What Will It Take to Tackle Water Scarcity on the Navajo Nation

Ashley Thacker turns off the highway onto a dirt road, the bright sun glinting on the windshield. It's a mild December afternoon on the Navajo Nation, in Arizona, and the melting snow has turned the red clay soil into gumbo. Thacker grips the steering wheel with both hands as the SUV begins fishtailing, and when the tires jam into the side of a rut and the whole vehicle tilts scarily sideways, she remains unfazed. This is just what everyday driving's like on Navajo, and of late, Thacker, who grew up on the reservation, has been doing lots of it.

The 35-year-old leads an eight-person survey team at the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health that has, for more than a year, been venturing to lonely corners of the reservation to knock on doors. Their goal? To obtain more definitive stats on the Navajo water crisis.

The Navajo reservation has a greater percentage of dwellings without piped water than anywhere else in the country. An estimated 30 percent of the population lives in homes that don't have running water, and many Navajo must drive miles to draw water from public spigots. (Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren, who himself grew up without running water, highlighted the scale of this injustice while testifying this week before the U.S. Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, in support of legislation that would help address it.)

Thacker's team has completed more than 950 surveys of homes in the Fort Defiance, Arizona, agency, each one assigned at random. At 200 of the homes, they've also been gathering water samples to test for myriad hazards, among them E. coli, PFAS, nitrates, arsenic, uranium, and turbidity.

In the distance, brown mesas are blanketed in white and the landscape stretches on, unpeopled, for miles. There's nothing but snow, cedars, and pines-worlds away from more typical scenes of modern American life: mini malls, traffic jams, tanning salons.

Soon, Thacker passes 14-year-old Aleira Reed, who is walking home from school, slipping and sliding her way through puddles. She offers the girl a ride-it's Reed's home she's driving to, after all. Reed jumps into the back seat.

The car spins its way to the crest of the hill before arriving at a single-room conical dwelling, a traditional Navajo hogan, where Reed lives with her mother, three sisters, and a brother. A welcoming committee of barking dogs awaits, and the hogan is toasty inside, warmed by a wood stove that sits mid room, glowing orange.

The making of a water crisis

The Navajo reservation came into being in 1868, the result of a treaty reached after years of war waged by the U.S. Army, which had burned Navajo homes, killed livestock, and forced the Tribe's members into internment camps. Through the Navajo Treaty of 1868, the federal government alloted the Navajo a sliver of their ancestral homelands in Arizona, and over the next seven decades, the boundaries grew to include additional lands in southern Utah and northwestern New Mexico. The Navajo Nation became the country's largest reservation at 27,413 square miles-about the size of West Virginia.

But the U.S. government continued to exploit the Tribe's lands and resources. Starting in 1944, mining companies began extensively extracting uranium from Navajo land, which the government sought in order to build atomic weapons. Coal miningfollowed in the 1960s, and together, the two industries not only hogged the Navajo's water supply but also contaminated local aquifers and waterways. In one particularly egregious incident in 1979, 94 million gallons of radioactive waste from a uranium mill flowed into the reservation's Puerco River.

Meanwhile, growing western cities, among them Las Vegas and Phoenix, began claiming most of the flow from the reservation's main water source, the Colorado River. Climate change has also affected water availability in the region, with warmer winters diminishing snowpack and contributing to drought conditions that have prevailed on the reservation for the past 25 years.

The water on Navajo Nation isn't just polluted and sparse, though. It's also hard to access, especially for those living in remote locations. Running pipes to just one such home can cost millions. And so thousands of Navajo are at risk of not being able to have water when they most need it. In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the Navajo Nation had a higher per capita infection ratethan any U.S. state, in part, because its residents were unable to wash their hands often enough or stay home on account of frequent water runs.

While the Navajo Nation has reached water settlements with the states of New Mexico and Utah, the Tribe has been stuck, for decades, in intense negotiations with Arizona. Last year, the Navajo implored the U.S. Supreme Court to help relieve this stalemate. Lawyers for the Tribe argued that, per the terms of the Treaty of 1868, the United States was obliged to identify where the Navajo could source water and ensure the Tribe's access to those sources. The court, however, ruled against the Navajo by a vote of 5 to 4. Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh stood against "assessing the Tribe's water needs, developing a plan to secure the needed water, and potentially building pipelines, pumps, wells, or other water infrastructure." In dissent, Justice Neil Gorsuch expressed that the ruling ignores historic context and that the Navajo have been asking the federal government to delineate its water rights since "Elvis was still making his rounds on the Ed Sullivan Show."

