Stolen River

Amy Scott: I want you to close your eyes. Unless you’re driving then you should definitely keep them open. But try to really take in the sounds of all of these creatures. Oh a Lizard. Hi Lizard.

Stephen Roe Lewis: Yeah, there is a lot of wildlife here. Squirrels, snakes.

Amy Scott: Splash in the water, you can tell them a city person. I’m like, Oh animals! we’re walking on a dirt path along the edge of a pond. It’s a hot August morning, and it’s dry the summer monsoon rains that usually start in July or running late this year. But this place is lush with sandbar willows and arrow weed and cat tail stands. I was marveling that this grass is like taller than me by several feet.

Savannah Maher: So you wouldn’t know you’re in the middle of the desert.

Amy Scott: Totally. You would never know this was here just driving by.  I’m here with my colleague Savannah Mar. And Stephen Roe Lewis, the governor of the Gila River Indian Community in a wetland about 40 miles south of Phoenix. Historically, the water that runs through here is the lifeblood of the community, a nation of acapella or thumb and pea posh people who’ve been farming this land and building their lives and economies around desert rivers, streams and washes for centuries.

Stephen Roe Lewis: In the late 1700s. As early as, as Mexican and even Spanish explorers. When they pass through here, and this is documented, they saw an abundance of produce that we were producing along the Gila River, melons, beans, corn squash.

Amy Scott: But for the better part of the last 150 years, there was almost no water flowing through this riverbed.

Savannah Maher: I mean, what about for you, Governor Lewis like this must just like the landscape must look so different from when you were growing up?

Stephen Roe Lewis: It does. They’re seeing all of our indigenous plants and trees just start to start to grow again. This is how it looks, you know, before the healer River was stolen from us over 150 years ago how our ancestors saw this how our ancestors survived, because everything that we needed, was provided for by the creator was provided for on the banks of the Gila River and to recreate this for a whole new generation of community members. It’s to me it’s a it’s a blessing.

Amy Scott: But ever since the community was able to bring this water back, outsiders have had their eye on it.  How does that feel to have this this precious resource that is increasingly in demand and valuable and hedge funds are buying up farmland and selling the rights to cities? Everybody wants this water, and you’ve got some.

Stephen Roe Lewis: It’s a tremendous responsibility.

INTRO

Amy Scott: I’m Amy Scott. Welcome to How We Survive a podcast for Marketplace about people navigating solutions to a changing climate. This is episode two: Stolen River. Last episode we told you about Buckeye, the fast growing city west of Phoenix that is desperate to find new sources of water to support its plans for development. An even bigger challenge in the face of the ongoing drought. One possible solution lease water from tribal nations that have rights to the Colorado River, but aren’t using their full share. That’s a story that Savannah and I have been looking into Savannah covers indigenous affairs for Marketplace and she’s here with me now. Hi, Savannah.

Savannah Maher: Hey Amy. So this episode we’re taking you to the Gila River Indian Community, one of those tribal nations with water to spare. Over a century after its namesake river the Gila was stolen by colonization. The community managed to secure a massive share of the Colorado rivers flow will explain how it’s been using that water to restore its farming economy and help quench the surrounding regions thirst.

Amy Scott: And why the community is not especially eager to keep sharing because after the centuries long legal battle it took to get this water. It’s finally in a position to use the water for its own benefit. I was noticing your Air Jordans. Those are super cool.

Savannah Maher: Yeah, those are sweet.

Stephen Roe Lewis: Oh, thank you. Yeah. Since the pandemic, I’m just all about comfort now. You know, our suit and I’ve even worn to the White House I wear suit with some Jordans.

Savannah Maher: Stephen Roe Lewis has been governor of the Gila River Indian Community for almost a decade. He’s tall with dark hair tied back in a graying beard. Along with the pink Jays. Today he’s wearing black jeans, a blue button down and a bracelet woven from plants that grow in this restored wetland.

Stephen Roe Lewis: This is one of our last traditional basket makers made. This is the same willow and cattail.

