WSPC02585

• File Number: 8064
• Description: Indian Water Rights
• State: CO
• Basin: San Juan/Dolores
• Water Division: 7
• Date: 3/17/1997
• Author: Todd M Olinger
• Title: Summary of Indian Water 1997
• Water Supply Pro - Doc Type: Report/Study

Indian Wa!er-1997: Trends and Directions in Federal Water Policy

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The salmon in the Northwest are leaving us. In that big Pacific Ocean out
there, the mighty Columbia River, the mighty Skagit River, the mighty
Nisqually River, the 80-mile river that I live on, the salmon are depleted, and
they are leaving us. .

It's water-the salmon need clean water. They need water to survive, to go
up to the headwaters and migrate out, to go out into the ocean for as long as
seven years and return in the life cycle. They need clean water, and what is
wrong with clean water in our lifetime?

Senator Slade Gorton, from the state of Washington, is always mucking
around with the Clean Water Act when it comes up for reauthorization. He
wants us to get in a fight with the states over the Clean Water Act. Ifwe
have agreements on the checkerboard of our reservation, he wants us to fight
with our neighbors, keep the pot stirred, keep us in court.

We need medicine like everybody else. We need the hospitals like everybody
else. We need the funding like everybody else. We need to be at the table
like everybody else.

We've had commissions study us over and over and over, and we are studied
out. We still show up. We are still out there. We are still out in every one of
these watersheds throughout the land. Our western governors, they meet
every year to talk about us. They don't know us, but they talk about us. The
attorney generals of the Western United States, they talk about us. They
don't know us. They have never been on a reservation, but they talk about
out. They talk about our rights and our treaties. How can we out-maneuver
these Indian people? That's still going on today.

We have all kinds of problems in the Northwest right today on the
reservations, adjacent to the reservations and in our watersheds. We've had.
500-year floods. 500-year flood. Before the 500-year flood, we talked about a
100-year flood. A 100-year flood, we could live with that pretty good, but the
500-year flood-it took all of our houses down the river. That's fine. We lived
there. We'll build more houses. We will put up with that river. But there
are no trees anymore to hold that water back up in the watershed. They've
all been cut down.

The universities have taught people to look at a tree that has board-feet in it,
that is money-not to look at a tree that has water and everything that's
below: the immune system, the mosses and everything.

We do have a problem right now facing us with the United States Congress,
with the leadership in the United States, with the leadership in the states,
and the legislation in the states. It seems like everything is coming onto the
Indian. The people that live on our reservation say they don't have to pay

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