The Johns Hopkins study, which is ongoing, is not just about tracking down numbers (as important as they are) but also about paying attention to a human need that has been long ignoredand relegated to the periphery of American life; an injustice that Thacker feels determined to right. As they spend up to two hours with each respondent, drawing from a list of 250 possible questions, the survey takers try to capture a big picture understanding of daily logistics and even cultural psychology around water scarcity.

While the researchers hope to conduct surveys on all five of Navajo's county-like agencies, they're starting small, focusing on just the Fort Defiance Agency (which is still the size of Connecticut). It's hard work, and potentially dangerous since it's common for the surveyors to travel alone. Some houses can be several hours away, and as Thacker describes, "There's wildlife on the roads. There's the danger of unleashed dogs. It can get dark on you."

Often, the surveyors get a cool reception. Many locals are reluctant to be interviewed, and suspicious. But survey taker Taishiana Tsosie, a Navajo member who grew up on the reservation and graduated from Pennsylvania's Susquehanna University in 2021, understands the skepticism.

"We're coming in as a non-Tribal organization, from a university, and we're asking these very formalized questions. People have a lot of historical trauma stemming from research being done in Indigenous communities," Tsosie says. "Then you have the issue of how the uranium and coal mines were built, and they used all this water, even though the people who worked there didn't even have water at home. There are layers of mistrust we have to get through to reach people."

For the Navajo, running water is not cut and dried

Inside the hogan, Reed's mother, 36-year-old Willena Begay, loads another log into the wood stove.

Begay, a small, direct woman with bounteous energy, has no qualms about divulging her water story. She says the nearest water source, a well, is a mile away, but she grew up in the area. Until five years ago, she did have running water, when she lived at the Navajo school where she teaches special ed, but she built the hogan as a way to return to her roots. "I missed the horse corral and the livestock. I wanted to bring my kids back to the traditional ways. I wanted them to put work into things," she explains. "But last week, a couple of the girls and I went to the well at eight at night to haul water, and it was snowing. It was cold. I thought, We need running water."

These days, Begay is weighing whether she wants to pay the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority roughly $10,000 to connect water pipes and electricity to her home. "I don't know," she says. "Right now, what I have is working-a generator and an outside restroom. Maybe when I get a little extra money."

As Begay speaks, Reed eyes her mother wearily. "She's just not very tough," the girl says. Though she doesn't yet have her license, Reed often drives to the well, which she enjoys. "Here, it's more fun than in town. We get to play outside. We get to ride horses. I like it."

Outsiders might assume that the Navajo water question is binary-that people either have running water or that they don't and want it. In fact, many Navajo, such as Victor Roanhorse, see living close to the land-ruggedly, without running water-as a cultural value.

Roanhorse, a 50-year-old school nurse, hops in his pickup truck every couple of days and drives nine miles up a rocky mountain road to fetch water for his family, 15 horses, and 30 sheep. He then pumps the water out of the large plastic drums on the truck bed into a 3,000-gallon underground cistern beside his house.

"Well water tastes purer to me," he says. "It's from the ground. When people drink water out of pipes, they don't even know where it's from." Roanhorse also appreciates the hands-on nature of the task, especially when it comes to his grandchildren. "They haul water and firewood with me," he says, pulling out his phone to display a photo of a tiny girl, aged five, helping to lug a five-gallon bucket to a vegetable patch. "They learn to garden, and they water by hand," he says, his face beaming with pride.

But a lack of water infrastructure can cause socially complex problems too. For Janna Stewart, a single mom, it's stressful to have running water when so many around you don't. When relatives come over to shower, they sometimes stay for two weeks. Stewart's friend and her daughters also come over to shower and do laundry. "But then that started taking on a whole new dimension, because she would say things like, 'Can you watch my kids?'" she recalls. "I became a child care facility. I had to put up boundaries."

And sometimes, the situation is simply agonizing. Donna Yellowhorse, a professional weaver in her sixties, and her husband care for 78 head of cattle. The nearest water source is five miles away, down a steep hill and over a dirt road. On the return trip, the road is often too steep to climb, even in the four-wheel-drive Chevy Avalanche that Yellowhorse bought especially for water hauling.