Savannah Maher: Governor Lewis has lived here in the community for most of his life. So he remembers when this lush ecosystem He’s showing us around was just dry red dirt. No bull frogs croaking, no cattails swaying in the breeze.

Stephen Roe Lewis: It looked very barren, very dry, very arid.

Amy Scott: And he remembers the protracted legal battle it took for the community to bring the Gila River back. Governor Lewis actually had kind of a behind the scenes look at that process because his dad, the late Rodney Lewis was doing most of the lawyering.

Stephen Roe Lewis: I remember sitting at the kitchen table. My father had, you know, just books on hydrology and water settlement documents that were just all over the kitchen table while he was drinking his coffee and I was going to school.

Savannah Maher: Here’s where we need to backup a bit. Like we heard from Governor Lewis, the Akimel O’odham, the River People and the Pee Posh. The People Who Live Toward the Water have a long track record of turning arid desert in what’s now central Arizona into lush, abundant farmland. Starting around 300 BC. Governor Lewis says the O’odham’s ancestors, the Huhugam built a network of canals to divert water from the Salt and Gila rivers to irrigate crops of cotton, corn, melon and beans.

Stephen Roe Lewis: We were part of a long history of agriculture in this area. Over 1000s of years, we trace ourselves to the whole government, civilization where modern day Phoenix is built upon, that that canal footprint literally.

Amy Scott: As recently as the 1860s. The Gila River Indian Community was the center of a booming grain market in the southwest, selling their surplus crops to white colonizers as they moved west during the gold rush and supplying union troops during the Civil War. But those colonizers wanted a piece of the market and to irrigate their own farming operations.

Savannah Maher: So backed by the federal government, white settlers upstream of the Gila River Indian Community started damming up the river and building canals to divert water to their own farms. So much water that by the turn of the 20th century, the Gila River stopped flowing through its namesake community. When the river dried up, suited the communities farm economy, its only real source of subsistence and revenue. That’s what Governor Lewis means when he says the river was stolen.

Stephen Roe Lewis: When the Gila River was was almost completely dammed up. upstream, you know, we had no water to to farm and to survive. We still barn and very small strategic areas. But at that point, you know, we were our agricultural subsistence economy was was literally turned upside down. And so that really started that, that era of, of, of scarcity, of really pushing us literally to the brink of extinction.

Amy Scott: During this time, the community survived on rations from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and by chopping down tens of thousands of acres of mesquite trees to sell as firewood. Because of the lack of water. Most of those trees never returned.

Stephen Roe Lewis: And, of course, you know, at that, at that time, especially Native Americans here, we weren’t considered citizens, we didn’t have the right to vote. So it was very difficult for us to advocate for our water.

Savannah Maher: For the better part of the 20th century, the community was in survival mode, just trying to keep its people alive and afloat.

Amy Scott: Like a lot of tribal nations at the time. The Gila River Indian Community didn’t have the resources or capacity to really go after the water it was owed. And that’s where Governor Lewis’s dad eventually came in.  My father, the late Rod Lewis, he was actually the first attorney for the tribe.  Plus a lot of other firsts in the 1970s Rodney Lewis was the first Native American attorney to be admitted to the Arizona bar. Later he became the first to win a case in the Arizona Supreme Court.

Stephen Roe Lewis: That was his legal career that he devoted himself to to regaining our water.

Savannah Maher: Then something happened that would change the community’s fortunes. Congress was looking for a way out of its treaty responsibilities to tribes, or it was looking to help them be more economically self sufficient depending on how you look at it. So in 1988, it passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, a law that opened the door for gaming as a new source of revenue for tribal nations. And in the mid 90s, the Gila River Indian Community got in on it. It opened to casinos, that thanks to the community’s location not far from a major city did pretty well.

Gila River Casinos AD: “Where the Winners Go” (90s Version)

Savannah Maher: And with that new source of income, the community could now afford to pay all the lawyers and scientists and other experts that needed to make the case for its water rights.

