Shorted

Access to water remains an issue for Colorado tribes

by Ryan Warner / Colorado Public Radio

The Dolores River gushed this spring, flowing in excess of 3,000 cfs thanks to strong snowpack. It barely flows most years, since the river has been dammed to serve communities nearby and climate change has generally reduced the snowmelt coming into Western rivers.

The high water this year means good boating, and it also means people with rights to the water – including on the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe – are getting more of their allocation. As recently as 2021, the reservation’s farmland got only about 10% of the water it was owed on paper.

The tribe’s history of fighting for water illuminates what Indigenous communities throughout the Southwest face. It also highlights the challenges facing everyone who relies on the Colorado River, of which the Dolores is a tributary, as negotiations into the river’s future get underway.

Colorado Public Radio recently sat down with Montezuma County resident Amorina Lee-Martinez. She grew up in the Four Corners and completed her PhD in envi- ronmental studies researching water management in the western U.S., specifically with regard to the Dolores River.

Ute tribes used to live all over what’s now Colorado. Where did they live?

Lee-Martinez: Ute tribal people lived in bands, which were basically family groups of 10 to 20 people, and lived nomadically all over Colorado and in a landscape that extended into all the states around Colorado. They kind of had homelands in different low country areas and then would travel into the high country in the summertime. And so movement was a really central part of Ute culture.

In the late 1800s, after the establishment of reservations, Ute people used the Mancos River in the Four Corners area. What happened when white settlers also wanted to use that water?

The Utes should have had the most senior water rights to the Mancos River. When settlers began to move into that area, after the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation was established, they began to divert the Mancos River upstream from where it would enter into the reservation. This was all done without consultation with the Ute people. And then in the 1950s, settlers built Jackson Gulch Reservoir on the Mancos River and further dewatered the Mancos River.

What happened after the Ute lost their access to the Mancos River?

They really didn’t get water. The Ute Mountain Ute Reservation had minimal to no good-quality water that the tribe could access as soon as the reservation was established, essentially. For about 100 years, water was trucked in to ensure that the tribe had some kind of good-quality water they could drink. When you have to truck in water, that’s more time and energy and expense to receive water, and less quality of life.

How did the Ute start using the Dolores River instead, then?

It’s important to understand the geography. The Ute Mountain Ute Reservation is in the very southwest corner of Colorado, and the Mancos River flows directly through the reservation and into the San Juan River, very close to the Four Corners.

The Dolores River never flows into the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation. It flows south from the San Juan Mountains and comes into the town of Dolores, which is about 20 miles north, and then it turns north.

So, an important aspect of how the Utes acquired Dolores River water is that on paper, they had the most senior rights to the Mancos River. In negotiations in the 1970s and 1980s, they gained recognition from the United States government that they could claim their own water rights – since, historically, the U.S. government did not really acknowledge or make any effort to honor Indigenous water rights. So through all these negotiations, the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe agreed to subordinate their rights to the Mancos River, meaning that they would not claim water that would harm the settler users upstream. In exchange for that, they gained a right to the Dolores Project, which includes McPhee Dam, and they gained the funding for the in- frastructure to deliver water from the Dolores River to the reservation, as well.

So the tribe gave up its senior rights to get junior rights on the Dolores. Does that explain why, in recent years, the Ute Mountain Ute Reservation gets delivered such small percentages of their allocated water from the Dolores?

Yes. In the way that water’s allocated in Colorado and in the West, the most senior water users can use all the water that they’re allocated. Those that are junior have to wait and see if they’ll get all of their water.

What has happened to the Ute in the span of time between when they were getting water trucked onto the reservation to when they had access to the Dolores River?

Almost immediately after receiving running water in the late 1980s, the tribe was able to start building businesses in a way they never were before. For example, they built a casino within the same year, I believe, and they established a construction company, and they have since built many other projects in the area. So businesses were able to be built with water in place.

With that also comes the ability to practice self-determination on a new, stronger level. This includes developing a school on their reservation that was recently opened, educating students in their own culture, in their own context, instead of having to send them north to Cortez, which is quite a trek, and there’s a lot of culture shock for youth going between Cortez and back onto the reservation. There’s also an effort to establish a fresh food market on the reservation, which is currently a food desert. So with running water comes economic development and cultural self-determination that was not possible before.

Is it a common occurrence for tribes to not get their water rights fulfilled?

This is certainly a pattern that has repeated itself in the Colorado River basin. The tribes keep getting the short end of the stick for multiple reasons.

Now we are in a relatively wet year. But the longer trend with climate change is that we’re going to see hotter and drier weather. So, what

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is the future for Indigenous tribes?

What I see with tribes, especially with the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, is that they are continuously requesting that they be present and incorporated and included in the discussions for the future of water management and not be treated as an afterthought or excluded from those conversations – as they have historically.

For more from Colorado Public Radio, go to www.cpr.org. ■