气候变化领域集成服务门户(CCPortal): Most of Chemehuevi tribe's water goes to California cities

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Most of Chemehuevi tribe's water goes to California cities 科技资讯

时间：2023-07-05 来源：[美国] Daily Climate

Colorado River Basin Tribes Face Hurdles Using Their Water Rights

Across the Colorado River Basin, tribes have fought for years to benefit from their water rights. But because of the fraught process to secure rights and move that water onto reservations, many have yet to realize the full benefit of what’s rightfully theirs. Here are a few examples.

In central Arizona, nearly two-thirds of the Yavapai-Prescott Indian Tribe’s surface water allotment flows down Granite Creek, where the town of Prescott can use it for free.

In Colorado, the Southern Ute Indian Tribe irrigates about a third of its arable land, as it searches for $100 million needed to repair a dilapidated canal system.

Just east of Phoenix, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community is neither using nor leasing about 61,000 acre-feet of its water, the volume that 540,000 Phoenix residents use in a year. A clause in the tribe’s settlement bars it from leasing much water.

Several tribes have secured the right to lease, but it’s been case by case. With the support of Arizona’s senators, the Colorado River Indian Tribes got a bill through Congress that gives it that right. President Joe Biden signed it in January. The law helped in “stabilizing more of our sovereignty of our natural resources,” Chairwoman Amelia Flores said.

The law only gave that right to one tribe.

For the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the roadblock is a quirk in the laws that settled its water rights, which prohibits the tribe from using the portion of its water held in Lake Nighthorse, a reservoir in Colorado, for agriculture. But that’s precisely why the tribe needs it.

Chairman Manuel Heart is tired of neither getting the full allocation of water nor being compensated for leaving it in the system for the benefit of others.

“If you guys want to use it,” he said, “then pay us.”

Even if tribes were able to negotiate their way out of their water-leasing woes, for some, it isn’t about getting the highest price for a culturally significant resource.

The Tohono O’odham Nation leases just a fraction of its water and isn’t looking to market more. “We were told by our elders that we should never sell our water,” San Xavier District Chairman Austin Nunez said.

原文来源：https://www.propublica.org/article/chemehuevi-tribe-reservation-water-colorado-river-california