Stephen Roe Lewis: We had a great team that we put together hydrologist historians to show our ongoing use of the healer River as well. So it was history, it was policy. It was law. It was science that we had to bring together.

Savannah Maher: To prove what the community had known all along. That it was entitled to enough water to restore its agricultural economy. So a lot when federal courts are asked to quantify how much water a tribe has rights to they make that calculation based on how much usable farmland The tribe is working with. We’ll talk more about that in the next episode.  Like is that part of why you have such a big settlement like I’m looking around, it’s very flat looks relatively irrigable.

Stephen Roe Lewis: Exactly. I mean, we literally are standing on historically over 1000s of years, time immemorial of this whole area being farmed.

Amy Scott: Knowing what a massive allocation the tribe might ask for in court, the state of Arizona started settlement talks. By this time, the descendants of the people who stole the water were entrenched and politically powerful.

Savannah Maher: So in 2004, Congress signed off on a deal. Phoenix and other cities north of the community would hang on to most of the Gila and Salt rivers flows. In return, the Gila River Indian Community got an annual water budget of over 600,000 acre feet, about half of it from another river, the Colorado, that’s more Colorado River water than almost any other tribe in the basin has rights to more than the city of Phoenix.

Amy Scott: Governor Lewis says with the Colorado River, the community has been able to recreate the flow of the Gila, at least in this one part of the riverbed. And as soon as they brought the water back.

Stephen Roe Lewis: You know, the the plants were popping up everywhere, just you know, regenerating just a spiritual place, a very peaceful place. I come out here to reflect sometimes to remember my father.

Amy Scott: Did he get to see this?

Stephen Roe Lewis: He saw the groundbreaking he saw the vision, he saw the overall plan. Sadly, he wasn’t here when it was finally completed. But I know that he’s here. I know. That’s, that’s why I come here to think of him. And, you know, I know that he’s, he’s watching over our community watching over myself as the governor on these, both of these difficult and critical times. This place where Governor Lewis comes to remember his dad isn’t just a beautiful, vibrant ecosystem. It’s also a key part of the community strategy for reviving its farming heritage.

Amy Scott: And for generating revenue to help pay for that.

David DeJong: Now water can be monetized and it can access the water credit can be sold.

Amy Scott: That’s after the break.

Savannah Maher: One thing I’ve learned reporting on tribal water rights is that there’s a big difference between having a right to water on paper and actually being able to use that water. The biggest obstacle for most tribes is infrastructure.

Heather Whiteman Runs Him: Those water delivery systems, those utility companies weren’t something that we were empowered or funded to put together for ourselves. And that’s, you know, what a lot of the struggle is here. That’s what we’re trying to address.

Savannah Maher: Heather Whiteman Runs Him is an attorney, a law professor and an expert on tribal water rights. She’s Apsáalooke from the Crow Nation that shares borders with Montana and Wyoming. Throughout the 20th century, when the federal government was funding big infrastructure projects in western cities and non Indian farming communities. Heather says tribal nations were on their own.

Heather Whiteman Runs Him: You know, a lot of the funding was conveyed to state governments to utilize to develop municipalities, and of course, up until recently, and maybe even still true stable communities would not be at the top of the list for priorities. So even after tribes finally secure their Colorado River water rights, they still have their work cut out for them.

Amy Scott: For the Gila River Indian Community, that means building hundreds of miles of irrigation canals to deliver that water to farmland around the reservation. To see how that ambitious project is coming along. We met up with the guy who’s overseeing it. I love it, the cooler! Everyone has to have a cooler here.

David DeJong: Oh yeah I go go nowhere without taking some bottles of water.

Savannah Maher: David DeJong is a tall wiry white guy in cowboy boots. He is not a citizen of the Gila River Indian Community, but he’s been connected to it for most of his life. He grew up in Mesa, Arizona, near Phoenix, and remembers when he was 16 years old driving through the Gila River Reservation.

David DeJong: I saw fallow land. And I thought to myself, I wonder what happened. Something happened, that all this land went out of production, and I made it my life’s goal to understand what had happened and why it happened.

