This story was produced by RE:PUBLIC and is co-published here by permission.
MOAB, Utah – Between the red rock canyon walls of the Colorado River, Aniston Hanks, 20, stood in the water while her best friend, Shauna Belone, 21, sat along the river’s shore.
The two Diné citizens spent part of their summer learning about water, land, plants and conservation across the Colorado Plateau through The Nature Conservancy’s NATURE Program (Native American Tribes Upholding Restoration and Education). For Hanks, standing knee-deep in the Colorado River brought thoughts of the Little Colorado River near her home in Cameron, Arizona, a source of reverence for her family.
“We think of it as a relative,” Hanks said of water, including the tributaries of the Colorado River. “We’re born for water.”
Nonetheless, Hanks and Belone live on opposite sides of a legal boundary dividing the same river, known as the lower and upper basins of the Colorado River.
Hanks lives in the Lower Basin in Arizona. Belone, from Naschitti, New Mexico, lives in the Upper Basin. As citizens of the Navajo Nation, their 27,000-square-mile homeland extends into both basins.
These basin boundaries matter as the federal government changes how the Colorado River’s two largest reservoirs — Lake Powell and Lake Mead — will be managed amid a 26-year megadrought.
The federal decision for both reservoirs arrived in two steps. The Bureau of Reclamation completed its environmental review on July 31. Then, on Aug. 21, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum signed a record of decision and issued the first set of operating guidelines for 2027 and 2028. The new rules for both reservoirs begin on October 1.
What the decision settles is a process, not the basin’s larger dispute. The seven basin states still have not agreed on a long-term formula for sharing shortages. In the decision, the Interior Department established a framework through 2036 that allows federal managers to revisit operations in shorter intervals as reservoir levels, runoff and negotiations change.
Celine Hawkins, Colorado River Program Director for The Nature Conservancy, said the Bureau of Reclamation’s environmental review provides planning analysis for decisions still to come. “They’ve essentially developed a 10-year framework for the basin,” she said, with operating plans expected every two years unless the basin states reach consensus on a negotiated solution.
That flexibility is being tested immediately. Interior said that after 26 years of drought, Lake Powell and Lake Mead together hold less water than at any point since Lake Powell began filling in 1963. For the first operating interval, Reclamation said it will adjust water moving through Glen Canyon Dam in an effort to keep Lake Powell at or above 3,510 feet, an elevation the agency associates with the dam’s continued operational reliability.
According to Interior, Arizona, California and Nevada must collectively take 1.25 million acre-feet less from the river in each of the next two years. How that burden is divided depends on whether the three states complete their proposed sharing agreement. Under that proposal, Arizona would take a 760,000-acre-foot reduction, compared with 440,000 acre-feet for California and 50,000 acre-feet for Nevada.
Interior said the Lower Basin plan also calls for water users to voluntarily conserve and store at least another 700,000 acre-feet during the two-year period. The Upper Basin was not assigned a comparable fixed reduction. Instead, it states that the Upper Basin states and tribes may negotiate coordinated operations at Flaming Gorge, Aspinall, and Navajo reservoirs, in consultation with Lower Basin states and tribes, if additional water is needed to protect Glen Canyon Dam.
For tribal nations, one of the less visible pieces of the decision is a federally controlled pool of water. Reclamation said the pool could be used to carry out federal delivery or firming promises contained in congressionally approved Indian water-rights settlements, to partially offset certain tribal shortages, or to protect federal infrastructure.
The record of decision says the tribal-firming provision applies to a limited group of Lower Basin tribes whose settlements include federal firming obligations, including the Gila River Indian Community. The Navajo Nation is not among those tribes.
Hawkins said the effects of the post-2026 framework will vary among tribal nations because their settlements, legal positions and water supplies differ across the basin.
Asked how the post-2026 framework could affect tribal nations, Hawkins said there was no single answer. “I don’t think there’s an easy or a single answer because I think different tribal nations in the basin are going to be affected differently,” she said.
She noted that some Arizona tribes rely on the Central Arizona Project supplies, while others rely on the Colorado River’s main stem, and that tribal water settlements and legal positions differ across the basin.
That distinction is central to the framework’s effects. Some tribes hold quantified, senior water rights directly from the Colorado River. Others rely on settlement water delivered through federal infrastructure. Still others possess unquantified rights or legally recognized water they cannot fully use because the necessary infrastructure has not been built.
Interior’s record of decision established the first operating rules, but it did not resolve the legal, infrastructure and water-access questions tribal officials raised during the federal environmental review.
A river divided on paper
For Crystal Tulley-Cordova (Diné), principal hydrologist with the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources, the problem can be described more simply.
“There is an imbalance between paper water versus wet water,” Tulley-Cordova said.
She said the effects are already visible across the Navajo Nation: snowpack has declined and reduced snowmelt runoff has affected local creeks. People who gather wild tea — green thread — have noticed changes in the plants’ growth, she said, while monsoon rainfall patterns have also shifted — bringing fewer routine summer showers and, at times, intense rain that causes flooding.
“There is an imbalance between paper water versus wet water.”
