With hard-won water rights, Indigenous tribes in U.S. consider how to manage rivers

Garnett Querta prepares to load water into a truck for transport to Grand Canyon West, a tourist attraction owned by the Hualapai tribe in Arizona.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail

Shortly after 7 a.m. most mornings, Garnett Querta pulls up to a yellow fire hydrant on the outskirts of Peach Springs, the main town on the Hualapai Reservation, and fastens a hose to it. Six minutes fills one tank with nearly 15,000 litres of water. Another six minutes and the second tank is full. Mr. Querta then swings himself up into the Freightliner truck cab and rumbles on Buck & Doe Road deeper into the desert, eyes alert for elk and javelinas that can leap from the sage.

The water he delivers is piped to Grand Canyon West, a major tourism attraction owned and operated by the Hualapai. Most days, Mr. Querta makes the trip five times, driving 280 kilometres to ensure the attraction, with its famous glass-floor Skywalk over a vertiginous drop into the Grand Canyon, can welcome guests with flushing toilets, clean dishes — and sufficient emergency reserves in case of fire.

“I’m the bloodflow for the main vein,” Mr. Querta says. “To keep it going, to keep everything working.”

NEVADA

Colorado River

Las Vegas

Grand Canyon

Grand Canyon West

Lake

Mead

Hualapai Indian

Reservation

Peach Springs

ARIZONA

CALIFORNIA

THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREET-

MAP CONTRIBUTORS

NEVADA

Colorado River

Las Vegas

Grand Canyon

Grand Canyon West

Lake

Mead

Hualapai Indian

Reservation

Peach Springs

ARIZONA

CALIFORNIA

THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREET-

MAP CONTRIBUTORS

NEVADA

Colorado River

Las Vegas

Grand Canyon

Grand Canyon West

Lake

Mead

Hualapai Indian

Reservation

Peach Springs

CALIFORNIA

ARIZONA

THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREET-MAP CONTRIBUTORS

His deliveries embody the fragility of water supplies across much of the southwestern U.S., where a multi-decade drought has parched the landscape, creating urgent new questions about how to allocate dwindling supplies from the Colorado Basin, the primary source of water for 42 million people.

Grand Canyon West once pulled its water from a well. Then four years ago, the well suddenly went dry. Now, a marquee U.S. tourist destination cannot function without the water Mr. Querta trucks, an operation threatened every time trailer brakes seize, a tire goes flat, a pump breaks down or Mr. Querta gets sick.

But the Hualapai are also on the cusp of embodying something very different: the transformative power of securing water rights.

The tribe has completed a settlement that, once approved by Congress, will provide guaranteed access to water from the Colorado River, US$180-million to build a water pipeline to deliver that water and the right to sell lease rights to any of the water it doesn’t need. The water pipeline will enable major new developments — new homes, a new school, a new hotel, perhaps even an amphitheatre for concerts on the rim of the Grand Canyon.

Such developments could, one study suggests, support more than 10,000 jobs a year. The water lease rights could be worth many millions of dollars.

The Hualapai stand on the precipice of “being one of the powerhouses,” said Damon Clarke, the tribe’s chairman.

“Because we will have that water.”

Tourists come to Grand Canyon West to see the red rock and the Colorado River.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail

For centuries, inadequate access to water was just one of the many ways Indigenous Americans, the poorest population group in the U.S., have been disenfranchised. The Hualapai reservation’s northern boundary includes 174 kilometres of the Colorado River, but the Hualapai have never had the ability to use its water, which was inaccessible at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

Now, water rights stand to make it and other tribes powerful — and wealthy.

“Water is critically important, and the tribes are going to be a key player in this,” said David Wegner, a member of the Water Science Technology Board of the National Academy of Sciences who worked on a number of tribal water settlements in more than 25 years at the Department of Interior.

“Casinos are chump change when it comes to what they’re going to be able to make once they get the right and the ability to market water off reservation,” he said.

Thirty tribes occupy land in the Colorado River basin, which primarily extends through Arizona, Utah and Colorado. Those 22 with settled rights have secured access to roughly a quarter of its available water. Some have won the right to lease their rights, with groups like the Gila River Indian Community signing multi-million-dollar agreements to provide water to the city of Phoenix and other waters users.

Other tribes are bound by federal rules that bar them from selling water leases off-reservation. But the U.S. Congress is contemplating legislation that would change that for the Colorado River Indian Tribes, or CRIT, whose 4,277 active members possess rights to 50 per cent more water than San Diego and its surrounding county use in a year.

Colorado River water pours from river outlet tubes at an Arizona dam.BOB STRONG/Reuters

For water managers, economists, parched cities and tribal leaders alike, the ability for Indigenous groups to lease water rights stands to change the way the Colorado is managed — and, by expanding a nascent market for water, could be an important lever for ending wasteful practices.

“We’re not the whole solution to the drought, but we’re part of it,” said CRIT Chairwoman Amelia Flores. “We’ve got to save our river.”

For CRIT and others, water rights promise a change — not only revenue, but influence at the tables where decisions about river use are made. “Water allocation is very valuable,” said Ms. Flores. “So now we don’t want to be left out. We want our voice heard. And now they’re listening.”

“It is opportunity out of crisis,” said Margaret Vick, an attorney who works in water rights, and represents CRIT. Gaining the right to lease water would be a “historic measure.”

Other governments are also looking to water leases as a solution to current shortages. A bill passed earlier this year in Utah creates new rights for farmers and others to sell water rights in order to preserve the Great Salt Lake, which is rapidly drying out.

The value of such rights is likely to vary widely by location and need. But at one water diversion project in Colorado, they have risen to about US$70,000 per acre-foot. Over the past several years, some hedge funds have worked to buy agricultural lands that have water rights — sparking a political backlash in California against “drought profiteering.”

A farm worker labours in a strawberry field amid drought conditions on near Ventura, Calif., earlier this month.Mario Tama/Getty Images

Putting a price tag on water has long been controversial. “It’s essential to life and there is some underlying feeling that people have the right — the human right — to receive water in some quantity,” Anne Castle, a former assistant secretary for water and science at the U.S. Department of the Interior who is now a senior fellow with a centre attached to the University of Colorado Law School.

She also cautioned that auctioning water rights could create new forms of economic upheaval. If large numbers of farmers in a small community lease their rights in exchange for fallowing fields, “what does that do to the local community? And the property taxes that support the schools that my kids go to?” Ms. Castle asked. “People feel that viscerally.”

Others see free water as a licence to squander.

“If you underprice something, people overuse it,” said Joseph Kalt, who leads the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. He called it “crazy” that water-intensive crops such as lettuce are being grown in some of the driest climates on earth. Treating water as too precious to sell, he warns, means “we just let people abuse it until the world collapses.”

The growing trade in tribal leasing rights “is a very important development” in creating new exchanges for water in the west, said Prof. Kalt, who has worked with the Hualapai for many years. It was his study that calculated the water settlement could support 10,000 jobs.

“These tribes are kind of breaking that market open,” he said.

In Peach Springs, the prospect of leasing water rights has sparked visions of a different future. Money could be used to harness stormwaters and recharge aquifers, rebuild aging infrastructure — and fund new construction. If that happens, the benefits will also flow, said Mr. Clarke, the Hualapai chairman.

“We’re going to be providing more jobs and more opportunities for people, not only on the local level but on the national and state level,” he said. He envisions a new generation of Hualapai that can grow hay for their own cattle — and share in the joys other Americans have.

“Maybe,” he said, “we can finally have swimming pools.”

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