Savannah Maher: So he went to school for Indian law and policy, he’s written three books about the theft of the Gila River. After he got his PhD, he worked for the community as a high school teacher.

David DeJong: I started working for the community in 1992. In the BC days, meaning “Before Casinos”.

Savannah Maher: Then when the community got serious about securing its water rights, David put on his academic hat and helped make the case. After the community won its settlement in 2004. He started working on the practical stuff, how to turn that paper water right into wet water that the community could actually use.

Amy Scott: David is director of the Pima Maricopa irrigation project. That’s the agency responsible for building all that irrigation infrastructure. He’s driving us around to show the progress they’ve made since 2004.

David DeJong: Got too many keys.

Amy Scott: Our first stop is just outside the southeastern corner of the reservation. We’re standing on a dirt berm overlooking the spot where two concrete line canals meet in a Y shape.

David DeJong: So this is the confluence This is where the Central Arizona Project water comes into our system. That’s the water from the Colorado River.

Amy Scott: It’s traveled about 280 miles through the desert to get here.

Savannah Maher: Where it’s mixing with water from the healer, which is a lot muddier looking sort of like chocolate milk.

David DeJong: All of the community CAP water.

Savannah Maher: It’s Colorado River allocation…

David DeJong: Can come through this canal. Now the community’s not using all of that CAP water. But we built it so that when the day comes and the community wants to use all of its water, we have the ability to get it.

Savannah Maher: This massive irrigation project has been years in the making, and isn’t scheduled for completion until 2030.

Amy Scott: In the meantime, the community agreed to lease some of its unused water to nearby cities, including Phoenix, Scottsdale and good year. It’s also set up a system of storage credits that it can sell. And that’s where that wetland we visited comes in. It’s one of a handful of managed aquifer recharge or Mars sites around the reservation where water is stored underground.

David DeJong: So how the MAR works is simple. It’s like a bank account. The community is putting water in the river. Water soaks down into the ground or percolates into the ground just like you would put money in the bank and the money theoretically doesn’t lose value. And then at a future date, community has several options.

Savannah Maher: One option is to deduct water from the bank account by pumping it back out of the ground to irrigate crops on the reservation. Another is to sell those credits to others who need water. Over the years, the community has sold long term storage credits to nearby cities, homeowners associations, mining companies, big corporations like Microsoft and Nestle. Those credits give the buyer the right to recover the water in the future.

David DeJong: A good chunk of that has now been sold but the community still holds probably in the area of one and a quarter million acre feet of water credit that it is just sitting on that it can mark it in the future…

Amy Scott: Possibly to a city like Buckeye. But as the Gila River Indian Community has made progress on its irrigation infrastructure, with help from the income from those deals. It’s farming economy has grown. And that means more demand for water on the reservation.

David DeJong: All right, that is Councilman Davis. Oh, let’s jump out.

Savannah Maher: David takes us to meet Brian Davis, a farmer and a member of the Gila River Indian communities legislative council near the village of Sacaton.

David DeJong: Councilman, how are you this morning?

Councilman Davis: Good, good.

Savannah Maher: Nice to meet you, Councilman. I’m Savannah.  Councilman Davis.

Amy Scott: Hi, Amy. Nice to meet you.  Councilman Davis meets us on a dirt road at the edge of a long canal bringing brownish water to one of his alfalfa fields. He’s in his 60s, he’s got a buzz cut. And just like David, he seems unfazed by the now 110 degree heat.  Farmers always amazed me your foot like dressed and long pants and long sleeves and you’re just fine.

Savannah Maher: Meanwhile, Amy and I are just about melting at this point.

Amy Scott: Do you want to have some water? You should think right, we’re all gonna take a hydration break.

Savannah Maher: Anyway, Councilman Davis has lived in the community for his entire life. He worked for a while as a farmhand for the tribe’s operation in the 70s and 80s.

Amy Scott: But when the 2004 water settlement opened the door for community members to start running their own farms. Councilman Davis says his uncle’s talked him into leasing some Bureau of Indian Affairs land and planting six acres of alfalfa, a cash crop that grows year-round in Arizona.

