ABSTRACT
Water development projects in the west have often come at the expense of Native Americans. This chapter discusses how Natives gained important new water rights from the Supreme Court decision in 1908's Winters v. United States, but also explains why this yielded almost no water at all until the Court's significant decision in 1963's Arizona v. California, which clearly gave many Native American tribes rights to significant amounts of water out of the Colorado and other western rivers. Finally, the chapter discusses how and why many tribes have decided to pass on asserting these rights in favor of negotiating settlements with traditional water users and what this all means for western water politics. The chapter also discusses how many Native American tribes have become important players in political fights to restore rivers by trying to remove dams, all to bring back lost salmon fisheries.
