At a time when many cities and states in the West are grappling over water, a south-central Arizona Indian community has found itself in the enviable position of having rights to more water than it can use, AP reports.
The Gila River Indian Community established along the Gila River faced severe water shortages after the river was dammed upstream in the 1920s. But in 2004, following a decades-long battle, it acquired enough water through one of the largest-ever American Indian water rights settlements to fill nearly 313,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools each year.
The reservation has been storing some of the water underground and is positioned to sell it to nearby desert cities. It also has high hopes of reviving its once-thriving agricultural tradition — with small family farms and cash crops such as alfalfa and cotton — to become Arizona’s breadbasket.
Concrete canals are forming across the reservation to supplement a network of earthen trenches used by ancestors of the Pima and Maricopa tribes for farming, but the infrastructure isn’t expected to be complete until 2029. Rather than lose the water the community fought hard to obtain, it has turned to leasing some of it in the Phoenix area and selling long-term storage credits that it will use to help finance the extension and maintenance of its canal system.
