‘How Native Americans Will Shape the Future of Water in the West’
~~Tribal nations hold the rights to significant portions of the Colorado River. In the increasing drought, some are showing the way to sustainability.~~
#WaterNews #WaterJustice #NewYorker #RachelMonroe

“In the United States, water law is founded on the principle of ‘first in time, first in right’—whoever first put water to ‘beneficial use’ can claim the right to use it now and in the future. In the 1922 compact, though, tribal nations are mentioned only in passing. ‘The Colorado River Compact basically just assumed that tribes were going to go away, the United States was going to figure it out, nobody had to care,’ Jay Weiner, a tribal attorney from Montana, told me. Instead, in recent years, as the worst drought in more than a thousand years has seized the Southwest, the region’s tribal nations have been asserting their legal rights to the contentious, increasingly scarce commodity of water.”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-southwest/how-native-americans-will-shape-the-future-of-water-in-the-west