Navajo sign water rights settlement with Utah and feds

https://www.12news.com/amp/article/news/regional/native-america/navajo-sign-water-rights-settlement-utah-feds/75-f40da99c-1973-4f74-bc04-c6f124975342

The portion of the Navajo Nation that lies in Utah is getting $210 million to go toward clean drinking water infrastructure.

UTAH, USA — Federal officials signed an agreement with leaders of the Navajo Nation on Friday that provides funding for clean drinking water infrastructure for reservation residents and resolves questions about longstanding Navajo claims to water rights in the drought-stricken U.S. West.

The signing formalizes the Utah Navajo Water Rights Settlement, which became law in 2020 as part of President Joe Biden's bipartisan infrastructure bill. As part of the agreement, the federal government will pay the Navajo Nation $210 million for drinking water infrastructure in San Juan County — the part of the 27,00-square-mile (71,000-square kilometer) reservation that lies in Utah.

Many Navajo homes lack running water. Residents often fill containers at public taps or rely on water deliveries from volunteer organizations.

“As we seek to strengthen Indigenous communities and support tribal self-governance, today’s action and all of these investments will help provide the Navajo Nation with autonomy and flexibility to design and build appropriate water projects that will address current and future water needs," U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said at a signing ceremony on the Navajo Nation.

Utah, which was also party to the agreement, will pay the Navajo $8 million as part of the settlement.

“We had two real problems in our state. One was the Navajo Nation had claims to the Colorado (River) that would impair Utah’s water rights,” U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney told The Salt Lake Tribune. “The other concern we had was about half the Navajo Nation residents (in Utah) didn’t have running water."

The settlement also quantifies the Navajo Nation's water rights, quelling Utah's anxieties about its long-standing claims to a share of water, including from the Colorado River.

A 1908 court decision said tribes had the right to as much water as was needed to establish permanent homelands. Though they possess senior rights, the Navajo were left out when seven western states divided up shares as part of the Colorado River Compact a century ago.

The subsequent uncertainty and potential legal battles have emerged as an urgent issue as the region reckons with a hotter, drier future with less Colorado River water to be shared.

The settlement recognizes the Navajo's right to 81,500 acre-feet of Utah water and allows them to draw the water from aquifers, rivers, or Lake Powell if they choose. The agreement also allows the Navajo to lease unused water to entities off the reservation and guarantees they won't lose water rights not put to use.

It's one of 16 tribal water rights settlements that the Biden administration is devoting $1.7 billion to fund from the recently enacted federal infrastructure bill.

“The hard work, however, must continue until all homes across the Navajo Nation have clean water running in faucets for all Navajo families," Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez told the newspaper.

>>16353717

Delta water crisis linked to California's racist past, tribes and activists say

https://news.yahoo.com/delta-water-crisis-linked-californias-120018338.html

Tribes and environmental groups are challenging how the state manages water in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, a major source for much of California, arguing the deterioration of the aquatic ecosystem has links to the state’s troubled legacy of racism and oppression of Native people.

A group of activists and Indigenous leaders is demanding that the state review and update the water quality plan for the Delta and San Francisco Bay, where fish species are suffering, algae blooms have worsened and climate change is adding to the stresses.

The tribes and environmental groups submitted a petition to the State Water Resources Control Board demanding the state change its approach and adopt science-based standards that ensure adequate flows in the Delta to improve water quality and sustain imperiled fish, including species that are at risk of extinction.

They said the ecological crisis in the Delta has its roots in California’s history of violence against Native people, the taking of land from tribes and structural racism that shaped how the water rights system was established more than a century ago. They said deteriorating conditions in the estuary represent a “continuation of California’s discriminatory water management history.”

They wrote in their 169-page petition that the state water board’s “failure to adopt sufficiently protective water quality standards entrenches a discriminatory system of water rights that was founded on the dispossession of Indigenous Californians and exclusion of communities of color, and that continues to prioritize large-scale agricultural interests over those of vulnerable Californians living in the Delta.”

The petition was filed Tuesday by the Winnemem Wintu Tribe, Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians, Save California Salmon, Little Manila Rising and Restore the Delta, who are represented by a legal team from Stanford Law School’s Environmental Law Clinic.

The petitioners called for the state water board to carry out a review of the Bay-Delta water quality standards through a public process and to consult with tribes in updating the standards, while recognizing and incorporating tribal uses of water.

They said the state should adopt new water quality standards that ensure adequate flows in the Delta. They urged the state water board to “regulate and restructure water rights as necessary,” including the most senior pre-1914 water rights, to implement the standards and to limit diversions and exports of water.

“Business as usual cannot continue. It's not sustainable,” said Caleen Sisk, chief and spiritual leader of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe. “They need to rethink and redo. And do it better.”

For the Winnemem Wintu, whose ancestors were displaced by the construction of Shasta Dam, salmon are central to their cultural and spiritual traditions. But endangered winter-run Chinook salmon, which migrate through the Delta, have suffered as years of drought and low reservoir levels have left the Sacramento River too warm for most of their offspring to survive.

Other threatened or endangered fish species include delta smelt, longfin smelt, spring-run Chinook, green sturgeon and Central Valley steelhead.

Sisk and others who signed the petition said the crisis in the Delta has been “exacerbated through the construction and operation of large-scale Delta water export projects to feed the growth of agricultural industries in arid areas to the south.”

Large quantities of water are diverted to supply vast farmlands growing almonds, pistachios, grapes, alfalfa and other crops. Water deliveries for agriculture have been cut back substantially during the drought, forcing growers to leave some lands dry or pump more groundwater.

But Sisk and others said the water system is structured in a way that continues to give preferential treatment to large agricultural interests that have senior water rights.

Some of the oldest rights date to the 1800s, when white settlers staked their claims, sometimes by nailing a notice to a tree.

Today, while many crops are exported in large quantities for profit, the water diversions are exacting a worsening environmental toll, Sisk said.

“How is it that Big Ag uses 80% of the water and then ships its products out of state or out of country, and uses all this water, and that.

(Continued)

Watch the water…

>>16353605

>ever single day

Hmmm…where’s the “y”?

>>16353770

He’s getting Nuremberg’d for that grammar alone