Despite holding senior water rights in the drought-stricken Colorado River Basin, many Native American tribes, like the Chemehuevi, are unable to access or monetize their allocations due to a lack of federal infrastructure funding and antiquated legal restrictions on leasing. While a few tribes have negotiated lucrative conservation deals, others watch their unused water flow for free to major Western cities. This disparity exacerbates economic inequalities and highlights systemic failures in Western water rights during a historic crisis.
**THE GREAT COLORADO RIVER SWINDLE!**
*Gilded Oases Drink Deep on Stolen Water While Red Men Go Parched!*
*The Tragedy of the Chemehuevi: A Five-Billion-Dollar Fortune Flowing Right Past Their Empty Buckets!*
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**BY OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT**
**LAKE HAVASU CITY, Ariz.** — When the sun goes down on the Arizona desert, a glittering electric carnival roars to life on the banks of the Colorado. Here, in this swank desert playground, the neon signs of grand hotels, bustling boat launches, and wealthy neighborhoods cast a golden glow across the shimmering waters of the reservoir. It is a monument to modern grit, built on the back of a mighty concrete monolith thrown up by the federal boys downstream in the 1930s. Thanks to Uncle Sam’s big dam, the cash registers are ringing, and the good times are rolling for the tourists.
But cast your eyes across the dark, glass-still waters to the California shore, and you will find a silence as heavy as a graveyard.
Nary a light flickers. The only sounds in the velvet blackness are the gentle lap of the tide and the eerie click of bats swooping overhead, completely drowning out the distant hum of the high-society motorboats.
This is the Chemehuevi Indian Reservation. When the federal government backed up the river to create Lake Havasu, they drowned the Chemehuevi’s dreams under a watery grave, swallowing up 7,000 acres of their richest, most fertile pastureland and washing away their ancestral homes.
Today, this watery divide stands as a stark, crying scandal—a tale of two Americas. It is a story of who gets to drink the sweet waters of prosperity, and who gets handed a dry canteen. And at the bottom of it all is a high-stakes shell game over who owns the water.
### THE LAW OF THE LAND: A TRUMP CARD UNPLAYED!
Get a load of this, folks: way back in the year of our Lord 1908, the big-wigs on the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision as solid as granite. They ruled that the government owed the tribes enough water to turn their reservations into permanent, flourishing homes. Better yet, they declared the tribes’ rights were "senior priority"—meaning they hold the trump card over every city, orchard, and land speculator in the West! Even in the driest dust-bowl years, the tribes are legally entitled to draw their share before Phoenix, Las Vegas, or Los Angeles can wet a single whistle.
But more than a century after that high court decree, only a select few have seen a single drop of justice.
Some tribes, possessing the political muscle to whisper in the ears of Washington’s power brokers, have struck gold. Take the Gila River Indian Community. Just recently, those slick operators shook hands with the federal boys on a breathtaking deal: they’ll pocket up to 150 million greenbacks over the next three years just for leaving some of their water in the river, plus another 83 million clams to build a brand-new pipeline!
But for the rest of the thirty federally recognized tribes in the basin, Uncle Sam has given them the high-hat.
Consider the Chemehuevi. Their reservation fronts a magnificent thirty-mile stretch of the Colorado River. Yet, a staggering 97 percent of their legal water allocation is left to flow right past their parched banks, ending up in the swimming pools and bathhouses of Southern California’s coastal elite.
And for all that liquid gold? The Chemehuevi don’t receive one copper cent!
### THE FIVE-BILLION-DOLLAR RACKET
Our newsboys did some digging, pulling the ledger books apart with the crusading scribes of *ProPublica* and *High Country News*. The arithmetic is enough to make a Wall Street banker blush.
The water legally guaranteed to these tribes that remains unused totals at least one million acre-feet every single year. That is nearly one-tenth of the entire Colorado River’s annual flow—four times what the whole roaring metropolis of Las Vegas consumes! If sold on the open market today, that water would command a jaw-dropping price tag of over **five billion dollars**!
For the Chemehuevi’s 1,250 souls, the water they own on paper but cannot touch is worth a cool 55 million dollars.
We found Steven Escobar, the tribe’s gritty administrator, standing by the river. As a young buck, Escobar used to test his mettle against the Colorado's icy, rushing currents. Today, he’s still fighting the river—only now, it’s a grueling wrestle with federal red tape.
"All that development and governmental support they provide to every state, that should be the same thing they provide to tribes," Escobar barked, his jaw set. "We’ve had to fight for everything out here."
With the Colorado River drying to a trickle and demand soaring, the tribes are gripped by a terrible fear: that they will be swindled out of their birthright forever.
### ONE DIESEL PUMP AGAINST A CONCRETE MONSTER
The Chemehuevi are trapped in a corner. They don't have the grand canals, the steel pipes, or the high-power pumps needed to bring their water up to the parched plateaus where they live.
Meanwhile, just across the way, look at the jaw-dropping spectacle of the Central Arizona Project! Fifty years ago, the federal government poured billions into a colossal, 336-mile concrete snake that sucks up the very water that flooded the Chemehuevi’s land and sends it roaring across the desert to the bustling streets of Phoenix and Tucson. The monstrous pumps driving that project devour more electricity than any other single entity in the entire state of Arizona!
And what do the Chemehuevi have to show? A single, sputtering diesel pump, straining to lift water six stories up from the lake to their dry fields.
Even if they wanted to lease their unused water to thirsty, booming cities to make a honest buck, they are hog-tied by ancient laws. Under the Indian Non-Intercourse Acts—passed back when redcoats were still fresh in memory—tribes are strictly forbidden from leasing their water without an express Act of Congress.
"This is a long-standing problem," says Mark Squillace, a high-brow law professor at the University of Colorado. "From the perspective of the people using that water, why would they pay when they’re already getting it for free?"
It’s the perfect crime!
### "THIS IS WHAT'S LEFT"
Last April, the brass hats and politicians packed into a smoky conference room at the Arizona Capitol to toast the Gila River Indian Community’s multi-million-dollar conservation deal. Deputy Secretary of the Interior Tommy Beaudreau took the podium, patting the tribes on the back like old pals.
"We don’t have any more important partners," he declared to the applause of the crowd.
But the Gila River folks had a grand canal running right by their doorstep and millions of dollars to spend on high-priced Washington lobbyists. The Chemehuevi had none of that. Their rights were settled by a cold court decree in the 1960s, back when they didn’t even have official federal recognition. They got no pipes, no pumps, and no handouts.
Escobar drove this reporter past the skeletal, rotting frames of greenhouse tents—the ghost of a farming venture that went belly-up for lack of water. Nearby, a single, lonely tractor churned the dusty soil.
Behind us, the blue waters of Lake Havasu sparkled, burying the rich soil where their ancestors once farmed. In front of us stretched a barren, sandy waste where Uncle Sam expects them to somehow scratch out a living.
"This is what’s left," Escobar said, his voice dropping to a somber whisper. "It’s sad."
The Chemehuevi once drew up a grand plan to farm 1,900 acres of their land using their legal allotment of 3.7 billion gallons a year. But today, in a good year, they can only irrigate a measly 80 acres—growing a few melons, some devil’s claw for weaving, and cottonwoods to keep the riverbanks from crumbling.
If the government won't help them build the pipes to farm their own land, Escobar says they ought to at least pay them for the water Southern California is drinking.
"We want to be a benefit to the system," Escobar said, looking out over the grand aqueducts carrying the river away to light up the marquee lights of Los Angeles. "But right now, they’re making it hard."