The era of the Indian land treaty ended more than a
century ago, but now the West is in the midst of another treaty era
– this time focused on water. So writes Daniel McCool, a longtime
scholar of federal Indian policy and the head of the University of
Utah’s American West Center, in his book Native
Waters, which will be released Oct.
17.
Though water rights were “reserved” for
Indians by the Supreme Court’s landmark Winters ruling in 1908,
tribes were largely given lip service and elbowed out of the way
while the Reclamation juggernaut pushed forward for white settlers’
benefit. Now, the tribes are negotiating with the federal
government and their neighbors for the real, wet water to which
they’re entitled.
The settlement process, writes
McCool, has brought mixed results, but it has “the potential to
reshape the entire water regime of the American West.” In one of
the book’s final chapters, McCool turns his attention to the role
Indians’ newly won water may play in a region where water supplies
are getting tighter every year. “The effort to lease tribal water
(to other users) has played an important and often controversial
role in water settlements,” he writes.
Water
marketing offers desperately poor tribes the potential to earn hard
cash, but it has “run headlong into the defenders of the water
status quo,” many of whom fear that the tribes may become “a kind
of water cartel.”
McCool tempers that
divisiveness with a gentle reminder that, “At the most basic level,
the politics of water is a human interest story.” And a final
vignette shows just what’s at stake: He leaves us with the image of
Edward Canyon (who appears on the cover) and his wife, Jean, now in
their 80s and still living at the edge of the now-dry Little
Colorado River on the Navajo Reservation … waiting for water.
Native Waters: Contemporary Indian
Water Settlements and the Second Treaty Era
Daniel
McCool
The University of Arizona Press, 2002.
260 pages.
Hardcover: $45.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Native Waters.
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