Studies show a higher infection rate in communities with limited access to running water, which disproportionately affects tribal communities, said Bidtah Becker, a member of the Navajo Nation and an associate attorney for the tribe’s utility authority who worked on a clean water report for the Water and Tribes Initiative.
“It just felt like this is the moment to shine a light on this issue,” she said. “It just seemed that the collective response was so different than it had been in the past.”
One of the ways tribes have funded water projects is through money from legal settlements with states and the federal government over their water claims, which can take decades to finalize. It took more than 30 years for the Navajo Nation to settle some of its water rights. Becker said people often ask about the connection between water rights and water development.
“They’re interconnected, because you need funding to develop your water rights. But if you don’t have a fully resolved water right, it can be challenging to get funding [to develop it],” Becker said. The Navajo Nation still has unresolved water rights.
Becker was surprised that the infrastructure bill included funding for tribal water projects — enough, she said, to fund an entire backlog of water projects that has been growing since the 1980s. The money could mean tribes don’t have to wait for settlements to fund infrastructure projects to put their water rights to better use.
The lack of clean water access for tribes is rarely discussed because it’s a “dignity issue,” Becker said. “It’s embarrassing to say, ‘I can’t get up and shower in the morning.’” That’s especially true for younger tribal members who go to school with flushable toilets and spend time with students who smell like soap and shampoo, she said.
“If [this funding is implemented effectively], we could have a whole generation of Indian folks who are not going to have the disadvantages that their parents had. Or even their older brother or sister,” Becker said.
Becker acknowledges that it can be “technically challenging” to figure out how clean drinking water fits into Colorado River negotiations. Still, she said equity needs to be considered in “everything we do.”
She said since the river agreement was signed before many Native Americans had the right to vote, the states and the federal government are still grappling with the concept of, “Who are the tribes?”
“What are tribal people? How do they fit into our system or not? I think they were unresolved then, and I think that’s what we’re still trying to resolve to this day,” Becker said.
Daryl Vigil, a member of the Jicarilla Apache Nation and the tribe’s water administrator, said the tribe was living off government-issued rations on a reservation that wasn’t their traditional homeland when the Colorado River Compact was signed, a decade and a half before the tribe even organized as a formal government and adopted its constitution.