When the road is muddy, she sometimes takes a longer route home-adding an extra 35 miles to the trip. Other times, she has gamed it and paid the price. "I break the CV joint on my Avalanche in the mud," Yellowhorse says. "That's happened so often, and it's just so terrible. When that happens, can you believe it? We just have to walk home."

A note from Yellowhorse's doctor states she has "multiple medical problems, including mobility problems," and she says her grandson worries about her. During his recent visit from Phoenix, where he works in construction, she recalls he said, "Grandma, I'm going to have to leave my job and take care of you."

"I don't know what we're going to do," Yellowhorse says, shaking her head in distress.

Where to go from here

The federal agency that most closely oversees water distribution on Navajo is the Indian Health Service (IHS), and in 2020, in response to the severe COVID-19 outbreak there, IHS secured $5.2 million to build water stations near the center of 48 Navajo chapters, or communities. The agency plans to soon launch a pilot program to deliver potable water in tank trucks to the homes of residents without pipes. One of the goals of the program is to dissuade the Navajo from using wells, which are sometimes contaminated by uranium. IHS hopes to keep the deliveries going for at least six months, but funding is uncertain. "We'll look at what the costs are and see how long we can run the program," says IHS Deputy Director David Harvey.

"The goal of the IHS is to reach all Native American homes with piped water, and it's possible to do that. If a space shuttle can recycle urine [into potable water]," he says, referencing a $250 million NASA project, "then we can get water anywhere in the country. The question is: Will our efforts be supported?"

There is some hope that they will be. As the federal government and seven western states negotiate how to manage the Colorado River after its current management plan expires in 2026, the Navajo could secure a slightly larger portion of the river's flow. U.S. Senator Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, is also championing a bill that would help Tribes work with engineers to get water projects "shovel ready"-a stage where they would become eligible for the $3.5 billion that the 2022 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law has allotted for such projects.

But Bennett's bill could fail (as it did when he first introduced it in 2021), and even if it passed, IHS projects take, on average, seven years from funding to completion. In the meantime, the Navajo will continue to grapple with a water shortage that's more complex than previously known. Preliminary results from the Johns Hopkins's study of Fort Defiance, released on September 20, found that 261 of the 995 households successfully surveyed (that is, 26 percent) didn't have piped water. Compared to the reservation dwellers that did have running water, those who were without were twice as likely to lack Internet access. Almost a fifth of the homes in this category also lack electricity, and the residents of these homes are significantly more likely than those with piped water to be 55 or over and to speak Navajo as their primary language.

The John Hopkins's study entered a new phase in April when researchers moved on to the Chinle Agency, where they began interviewing 830 families. As a next step, pending funding, the team plans to survey the reservation's three other agencies-Central, Shiprock, and Western.

What solutions this probe might identify in the end is far from clear. In fact, there may be a range of "microsolutions" tailored to individual users; say, installing an underground cistern for one family, and for another, laying 500 feet of pipe to connect a main water line.

Reese Cuddy, the Johns Hopkins researcher who coordinates the survey, stresses that a "silver bullet brought in from outside" would not likely work. In 2021, Johns Hopkins brought in hydropanels, which are solar panels that pull water vapor from the air and condense it, providing drinkable water. But desert dust soon gummed up the panels. They're also hard to fix and currently inoperable. "The solutions," Cuddy says, "will need to be community-oriented." Over the coming months, she and others will begin conferring with Navajo leaders, a dialogue that will continue until the study's conclusion. Finding funding for any potential solutions is, of course, another hurdle.

"This whole study could lead to nothing," says surveyor Tsosie, soberly aware of the history of this fight. "We could do all this work, and nothing happens. Or maybe someone will decide to do something with our data. It could be after my lifetime is over. I don't know. But if it happens, that would be a great thing."

This NRDC.org story is available for online republication by news media outlets or nonprofits under these conditions: The writer(s) must be credited with a byline; you must note prominently that the story was originally published by NRDC.org and link to the original; the story cannot be edited (beyond simple things such as grammar); you can't resell the story in any form or grant republishing rights to other outlets; you can't republish our material wholesale or automatically-you need to select stories individually; you can't republish the photos or graphics on our site without specific permission; you should drop us a note to let us know when you've used one of our stories.

Related Stories