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Last modified
7/14/2009 5:02:35 PM
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5/22/2009 5:44:48 PM
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UCREFRP
UCREFRP Catalog Number
9367
Author
Colorado Water Workshop.
Title
Proceedings
USFW Year
1992.
USFW - Doc Type
Colorado Water Workshop July 22-24, 1992.
Copyright Material
NO
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<br />to accomplish the purposes of the reservation. <br />The treaty called for the Tribes to make a the transformation <br />from a nomadic lifestyle to one involving irrigated agriculture and <br />the arts of civilization. Water was set aside for these reservation <br />purposes. The right was recognized under federal law, not under state <br />law, and was quite different from state water rights. There was no <br />need for the tribes to put that water to use to establish a priority <br />date, rather the priority date stems from at least as early as the <br />time the reservation was created. That case has been cited many <br />times. I am sure that many of you are familiar with it. We commonly <br />talk about it in the context of h9W to quantify tribal water rights. <br />But, if you go back and look at the opinion, you find a great deal of <br />discussion by the Supreme Court about how the tribes had "command of <br />the waters." Again, the Court goes back to this notion that tribes <br />were sovereign with control over the resources within their territory, <br />both before and after the treaty. Before the treaty the tribes had <br />control over a large area. When the treaty was passed and the tribes <br />agreed to accept a smaller reservation and make this transformation, <br />the tribes retained control of the water. I think that we will see <br />that the control issue is equally as important as the quantification <br />and treatment of the tribes' entitlement to water rights. <br />The Winters Doctrine or the Reserved Rights Doctrine has a mixed <br />history from 1908 up into the 1960's. There were numerous cases in <br />which the Reserved Rights Doctrine was recognized. The doctrine was <br />expanded to apply to reservations that were created other than by <br />treaty, i.e. those created by executive order. In general, there was <br />an acknowledgement of the existence of the doctrine, but it remained <br />quite vague. <br />In 1963, however, the Supreme Court issued its opinion in Arizona <br />versus California, which you heard about yesterday. What is important <br />from the tribes' perspective is that in Arizona versus California, the <br />United States intervened and asserted water rights on behalf of all <br />26 tribes in the Lower Colorado River basin. The Court ultimately <br />decided only to address the question of main stem rights, and the <br />Supreme Court awarded nearly one million acre-feet of water to the <br />five tribes along the main stem of the Lower Colorado River basin. <br />That was the first time that the Court addressed a permanent or <br />perpetual quantification of the tribal rights. For those <br />reservations, the Court used a standard which is called the PIA <br />standard because it is hard for most people to say practicably <br />irrigable acreage with any ease. The idea was that at the time the <br />reservations were established, the tribes were meant to have enough <br />water to irrigate all the practicably irrigable acreage on the <br />reservation. There is some dispute about exactly what that means. <br />I think practicably means exactly what it sounds like; "what is <br />reasonable," economics also plays a role in it. In any event, it was. <br />a substantial quantity of water within the Lower Basin. <br />The focus after Arizona v. California has been to find a way to <br />quantify the tribal water rights. Not very much attention is paid to <br />the issue of how are those water rights regulated, who ought to have <br />control of that water, and what opportunities do the tribes really <br />have to put their water to use. Nevertheless, there was law review <br />article written after the Arizona versus California decision that <br />anticipated many of the issues that we are talking about today. It <br /> <br />44 <br />
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