Councilman Davis: You know, as all businesses happen, you know, when you start out sometimes you fail but you find a way to come back and that’s what happened to me. I failed first two years probably. But then I came back again, you know, and maybe even better.

Amy Scott: 17 years later, he’s up to 300 acres of alfalfa and turf grass, and looking to expand even more, which will be a lot easier. Now. Recently, the community lined the canal that delivers water to one of Councilman Davis’s fields with concrete, a simple but expensive step that prevents water from seeping into the ground water that in a drought the community cannot afford to lose.

David DeJong: That was an unlined ditch. And then we lined it. And if I’m not mistaken, you took about 11 CFS for that field.

Amy Scott: 11 cubic feet per second. It’s about 82 gallons.

David DeJong: And then you call back and said, whoa, whoa, whoa, you’re sending way too much water.

Councilman Davis: About flooded my field out there. I about flooded my field out. In fact, I had to open it up multiple ports and borders in order to make sure that that water didn’t run over my canal.

Amy Scott: So 11 CFS looks different on a line canal than an unlined.

Councilman Davis: Yes. So right now when I ask for water I ask for 8, 9 CFS. And that’s just right. By lining these canals, they’re more efficient. A lot of the farmers are grateful for this.

Savannah Maher: As these canals are getting lined and the infrastructure is being improved. Like, what’s your vision for the agricultural economy here? What would you like to see it?

Councilman Davis: I’d like to see it grow. Hopefully, in the long run, you know, we could be able to do maybe vegetables and so forth, you know, whatever will really grow here. Watermelons and whatnot. But you know that’s, that’s my vision.

Amy Scott: Do you worry about the future of water in this part of Arizona?

Councilman Davis: Yes, I do. How is it gonna be in the future, are we gonna be able to have underground water is the water ever table ever going to come back up? Lake Mead, and so forth. I don’t know. We’re in this area where global warming is predicting, you know, what’s going to happen to us in the future here.

Savannah Maher: This is a community that has managed to hang on to its farming heritage. Even after the river that sustained it was stolen. It took 100 years for the Gila River Indian Community to shore up the resources to finally claw back the water it had been entitled to all along. Now, it’s got one of the largest settlements of any tribe in the Colorado River Basin. It’s building the infrastructure it needs to put that water to use. But now this mega drought is putting it all at risk.

Amy Scott: And even though tribes have some of the most senior rights to the river, no one’s allocation is safe from potential cuts.  The timing in some ways seems really cruel, that just when things were coming back or farming was possible again, there’s this other threat.

Councilman Davis: Eh threat’s there. But then again, I look at it, you know, where the federal government or whomever put us here on this land thinking that we weren’t going to make anything out of it, you know, and so, my thing is we survived when we had a dry river to which today is still dry. And I think we will survive one way or another.

Amy Scott: As its been able to use more of its water on the reservation, and as the mega drought has threatened its Colorado River allocation. The community is rethinking how much water is willing to share. When I asked Governor Lewis if he’d consider leasing water to Buckeye, he was pretty blunt.

Stephen Roe Lewis: We don’t want to lease our water in a long term fashion, 100 year leases. You know, as governor when I came in, you know, I wanted to make sure that we went away from that

Amy Scott: 100 years is a long time to tie up and increasingly precious resource. He’s open to selling storage credits, which are shorter term contracts that allow the community to command better prices and have more control over its water.

Savannah Maher: But in the past several years, the community has been more focused on conserving water than selling it.

Stephen Roe Lewis: With the drought we’re going through right now. We’ve put a lot of a significant amount of our CAP water, we’ve we’ve stored that up in Lake Mead as part of conservation.

Savannah Maher: In 2016, Lake Mead, the reservoir created by Hoover Dam that provides water to more than 25 million people in Arizona, California and Nevada had fallen to critical levels.

KTNV Channel 13 Las Vegas (2016): We’re following a developing story that could mean less water that you can use. The water level out at Lake Mead is at a record low and is going to continue to drop.

