AP News. (2022, February 22). Haaland: 16 tribal water settlements will get $1.7 billion. Retrieved August 28, 2022 from https://apnews.com/article/environment-and-nature-arizona-water-rights-4cb3ae9b7770f4721809a5cb758744e1

 

The Biden administration recently announced that $1.7 billion from the federal infrastructure bill will go towards funding tribal rights settlements. In the past, tribes have been blocked from discussions about the division of water rights, despite the fact that the supreme court has declared that they often have senior rights. Now tribes are working to remedy the effects of this by negotiating for settlements. Although tribes have the water rights, settlements give them the money needed to build infrastructure to actually use the water they are owed. AP news lists the following beneficiaries of settlements this year: “Aamodt Litigation Settlement (Pueblos of San Ildefonso, Nambe, Pojoaque, and Tesuque), Blackfeet Nation, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Crow Nation, Gila River Indian Community, Navajo-Utah Water Rights Settlement and Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project, San Carlos Apache Nation, Tohono O’odham Nation, and White Mountain Apache Tribe.”

 

Agreements like these are really important in helping to reduce the effects that past wrongs have on the present and on the future. American Indians have almost always been excluded from discussions about resource management, even when it directly impacts them, and as a result often lack basic human rights like clean water. If these settlements do their job, more people will have access to clean water, which is extremely important when you look at a future that has more droughts and less water, a fact that the other articles I read touched upon. Policy and politics such as the things described in this article are an important part of what makes environmental science an interdisciplinary and impactful field of study.