On Governing Water - Aqua Shock: Water in Crisis - page 125

quantities of water for their reservations. The crux of the matter is
that Indian water rights in many cases are senior to prior appropria-
tion rights because their date of priority is the date the reservation
was established. However, it's not that simple. Among the confu-
sions, the Supreme Court in Winters found that an Indian reserva-
tion may reserve water for future use in an amount necessary to
fulfi ll the purpose of the reservation. The amount of water, then,
is left open to interpretation, challenge, and more confusion. That
also left the federal government smack in the middle of states' water
management. To remedy that somewhat, in 1952 Congress passed
the McCarran Amendment, which stipulated that these and other
federally reserved water rights are subject to state adjudication. In
the past several decades, Indian tribes and state governments have
worked to negotiate settlements on the quantities of water they're
each entitled to, but many cases remain unsettled. 1
If you're wondering what kind of precedence and “water power”
American Indians can wield, you had better believe they're substan-
tial. In the case of the Wind River Indian Reservation and reserved
rights to water in the Big Horn River system in Wyoming, the Big
Horn General Adjudication awarded the Shoshone and Arapaho
tribes of the reservation the right to 500,000 acre-feet of surface water
annually with a priority date of 1868! 2 That's a major and very senior
water right—and that means it trumps all rights after it. To put that
amount of water in perspective, one acre-foot equals 325,851 gallons
of water. That's nearly 450 million gallons of water a day. The city of
Albuquerque, New Mexico, with a population of about 500,000, con-
sumes about 50 million gallons of water a day, Hightower notes.
Potential Native American reserved rights could create a night-
mare scenario for another river—the Colorado. Under the Winters
doctrine, says Hightower, Indian tribes with large land holdings
claim the right to signifi cant water in the Colorado. That's a colossal
problem because there may not be enough water in the Colorado
River to meet the actual demands of the Winters doctrine, he adds.
PUBLIC OWNERSHIP
Still other variables affect water rights. Some water, even in the
West, is considered to be in the public domain. The public has