Click the link to read the article on The Los Angeles Times website (Tyrone Beason). Here’s an excerpt:
April 7, 2024
The Navajos live in the same 1,400-mile-long Colorado River Basin that brings fresh water to millions in Southern California, yet about 30% of homes on the reservation were built without indoor plumbing. With the absence of pipes connecting homes in this isolated corner of the reservation to a water source, many Navajos must spend hours each week driving to a community center in the tribal settlement of Dennehotso to refill portable tanks. While California wrangles with other Western states over the Colorado River’s drought-stricken water supply, Navajo water rights advocates estimate that the 175,000 members who live on the reservation subsist on average on just 5 to 10 gallons a day per person. Compare that to the 76 to 100 gallons of water the Environmental Protection Agency says most Californians use daily…
Some see hope in a proposed landmark agreement that would settle all outstanding water rights disputes between the Navajo, Hopi and San Juan Southern Paiute tribes and the state of Arizona. If the final terms of the agreement are approved by the tribal government, the Navajos will ask Congress for $5 billion in federal funding to expand the reservation’s water delivery infrastructure, says Navajo Nation Council Speaker Crystalyne Curley.
“In the past, we’ve tried to get all of the parties to the table to secure water rights, which since time immemorial we’ve had to fight for,” Curley says…
The failure to extend water service to all Indigenous Americans is especially galling given their traditional role as nature’s caretakers, says Heather Whiteman Runs Him, associate clinical professor and director of the Tribal Justice Clinic at the University of Arizona in Tucson.
“We respect water in ways that many other Americans don’t,” says Whiteman Runs Him, a Crow tribal member from Montana. “The vast majority of Americans take water access for granted. You pay a water bill but don’t think about what you’re paying for.”
[…]
The disparity in water access between Navajo tribal members and other Americans was dramatized in a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling. Brushing aside a host of treaties and legal precedents dating to the formation of the reservation on a fraction of Navajo ancestral territory in 1868, the court determined that the federal government is not obligated to help the tribe get more access to water from natural sources such as the Colorado River basin.
