he Gila River Indian Community near Phoenix has one of the largest shares of Colorado River water flowing through Arizona. Some 15,000 tribal members live on its reservation.
SACATON, Arizona — Stephen Roe Lewis grew up seeing stacks of legal briefs at the dinner table — often, about his tribe's water.
For years, the Gila River tribe has made a business of banking the water it gets from the Colorado River and leasing some of it to cities in Arizona in exchange for money. One such deal reached in 2016 with the fast-growing Phoenix suburb of Chandler netted $46 million for the tribe. He described a childhood in Sacaton, Arizona, during which he would run into previous governors of the tribe, “giants, larger than life."
Rerouting a river These fortunes are recent. Starting in the 1800s, state and local governments stripped the Gila River tribe of water that it had depended on for millennia by damming the once free-flowing Gila River. The river was put behind concrete or earthen dams, and the water was allocated for non-Native farmers and cities.
As farmers in central Arizona, whose water supply was severely cut in 2021, pare down their operations, Lewis is resolute that the Gila River tribe wants to keep expanding its farms — for which it's building more irrigation infrastructure to send water to different parts of the 586 square-mile reservation.
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