A massive Colorado River water settlement for the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe and San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe is blocked in Congress. While the deal would resolve the largest outstanding tribal water rights claim and provide about $5 billion for infrastructur
For 83-year-old Marilyn Tewa, the stalemate over Colorado River water is measured in buckets, not billable hours.
On a May afternoon. she tapped the spigot on an untreated water line—one of the few things that stands between her family and daily survival. Her village, Mishongnovi, sits on the Hopi reservation in northern Arizona without indoor plumbing. Every other day, Tewa loads 5-gallon buckets into her pickup and drives 5 miles to a windmill originally built for livestock. “That’s what keeps us alive,” she said.
The broader political fight is happening far away—in committee rooms and congressional negotiations over how to split a dwindling river. But for Tewa and many of her neighbors. the consequence is plain: if the Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Act doesn’t become law. the family will keep hauling water the way they have been forced to do for years.
Tewa is a member of the Hopi Tribal Council and has helped work on the water rights agreement. She watched the settlement reach Congress after decades of negotiations involving the Navajo Nation. the Hopi Tribe. and the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe. Now it sits stalled. with four Upper Basin states refusing to allow it to move forward in the form currently before lawmakers.
The legislation is designed to resolve the largest outstanding claim on the Colorado River. It would also provide about $5 billion in federal funding for water infrastructure—pipes. pumps and treatment plants—to transport water across the reservations. The act goes beyond water rights. too. creating a reservation for the San Juan Southern Paiute. an effort that was added to the settlement because of the tribe’s difficulty getting it through Congress independently.
For Tewa, who described her hope as something she carries for children and grandchildren, the question is whether Congress will let the long-delayed promise reach the ground. “That’s my prayer,” she said, “that we get this settlement through for all three tribes.”
Instead, the opposition from the Upper Basin has tightened around a specific feature of the deal: the plan for Navajo and Hopi to lease some of their water rights, almost certainly to growing towns around Phoenix, so the tribes can help defray infrastructure costs beyond the federal contribution.
Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming are resisting that leasing provision, and they have done so consistently enough that negotiations have reached what negotiators involved in the process describe as a stalemate.
In a previously unreported March letter to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. negotiators for Utah and Wyoming wrote that they had “significant unresolved concerns with the legislation that may affect each of our states’ rights to and interests in Colorado River water.” New Mexico and Colorado sent similar letters.
The four Upper Basin states are caught in a larger showdown with the Lower Basin states of Arizona. California and Nevada over new rules for how water is shared. Congress and the White House—under both Democratic and Republican leadership—have declined to approve the settlement until all parties reach an agreement.
The dispute is sharpened by geography. The dividing line between the Upper Basin and Lower Basin does not follow state borders. It cuts across northeastern Arizona and directly through the Navajo reservation. If water moves across that line under leasing provisions. the Upper Basin states argue they could lose control in a way that effectively gives them a veto over the settlement.
There is also an unresolved legal question: whether approval from all seven basin states is necessary.
But the Upper Basin states’ deeper fear is about what happens after the settlement. They worry that water they currently control could be leased on an open market in the future. potentially allowing high-wealth downstream cities—explicitly named in the reporting as Los Angeles. Phoenix and Las Vegas—to buy vast quantities of the water. Navajo and Hopi negotiators. for their part. attempted to blunt that concern with concessions—offering to limit both the volume of water and the length of time they could lease it. and offering to leave some water in one of the river’s drought-depleted reservoirs to help keep downstream flows high enough.
The Upper Basin states have not backed down.
While the letters and objections have stayed on paper. the settlement is also tied to specific infrastructure already waiting on funding. A construction crew has installed pipes at the new LeChee Water Treatment Plant near Lake Powell, along the Arizona-Utah border. The former Navajo Generating Station’s intakes—facilities that once drew water from Lake Powell to cool a coal power plant—still sit unused. awaiting money from the stalled settlement.
In the language of the people it was supposed to serve, the situation has a cruel twist. The tribes helped deliver Colorado River water beyond their lands for years. including by powering major systems that sustained cities in the Basin. Now that they have secured rights to water for their own communities. they are blocked from using the same resource to stabilize daily life.
