Indian water in the new West

the long version

Although the rights of Indian reservations to water were specified by the Supreme Court as early as 1908, the settlement of Native American claims has become a crucial matter in recent years as economic and demographic growth in the West places extreme demands on this limited resource. This collection of essays on Indian water rights seeks to assess these ongoing processes of conflict and accommodation among competing claimants. It brings together the views of engineers, lawyers, ecologists, economists, professional mediators, federal officials, an anthropologist, and a Native American tribal leader - all either students of these processes or protagonists in them - to discuss how the legitimate claims of both Indians and non-Indians to scarce water in the West are being settled. Because the number of cases settled to date is but a small fraction of those pending, this volume offers an invaluable perspective on an active issue and points to the need for negotiation rather than litigation. It complements the existing literature on water law with a divergence of outlooks on an issue of vast complexity.