A US$5-billion deal could finally bring running water to many in the Navajo nation who have never had it

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A half-century ago, when Geneva Benally was a girl growing up on Navajo land, she would sometimes play house with her sister.

“We would just pretend that we had running water,” said Ms. Benally, now 60. It was a fantasy world – complete with showers on command and cups filled from an endless tap – fashioned after the lives of people they saw on television.

Her childhood home, just 11 kilometres from the main road leading to the Navajo administrative centre in Window Rock, Ariz., had no piped water. Instead, her family hauled it in from neighbours for bathing and for their animals. Sometimes, they drove 40 kilometres to Gallup, N.M., to do laundry or stay in a hotel where the water flowed effortlessly.

It was a time that, for many Navajo, has not yet passed into history. The 400,000-person Navajo Nation is the most populous Indigenous American tribe, occupying an area the size of New Brunswick. But even today, 30 per cent of the people on Navajo reservation lands do not have running water in their homes.

Now, a new water agreement promises to change that. The Navajo, Hopi and San Juan Southern Paiute tribes have agreed to a settlement with the U.S. government and the state of Arizona that gives them water rights to the Colorado River and other waterways, as well as aquifers on their lands and, for the Southern Paiute, a new reservation. Some six decades in the making, it is the biggest agreement of its kind and includes US$5-billion for the construction of a network of pipelines to deliver water to homes.

The deal also gives the tribes the right to lease water supplies to other users, positioning them as important brokers of a resource that has become a critical issue for cities, farmers and commercial interests across the U.S. Southwest.

It must still secure the approval of the U.S. Congress – observers say passage is not a foregone conclusion – which must balance its immense price tag against its importance for Indigenous Americans.

“It’s foundational to having a nation – you have to have access to water, whether that’s to preserve life in the nation or to have development and prosperity,” said Ethel Branch, the Navajo Nation’s Attorney-General.

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A Harvard-educated lawyer, she grew up in a home without running water. The provision of drinking water to more people stands to reshape life on Navajo land, where overcrowding led at one point to the highest rate of COVID-19 infections in the U.S. It could spur the establishment of new businesses. It may even reduce the number of traffic accidents if people no longer have to drive long distances for water.

“It’s very exciting to think about what the social outcomes could be, what the economic outcomes could be,” Ms. Branch said.

The agreement builds on a period of considerable change for Indigenous Americans after a 1989 U.S. policy shift toward self-determination and self-government. Since then, Indigenous Americans on reservations have seen income growth several times that of other Americans. (In Canada, too, incomes for Indigenous people have risen faster than the national average, according to an analysis by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.)

With self-determination has come a new political and economic role for tribes, whose control of water resources in the Southwest constitutes “a lot of power,” said Joseph Kalt, who leads the Harvard Project on Indigenous Governance and Development.

Tribes “are breaking open a real water market, and that’s going to benefit everybody,” he said.

Water in the U.S. has historically been apportioned by seniority rights. A number of tribes, however, have been granted the right to lease water, as the Navajo are hoping they will be. This has created price signals that economists say will lead to more efficient use of scarce resources.

It has also created opportunities for wealth.

Water leases once fetched US$30 per acre-foot – a unit of measurement that aptly describes the volume needed to cover an acre of land with a foot of water. Current prices are likely 10 times that, if not more, said Tom Buschatzke, the director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources.

The Navajo agreement alone includes 170,000 acre-feet of water from the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers.

Arizona relies on the Colorado River for roughly 36 per cent of its water, and tribes control half that allocation. The agreement stands to clarify just who can claim which water resources, Mr. Buschatzke said.

Using 100-year population projections, the Navajo have estimated they will eventually need all the water covered by the agreement for themselves. But in the meantime, leasing some of the supply might provide revenue to fund infrastructure.

Some tribal members have expressed skepticism about the deal. Navajo historian Wally Brown pointed to decades of broken government promises to Indigenous Americans.

“We always end up on the short end of the agreement,” he said. “One thing that they should not do is trust the government.”

It would be better, he said, to fight for water the Navajo believe is rightfully theirs and secure those rights in court instead of settling with governments that have not always proven trustworthy.

But the settlement promises funds that a court would be unlikely to award – even if the unprecedented amount has brought political uncertainty.

Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren has met with political leaders in Washington and across Arizona. He expects bipartisan backing, with Mark Kelly, a Democrat, sponsoring legislation in the U.S. Senate and Republican Juan Ciscomani sponsoring a bill in the House of Representatives.

What “a lot of people are scared of is the US$5-billion price tag,” Mr. Nygren acknowledged. But “it’s going to cost more than US$5-billion if we wait any longer.”

The agreement has already proven to be a source of hope.

For now, Kyle Henry’s family depends on household water delivered every two weeks by a church group. The family uses bottled water for drinking, although it’s not uncommon for them to run out of both. The nearest store is more than 30 kilometres away.

Mr. Henry said the prospect of securing running water sounds like a dream to him. There would be no more need to walk to an outhouse in the dark or across ground made slippery by rain or snow.

The fate of the bill before Congress, Ms. Branch said, amounts to a “test of the humanity and decency of the American people.”

“Are they going to step forward and close this longstanding equity gap and ongoing human-rights situation? Or are they going to turn a blind eye?”