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I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I REGIONAL ECONOMY WITHOUT PROJECT WINTERS DOCTRINE The states of Colorado and New Mexico, as well as many other western states, determine who has the right to use the water under state law by applying the doctrine of "prior appropriation." Under this doctrine, a person or entity acquires an enforceable right to use water actually diverted from its natural sources and apply it to reasonable beneficial use. This water is assigned a priority date and, under the "first right" concept, the earlier priority date holds a senior right over a junior user. This is extremely important, for in time of short water supply, the senior right holder may use its water supply before the junior user gets any water, and some junior users may get none. While the prior appropriation doctrine applies to most water users, the Supreme Court of the United States, in the case Winters vs United States, ruled in 1908 that Indian Reservations had reserved rights dated from the time that the Reservations were established. The United States brought the suit on behalf of the Tribes of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation established in 1888 on the Milk River in Montana. Upstream users on the Milk River were preventing sufficient water from reaching the Reservation to meet the Indian needs for development of the Reservation's agricultural land and related uses. The Supreme Court determined in the Winters case that rights to use Milk River water had been implicitly reserved to the Fort Belknap Tribes by the establishment of the Reservation. The Supreme Court held that the Tribes possessed the senior water right to the Milk River, in spite of the fact that non-Indian homesteaders had obtained water rights under Montana law in the early 1890s, and the Tribes did not begin to divert any water from the Milk River until 1898. In the Winters decision, the Court placed no limit on the amount of water to which the Tribes were entitled in the future. The Indians had reserved water rights sufficient to make the Reservation "valuable or adequate." The decree was thus open-ended in terms of quantifying the water rights of the Tribes. The United States Supreme Court's 1963 decision in Arizona v California brought into sharp focus the importance of Tribal reserved water rights in allocation and utilization of the Nation's water resources. In this case, the Court changed the open-ended uncertainty of the Winters decision and other prior Court decrees concerning Indian reserved water rights and established a standard for quantifying Indian reserved water rights where the primary 3-2