“Ultimately, Mother Nature is in charge here,” said Bidtah Becker, chief legal counsel for the Navajo Nation Office of the President and Vice President and a member of the Navajo Nation Water Rights Commission.
The commission is tasked with settling the Navajo Nation’s water-rights claims across its vast lands, including in the Lower Basin through the proposed Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Act of 2025.
Even so, humans have spent more than a century creating rules for dividing what nature provides.
The 1922 Colorado River Compact divided the river into an Upper and Lower Basin and became part of the collection of laws, legal agreements and court decisions known as the Law of the River. Tribal nations were not sovereignly engaged in the compact.
“The Indians were not at the table 100 years ago,” said Peter Ortego, president of Acadian Desert Consulting and former longtime general counsel for the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. “They weren’t invited.”
The Navajo Nation presents an especially complicated example of what those century-old boundaries mean today under the post-2026 rules.
Under the proposed Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement, the Navajo Nation would receive approximately 47,000 acre-feet of Upper Basin Colorado River water for communities in Arizona. But some communities that need the water sit south of the legal line separating the basins.
“We didn’t draw those lines,” Becker added. “We didn’t impose the system on ourselves.”
The distinction also matters because not all tribal water rights have been legally quantified.
The post-2026 rules do not directly change the Navajo Nation’s water rights under the proposed settlement because the Nation still does not have a fully approved Colorado River settlement in Arizona. Until Congress approves it, the Navajo Nation’s 47,000 acre-feet remains more of a plan than actual wet water, Becker said.
Tulley-Cordova explained that quantified and decreed rights allow a specific amount of tribal water to be accounted for within a state’s share of the Colorado River. Unquantified rights, she said, are “not really included into the management framework.”
That does not mean the post-2026 framework itself settles those claims. Nor does it determine whether existing projects such as the Navajo-Gallup Water Supply Project, funded largely by Reclamation, continue construction. The project would bring a long-term water supply to more than 250,000 people in New Mexico using San Juan River water secured through the Navajo Nation San Juan River Basin Water Rights Settlement.
Tulley-Cordova said the framework is focused on how the reservoir system is operated, including what water is held back and released.
Different rights, same river
There is no single tribal experience on the Colorado River.
“We are not a monolith,” Becker said, noting that the effects of Colorado River management decisions vary widely among tribes based on whether their water rights are quantified and how they use their water.
“We are not a monolith.”
For the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, the issue demonstrates the difference between holding a water right and having the infrastructure to fully use it.
The tribe has settled its water rights in Colorado. Ortego also pointed to water stored in Lake Nighthorse near Durango, Colorado, which must pass through New Mexico before reaching only a small portion of the reservation. Roughly 16,000 acre-feet of water that the tribe currently cannot use bypasses the reservation each year, he said.
That creates a dilemma during scarcity: developing the water would allow the tribe to exercise its rights, while leaving it in the system could benefit an already stressed Colorado River. Ortego said the tribe should either receive infrastructure to use its water or receive compensation for deferring its development.
“None of us is in the exact same situation,” Ortego said of tribes in the Upper Basin.
The Colorado River Indian Tribes, a federally recognized tribe that is also known as CRIT, enter the process from a different legal position. CRIT’s reservation stretches along the Colorado River in Arizona and California, and its rights are governed by a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court decree in Arizona v. California. CRIT Chairwoman Amelia Flores described them as the most senior tribal water rights in the Lower Basin, going back to 1865.
CRIT had opposed language in earlier federal proposals that tribal leaders said could have imposed illegal reductions on its allocation. In an August 21 statement responding to the record of decision, CRIT said Reclamation had affirmed that it would follow the court decree and would not impose those reductions.
“The efforts of CRIT have made a difference,” Flores said in the release. “The numerous meetings and discussions between CRIT’s Tribal Council and the Bureau of Reclamation have clearly had an impact.”
The record of decisions also calls for tribal nations, including CRIT, to be formally included in a basin-wide consultation structure. CRIT leaders welcomed the commitment but said they would remain engaged as Reclamation develops successive two-year operating guidelines, particularly if worsening reservoir conditions lead to additional reductions in water supplies for central Arizona.
“Given the critical status of the river, tribal consultation is mandatory in every discussion and decision regarding the Colorado River,” CRIT Councilmember Raeanne Patch said in the statement.
The Nature Conservancy’s Celine Hawkins said tribal nations are bringing innovative ideas to discussions about the Colorado River’s future, though they “don’t have the same level of access to decision-making tables as their state and federal counterparts.”
Peter Ortego said greater tribal participation in the post-2026 framework could strengthen tribal sovereignty and give tribes more influence over future operating decisions.
“When the tribes have the power and the ability to put their perspective on the table, and other people actually listen to it and actually respond to it in a positive way,” he said, “that’s the best way tribes can exercise their sovereignty.”
Back along the Colorado River near Moab — far upstream of Lee Ferry, Ariz., the legal dividing point between the Upper and Lower basins — that boundary was nowhere to be seen.
For Aniston Hanks, the question of how people live with a river carrying less water returned to something more fundamental.
“There has to be a balance,” she said while standing knee-deep in the river, part of a system that supplies resources to more than 40 million people. “You walk with beauty, with nature, not against it.”
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
