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I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I 0956 Sess;on J: Western Water Trends and Directions A more practical and political reason for looking for ways to work together is that conservationists and tribes, as parties with interests in water, have had relatively little political power or clout in the western policy arena, for many of the reasons that Sue Williams described. It is true that tribes enjoy a unique govemment-to-government relationship with the Federal Government, and that the U.S. Government has important treaty and fiduciary obligations to the tribes. Even as we meet this year, I expect that this relationship can be used, as it should be used, by the tribes to leverage more action by the Federal Government to resolve tribal water issues. However, I also strongly believe that success in securing and developing the water rights to which the tribes are entitled will necessarily involve finding ways to achieve those goals in conjunction with the resolution of other water management issues. This is particularly true given our new era of budget politics in western water. Western water policy is dominated by stories of conflict, and it's based on mountains oflaws, policies, institutions and technical fixes that are designed to address these conflicts. Like growing urban water demands, I would say that environmental water demands are here to stay, and as we develop a tribal agenda for shaping water policy, we will have to take into account environmental water needs. I personally tend to agree that it's not fair that tribes-after waiting and working hard to be in a position to develop water rights-now face environmental constraints to developing their rights, but this is where we are. It's part ofthe landscape, and I think we have to figure out the best way to deal with it. The fact that environmental issues can and do figure into tribal water issues can be seen in some of the recent tribal water settlements. Before the 1990s, there were very few, if any, settlements that had explicit provisions and conditions for addressing environmental matters. Since 1990, there have been several examples of settlements where environmental water issues were an explicit component of the settlement for tribal water: the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone and Truckee-Carson-Pyramid Lake settlement in 1990, the Jicarilla-Apache settlement, the Wind River litigation-which is full of issues about instream flows, the ongoing Animas- La Plata Project, and the Colorado Ute Indian water rights settlement. At least one of these serves as an example of an instance where environmental needs actually helped to advance the water right settlement. In the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone and Truckee-Carson-Pyramid Lake water 29