Supreme Court to hear case on Navajo Nation rights to Colorado River

The Supreme Court announced Friday that it will weigh in on a dispute between the Navajo Nation and state and federal governments over the tribe’s claim on Colorado River waters.

The tribe has argued the U.S. is failing to fulfill its obligations regarding the river under the terms of an 1849 treaty.

In a filing, lawyers for the tribe wrote that “[w]hen the government creates an Indian reservation, it reserves then-unappropriated water sufficient to fulfill the reservation’s purposes.” The Navajo Nation, which first sued over access to the river in 2003, has asked for access to the main branch of the river, rather than to the San Juan River, the tributary where it gets most of its water. 

Meanwhile, the federal government and the states of Arizona, Colorado and Nevada argued in an October filing that the river’s water is not an explicitly enumerated responsibility of the government regarding reservations. The case law “has made clear that Indian tribes may sue to enforce only those trust responsibilities that the United States has ‘expressly accept[ed],’” they wrote.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona had earlier dismissed the Navajo Nation’s claims, but the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals revived the complaint last year, citing the “fierce” competition in the West for the river’s over-allocated waters.

Access to the river’s waters is governed by a century-old compact, which does not account for the drought that has plagued the region for over two decades. The state governments themselves have also been at odds over their respective claims to the water.

Earlier this year, the federal government announced a 21 percent cut to annual allotments to Arizona from the river, while recently it announced it will weigh intervening in the ongoing talks between the states in the river’s basin after they missed a summer deadline for an agreement.