, the Navajo Nation—with the geographically largest reservation in the country and, as of June 2023, the second largest tribally enrolled population (closely behind the Cherokee Nation)—has not secured rights to its share of the water, and neither have 22 other basin tribes, including eight in Arizona.
It’s not easy to condense their excellent reporting, but here goes anyway.