CNN(2016): The only time it’s been this low was first one it was filled. When Hoover Dam was built.

CBS Mornings (2016): Lake Mead has receded so far that tourists can now hike a mile across the desert to examine what’s left. With no water in sight.

Savannah Maher: The Gila River Indian Community made an agreement with the federal government. Instead of storing some of its Colorado River water underground, it would leave it in the reservoir initially 10,000 acre feet and get $1.7 million as compensation.

Amy Scott: And since then, the community has made more of these conservation deals, all told, leaving more than 730,000 acre feet in Lake Mead. Toward the end of our irrigation tour, David DeJong pulls off onto a dirt road where a construction crew is digging a deep trench. Long sections of bright blue pipe four feet thick line the road.

David DeJong: So what you see going on right now is the excavator is is excavating the trench. For the pipe, we’re putting in about 250 feet a day.

Amy Scott: When finished this nearly 20 mile pipeline will bring reclaimed wastewater from the cities of Mesa and Chandler to the reservation.

David DeJong: We then can put it into the canal that serves 95% of the communities agricultural land, giving us great flexibility into how the water will be used and where it will be used. And at the same time be able to leave Colorado River water in Lake Mead to help prop up the lake and conserve.

Savannah Maher: In exchange, the federal government is funding this $83 million project. The community also has plans to cover about 20 miles of its canals with solar panels to reduce evaporation and provide clean energy. One of the first projects of its kind in the country.

Stephen Roe Lewis: When we’re at the table. We bring innovations. Again Governor Stephen Roe Lewis, we’re doing everything we can to model very responsible behavior in regards to how we are how we are using water both on reservation how we’re storing water, how we’re conserving water as well, how we’re utilizing technology.

Savannah Maher: The Gila River Indian Community isn’t responsible for the Mega drought, or for the decades of poor management decisions that got the Colorado River Basin into this mess. Still, there’s pressure on the community to be the most responsible, and the most generous and conservation minded with this water it’s been entitled to all along but only just secured the rights to us. So that when the system is forced to make cuts, no one will have a reason to point a finger at the Gila River Indian Community.

Stephen Roe Lewis: We have to look at ways where we’re proving that we’re actually conserving the water. We’re using the water responsibly. And we want to make sure that as my father always told me that there’s ongoing vigilance, even though we have a water settlement that you would think would be protected as federal law. But because of the worst drought in over 1200 years. We want to make sure that there’s not a second taking over water.

Amy Scott: So tribal water is not the silver bullet that’s going to save parched desert towns like Buckeye, at least not the Gila River Indian communities water.

Savannah Maher: But tribal nations can be a big part of the solution to the crisis on the Colorado River if their rights to the river are respected. The Gila River Indian Community has one of the largest and most comprehensive water settlements in the basin. It’s a huge success story. And it’s still struggling to use its water how it wants, and to get a meaningful seat at the table in management decisions about the river.

Amy Scott: So where does that leave other tribes with smaller allocations, less resources, and in some cases still unsettled and unquantified water rights.

Daryl Vigil: Hydrology has pushed us to the conversation of equity, justice and basic human rights. We have the opportunity to set some of that shit straight here in the basin with these post 2026 guidelines.

Amy Scott: We bring you that story next week.

OUTRO

Amy Scott: That’s it for this episode. Thanks for listening. And as always, if you like what you hear, please leave a review, share it with a friend. All that really helps. How we survive is hosted by me, Amy Scott, Savannah Maher and I wrote this episode.

Savannah Maher: With help from our production team, Hayley Hershman, Lina Fansa, Courtney Bergsisker and Sophia Paliza-Carre. Our senior producer is Caitlin Esch. Our editor is Jasmine Romero.  Sound design by Chris Julin and audio engineering by Brian Allison. Special thanks to Jason Hodder.

Amy Scott: Our theme music is by Wonderly.  Bridget Bodnar is director of podcasts, Francesca Levy is Executive Director, Neal Scarbrough is Vice President & General Manager of Marketplace.