"Records unearthed by a University of Virginia professor shed new light on states’ vocal opposition in the 1950s to tribes claiming their share of the river. Today, many are still fighting to secure water."
"In the 1950s, after quarreling for decades over the Colorado River, Arizona and California turned to the U.S. Supreme Court for a final resolution on the water that both states sought to sustain their postwar booms.
The case, Arizona v. California, also offered Native American tribes a rare opportunity to claim their share of the river. But they were forced to rely on the U.S. Department of Justice for legal representation.
A lawyer named T.F. Neighbors, who was special assistant to the U.S. attorney general, foresaw the likely outcome if the federal government failed to assert tribes’ claims to the river: States would consume the water and block tribes from ever acquiring their full share.
In 1953, as Neighbors helped prepare the department’s legal strategy, he wrote in a memo to the assistant attorney general, “When an economy has grown up premised upon the use of Indian waters, the Indians are confronted with the virtual impossibility of having awarded to them the waters of which they had been illegally deprived.”"
Mark Olalde reports for ProPublica, and Anna V. Smith for High Country News, October 17, 2023.
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