User:V24d139/V24d139's Sandbox
I am working on Arizona v. California. I would like to edit the page's layout, by providing more background and then getting into the specifics of the case. I would also like to provide the case's implications for future issues regarding Indian water rights.
Arizona v. California, 373 U.S. 546 (1963). In this major litigation over the lower Colorado River, the Court had to determine the water rights accruing to tribes along the river whose reservations had been established by both statute and executive order. The Court viewed the question as one of the intention of Congress or the President, and held that neither one could have meant to establish reservations without reserving for the use of the Indians the water necessary to make the land habitable and productive. The Court held that the water rights were effectively reserved as of the time of creation of the reservations. The other major issue presented by Arizon v. California concerned the quantity of water reserved. Competing users contested that the water rights should be limited to amounts likely to be needed by the relatively sparse Indian population in the forseeable future. The Supreme Court rejected that measure and instead ruled that the tribes were entitled to enough water to irrigate all the practicably irrigable acreage on the reservations—a much more generous measure. Once that quantity was established in the litigation, res judicata precluded claims for additional acreage within the reservation that had not been properly claimed as irrigable. Arizona v. California, 460 U.S. 605 (1983) Reopening was permitted, however, for claims relating to a disputed additional 25,000 acres added to the boundaries of the Quechan Tribe's Fort Yuma Indian Reservation; a defense of res judicata to that claim was raised too late. Arizona v. California, 530 U.S. 392 (2000). There seems little doubt, however, that once the major water rights adjudications are concluded, with tribes and other users awarded a specific quantity of water with fixed priority dates, those figures are not likely to change thereafter. While maximum irragable acreage provides the measure of Indian water rights under Arizona v. California, at least one state court has since diverged from that measure. The Arizona Supreme Court determined that the purpose of a reservation was to supply the Indians with a "'permanent home and abiding place.'" Accordingly, it was error for a lower court to use the measure of practicably irrigable acreage. Instead, the needs of the reservation should be determined by attention to a tribe's history and culture, its reservation's topography and resources (including groundwater), the tribe's economic base, past water use, and (with a caution that it should never be the only factor) present and projected populaiton. The fact that this formula is likely to lead to a lower award to the tribes is suggested by the fact that they and the United States urged adherence to the standard of practically irrigable acreage. As the Supreme Court observed in one of the Arizona v. California opinions, a prime benefit of the measure of practicably irrigable acreage was its capablility of provided "a fixed calculation of future water needs." The use of practicably irrigable acreage as a measure of water does not require a tribe to engage in inefficient or undersired farming, The special master in Arizona v. California stated that this measure did not necessarily mean that the water had to be used for agricultural purposes. In the Arizona v. California decree, 376 U.S. 340, 344 (1964) the court also reserved for Indian use water from off-reservation sites, if it was determined to be necessary to meet reservation needs. Competing users and the Indians themselves know that a reservation in entitled to enough water to irrigate its practicably irrigable acreage, but no one knows exactly how much water that is. One solution ot that problem is adjudication, as in Arizona v. California. Adjudications have not come easily, however. The United States historically has not been vigorous in litigating to establish or preserve Indian water rights. The tribes themselves can bring suit, but the cost of such litigation is frequently prohibitive. Mere service of process in a major river adjudication can run into tens of thousands of dollars and surveys to determine irrigability may cost hundreds of thousands. Expenses of trial itself are even greater. For these reasons, suggestions have been made for quantification of Indian water rights by negotiation, administrative action or legislation, and negotiated settlements are increasingly being reached. (American Indian Law. Willian C. Canby, Jr.).