Across tribal communities in northeastern Arizona, one in three homes does not have running water.
But now, there’s a way to help fix that. The Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Act could bring billions of dollars and more clean water to three tribes in the area. If passed, it would be the largest tribal water settlement in the nation’s history, and deliver generational change for the Navajo Nation, Hopi Tribe and San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe.
But four states are trying to block it. KJZZ teamed up with ProPublica and just published a monthslong investigation into the reasons why. KJZZ's Alex Hager reported this story and joined The Show to talk about it.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Good morning, Alex.
ALEX HAGER: Thanks for having me, Mark.
MARK BRODIE: So, you spent a lot of time visiting with tribal leaders in these communities. What did you see when you were there?
ALEX HAGER: You know, it’s it’s really quite striking. My colleague Mark Olalde and I, we spent a lot of time with leaders on the Hopi and Navajo reservations. And even today, in the year 2026, a lot of people need to fill up jugs and tanks and buckets and drive them back home from a water pump, just to wash their hands, take showers, cook food, that kind of thing.
You know, this is the case for regular folks. It is the case for elected officials in these communities. We spent time with tribal council members on the Hopi reservation who do not have a sink in their kitchen.
MARK BRODIE: Wow.
ALEX HAGER: Yeah, Marilyn Tewa is one of them. She is in her 80s now, and she still lives in the same little cluster of houses where she grew up, and they are still using, you know, plastic Porta Potties every day because the homes don’t have bathrooms.
MARILYN TEWA: We’re still living like we’re, you know, when I was born, because we still wash our hands in a container, you know, in the morning, wash our face in a wash bowls. And spill it outside, you know, and it hasn't, nothing really has changed for us.
ALEX HAGER: We talked to her at this rusty old well, we're on a dusty, windy plain where it pulls untreated water into an area originally built for livestock. That is where she gets that washing water she was talking about. She has to drive about 10 miles round trip and bring this untreated water back home in 5 gallon plastic buckets.
MARK BRODIE: Well, so, Alex, this proposed settlement that I mentioned would make it, right, so people don’t have to live like that anymore. How would it work?
ALEX HAGER: Yeah, it’s a deal with the government. So tribes in the Colorado River Basin, they legally have access to about a quarter of all the water in the river. But most of the time, those tribes are not using all of their water. They just don’t have the money and infrastructure to pull it out and put it to work.
So in this case, they can enter a kind of compromise. The three Arizona tribes we’re talking about, they would agree to use less water than they might be legally owed, and the federal government would give them $5 billion in exchange. They would use that money to build a huge system of pipelines that would bring water to thousands of homes that do not currently have it.
MARK BRODIE: Well, so it sounds like that’d be a pretty big win for Indigenous justice, environmental justice, but you mentioned a few different states are blocking it. Which states and why?
ALEX HAGER: Yeah, this is a case of something today getting caught up in the big, messy world of Colorado River politics. These are the same kinds of rivalries and tensions that you hear me talking about if you, if you hear my voice in our newscasts every morning and afternoon. That’s what’s at play here.
So, part of the settlement says that Navajo can lease some of its water off-reservation, right. Say you are a city in the Phoenix area that is growing rapidly, maybe you’re seeing cuts to your Colorado River allocation. Navajo Nation is not using all of theirs, so the city in the Phoenix area can pay the tribe to use some of theirs. But not everyone is a fan of that idea.
The Colorado River is split into two halves. You have the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico, and then the Lower Basin states, that’s Arizona, California and Nevada. These two groups have a rivalry going back more than 100 years. They are always fighting over water. That is the root of the hang-up here.
And it’s sort of a quirk of the map that that causes this problem. So, typically, those two camps, they can be very neatly divided by state borders. But technically, the line that splits the river in half is a product of geology. It does not neatly follow the state borders. It is a squiggly line, and it goes right through northern Arizona, and Navajo Nation straddles the line.
MARK BRODIE: Ah.
ALEX HAGER: So the states on the upstream side of that line, they are worried that Navajo could take some of their, you know, quote-unquote "their water" and give it to someone on the other side of that magical line. Because of that, you’ve got those four states — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico — trying to block the deal. They say they are worried that it could set a precedent for other users to move their water downstream.
MARK BRODIE: All right, with the stipulation that neither one of us are attorneys, do those Upper Basin states have a case? Could this settlement actually set a precedent?
ALEX HAGER: That’s right, I am not a lawyer, but I talked to some, and pretty much all of the experts I talked to said no. Navajo is the only tribe that straddles the line, and it could not create some kind of slippery slope.
I talked about it with Heather Tanana. She is a citizen of the Navajo Nation. She’s also a law professor at the University of Utah.
HEATHER TANANA: I don’t think they have a valid claim. This is a sovereign government who has been prevented from accessing a right that has been recognized since 1908.
ALEX HAGER: Tanana pointed out that this deal has really widespread support. You know, it took a while to get here, but the state of Arizona is behind it now, the federal government seems on board.
HEATHER TANANA: I hope people hold their representatives account, accountable because when I talk to my neighbors, you know, and in all of these different states, colleagues, families, friends, I think everyone agrees everyone deserves water, and this will get much needed water to families who have been without it for a century or more.
ALEX HAGER: Tribal leaders told me after years of work on the settlement, they are really close. The president of the Navajo Nation used a sports metaphor. He said it feels like they are at the 5-yard line and, from what it looks like, the four states are the main thing, or maybe the biggest thing, standing between this deal’s passage and the end zone.
MARK BRODIE: Interesting. So, Alex, you spent more than four months working on the story. What did you take away from that process?
ALEX HAGER: So, I left with two big impressions. The first is that this is not just about getting water today. You know, obviously, the immediate problem it fixes is getting running water to those kitchen sinks and showers and toilets for people who don’t who don’t have them today.
But it’s also about setting up these tribes for the future. I talked about that with Navajo Council Speaker Crystalyne Curley.
CRYSTALYNE CURLEY: It is a violation to our human right, having access to clean water, having access to having, making sure that our children, future generation have a permanent homeland. And for me, that’s what it stands for.
ALEX HAGER: Navajo leaders said they want to grow the economy there, grow the population of Navajo people who want to live on Navajo land. And it gets a lot easier to do that, easier to convince kids growing up there to stay, if you can guarantee that there will be water in the future.
The second thing I learned, this story is really a lesson about history. The Colorado River right now is at this really pivotal point. You hear about it on KJZZ basically every day.
MARK BRODIE: Yes.
ALEX HAGER: Climate change means there is less water to go around, and every time we have conversations about changing our demand, they are happening in the long shadow of policies that were written more than 100 years ago.
That is especially true for the way that Indigenous people get their water. You know, the need to fix this is very obvious. The way to fix this is becoming clear. There’s a lot of smart people who have put together a plan for how this can happen.
But the tribes involved, they are seeing their ability to get water caught up in these tensions and politics that are all downstream of a century of laws that were designed to exclude them.
MARK BRODIE: All right. That is Alex Hager, who reports on water for KJZZ. He published this story in partnership with ProPublica. You can read the full piece, see photos from across those tribal lands on our website, kjzz.org. Alex, thanks so much.
ALEX HAGER: It’s good to be here. Thanks.
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