US water law

The Klamath River runs over 250 miles (400 kilometers) from southern Oregon to the Pacific Ocean in Northern California. It flows through the steep, rugged Klamath Mountains, past slopes of redwood, fir, tanoak and madrone, and along pebbled beaches where willows shade the river’s edge. Closer to its mouth at Requa, the trees rising above the river are often blanketed in fog. The Klamath is central to the worldviews, history and identity of several Native nations. From headwaters in Klamath, Modoc and Yahooskin-Paiute lands, it flows through Shasta, Karuk, Hupa and Yurok homelands. The Yurok Tribe has legally recognized the personhood of the river. Historically, the Klamath was the third-largest Pacific salmon-producing river on the West Coast. The river supported abundant and diverse runs of native fish, including Chinook and coho salmon, steelhead trout, Pacific lamprey, green sturgeon, eulachon smelt and coastal cutthroat trout. Most of the Klamath in California has...

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The Navajo Nation, the largest Native American reservation in the U.S., covers 27,000 square miles (70,000 square kilometers) in the Southwest – an area larger than 10 states. Today it is home to more than 250,000 people – roughly comparable to the population of St. Petersburg, Florida, or Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Unlike those cities, however, 30% of households on the Navajo Reservation lack running water. Hauling water can cost 20 times what it does in neighboring off-reservation communities. While the average American uses between 80 and 100 gallons (300-375 liters) of water per day, Navajo Nation members use approximately seven. Since the 1950s, the Navajo Nation has pressed the U.S. government to define the water rights reserved for them under the 1868 treaty that created their reservation. These efforts culminated in a U.S. Supreme Court case, Arizona v. Navajo Nation, which posed this question: Does the treaty between the Navajo Nation and the United S...

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