Heather Tanana. an assistant professor at the University of Denver law school who focuses on federal Indian law and is a citizen of the Navajo Nation. described the opposition as something more than bureaucratic caution. She said the Upper Basin is “trying to hide behind” how the river has traditionally been managed rather than find a way to give the tribes access to a resource that is “rightfully theirs” and is “one that they need to survive.” Tanana called it “a fundamental human rights issue.”.
Tewa’s home shows how that human-rights conflict plays out inside ordinary rooms. She bustled about her kitchen while her daughter kneaded dough for dinner, but there’s no faucet. The family stores water in large plastic containers. and because of the lack of indoor plumbing. neighbors use portable toilets placed among the houses.
The family’s routine is not theoretical. It’s the difference between safe sanitation and exposure to the hazards of hauling and storing water. Tewa’s daily life—lifting and carrying water, washing with what she can get—has persisted through the same national delay that has held up the settlement.
The law would also address the practical realities of water delivery on reservations: the tribes need pipes. pumps and treatment plants to use the water secured through the agreement. To cover costs beyond the federal government’s expected contribution. the Navajo and Hopi plan to lease some of their water rights for a set number of years to towns around Phoenix. with those towns paying to use the water.
If the Lower Basin states support the settlement, the Upper Basin has latched onto leasing as the dealbreaker. The Upper Basin position also runs into the Navajo Nation’s unique status: its reservation straddles both divisions of the Colorado River Basin. Navajo President Buu Nygren has said his tribe’s location should not become a reason to deny the settlement. “We shouldn’t be punished for being in two basins,” he said. He added that other tribal nations and other settlements have been able to lease water.
Nygren has also described leasing as limited by design. He said leasing would last only as long as it’s needed to pay for the infrastructure to distribute the newly acquired water. He argued it would not set a precedent because no other tribe straddles both basins.
The stalemate has spread beyond the policy questions and into the timing of hope itself.
Tewa said she is speaking for the family line ahead of her, insisting that the settlement is about more than correcting history. “I’m speaking on behalf of my children, my grandchildren and their children that haven’t come yet,” she said. “I hope, in the future, that they will have water.”
Other tribal leaders are pushing Congress for different reasons, but they describe the same urgency.
For San Juan Southern Paiute Vice President Johnny Lehi Jr., the settlement is about securing a permanent homeland. The San Juan Southern Paiute have no reservation. but they reached a deal in 2000 with the Navajo that transferred some land. Because the tribes had already agreed. Lehi said the land transfer itself should not have been hard to finalize—but it was pulled into the water settlement and became caught in the same congressional gridlock.
Lehi described the reality of negotiating before time runs out. “During the COVID era. it took a lot of the tribal elders. and there are only a handful that saw the treaty signed and are really wanting to see this before their time is up. ” he said. He said finally securing a reservation would mean the ability to build housing and develop an economy for a tribe that currently rents its government building.
On the Hopi reservation. Councilmember Marilyn Fredericks walked up and down the hand-carved steps of a terraced garden that once produced food for her community. Seven natural springs had fed that garden. Now only two still flow, and ponds that once stored water sit dry. Fredericks said it’s been six years since there was enough water to plant.
For her, the settlement is not an abstract promise. She described the funding as a pipeline that would be “our umbilical cord.” Future generations. she said. have a right to clean. reliable water. and she pointed to the settlement as evidence of how precious water is on the reservation. “This is evidence of how precious water is to us,” she said.
The fight is the latest chapter in a much longer struggle that tribal leaders say began with the federal government’s obligations but has taken generations to implement.
In 1908, the Supreme Court ruled that if the federal government confined tribes to reservations, it owed them enough water to sustain an agrarian economy on that land—often referred to as “Winters rights.” But, securing that water has been difficult.
Tribes were excluded from the compacts that apportioned the river. The Navajo in particular were barred from joining a seminal case quantifying other users’ rights. and in 2012 Navajo members rejected a proposed settlement because they viewed it as unfair. The tribe then returned to the Supreme Court. asking the justices to force the federal government to quickly settle the claims.
The Navajo lost again. The court’s majority decided their treaty with the U.S. did not require the government to take any “affirmative steps” to deliver the water it owed the tribe.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in dissent that, “At each turn, they have received the same answer: ‘Try again,’” and compared the delays to pop culture from an earlier era, noting that when the “routine first began in earnest, Elvis was still making his rounds on The Ed Sullivan Show.”
By the time the settlement reached Congress, the stakes had grown beyond the tribes’ own communities.
The 30 federally recognized tribes with land in the Colorado River Basin are estimated to have a right to at least a quarter of the river’s flow. Tribal water rights are senior on the river. meaning in times of shortage everyone else would see their water cut before tribes. But because tribes currently use only a fraction of their entitlements, farmers, cities and businesses can use the rest.
Former Navajo attorney general Ethel Branch. involved in the negotiations. said that in practice “everybody’s getting free Navajo. Hopi and San Juan Southern Paiute water right now. ” adding that “the seven basin states are all benefiting in the absence of a settlement.” Branch went further. saying the water had been “stolen for over a century.”.
A settlement also faced political obstacles long before the Upper Basin letters returned to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs. The House of Representatives balked at the price tag. Presidential administrations were unwilling to spend political capital on such settlements. and more than a dozen settlements were in the works—clogging the system. No settlement has been enacted since 2022.
Still, in November 2024, as President Donald Trump prepared for his return to the White House, tribes believed they had a window to secure congressional approval while President Joe Biden was still in office.
Navajo leadership had supported the Democratic presidential ticket and worried the incoming administration would be vindictive. In the period when those fears were active. tribal negotiators and staff—including a federal representative—descended on the Arizona Department of Water Resources’ offices in Phoenix for what attendees described as a “Hail Mary.”.
At that meeting, the Navajo offered a major compromise: limiting how much water they could lease and for how long they could lease it. Upper Basin states, according to multiple attendees, arrived with a list of grievances and were not interested in negotiating over Navajo leasing concessions.
Tom Buschatzke, Arizona’s Colorado River lead, later said it’s difficult for the Upper Basin to wrap their heads around this settlement.
As negotiations continued. tribal leaders traveled to Washington for a Senate hearing in March 2026. where they made an impassioned plea for Congress to pass a version of the bill that included the concessions they said they offered in the Hail Mary meeting. Sen. Lisa Murkowski. the Alaska Republican who ran the hearing. expressed support for the settlement but worried its $5 billion price tag was too high. An Interior Department official echoed that concern. The tribes and the Department of the Interior are currently negotiating to shrink that cost.
Throughout this process, each Upper Basin state has submitted comments opposing the settlement. Their main concerns have focused on leasing across the basin and whether the water for the settlement would be counted against the upper or lower division of the river.
Colorado’s governor. Jared Polis. said the state is “committed to finding a path forward” and pointed to a letter submitted to Congress by Becky Mitchell. the state’s lead river negotiator. Mitchell wrote that the settlement’s leasing provisions violate laws governing the river. and that the state was concerned about what the sale of water across the basin would mean for “the security and certainty” of Colorado’s share of the river.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s spokesperson said in a statement that the tribes addressed most of the state’s concerns but that questions remain about whether the water that the tribes would lease to Arizona cities could be counted as part of what the Upper Basin states are legally required to send to the Lower Basin. The spokesperson said “New Mexico remains committed to finding a workable solution.”.
Utah and Wyoming’s lead negotiators deferred to the March letter they co-signed.
Back in Mishongnovi, those legal debates land in the same place: on the road at dawn with buckets in the pickup bed, in the absence of faucets where a family wants them most, and in the waiting that stretches longer than most people can plan for.
Even as pipes are installed at plants near Lake Powell and pipelines remain only a schematic without the stalled funding. the settlement still hangs in Congress—stopped at the moment when. for the tribes. water rights would have meant something more than paper entitlements. It would have meant turning on a faucet.
For Tewa, the stakes are personal and immediate. For the families living without indoor plumbing, the delay isn’t just political. It is lived. And it persists while four states keep insisting the deal’s leasing terms cannot be allowed to move forward.
Colorado River Native American water rights Navajo Nation Hopi Tribe San Juan Southern Paiute Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Act Congress Upper Basin states leasing provisions federal Indian law Marilyn Tewa