Settler Colonialism, Water Inequality, and Rural Injustice in the US Southwest

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ABSTRACT BRAY, LAURA ANN. Dividing the San Juan: Settler Colonialism, Water Inequality, and Rural Injustice in the US Southwest. (Under the direction of Dr. Thomas E. Shriver).

Rural communities of color suffer multiple forms of water injustice that result in insecure and unsafe water supplies, including contaminated drinking water and inadequate water infrastructure. Native nations face the additional challenge of protecting their legal water rights against constant threats from non-Native communities and governments. This dissertation draws on theories of critical environmental justice (Pellow 2018) to examine the formation or rural water inequality in Indigenous communities. Two primary lines of research within this literature inform this study: rural environmental justice (Mckinney 2016; Pellow 2016a) and settler colonialism (Bacon 2019; Whyte 2018). I merge insights from these frameworks to examine intersections of race, space, and Indigeneity within processes of environmental inequality formation. Drawing on archival and historical sources, this study takes a historical case study approach to explore: (1) racial projects within rural environmental inequality formation, (2) the construction and mobilization of socio-spatial boundaries within natural resource conflicts, and (3) state bureaucratic mechanisms used to enact settler colonial projects. The case study focuses on two closely related federal water projects that divided San Juan River waters in New Mexico between the rural Navajo Nation and the rapidly urbanizing Middle Rio Grande Valley. Authorized in 1962, the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project (NIIP) was designed to alleviate widespread poverty on the Navajo Nation by developing an agricultural industry. At the same time, Congress approved the San Juan-Chama Project (SJCP) to divert water from the San Juan River to the Rio Grande River Basin, primarily for use in Albuquerque. The SJCP was completed within eleven years, while construction on the NIIP remains ongoing nearly six decades later. Tracing the history of these two divergent projects offers insight into the social forces upholding water injustices in Indigenous communities and between urban and rural places. In chapter one I position the water projects within western reclamation and American In- dian water rights, introduce the study’s overarching theoretical concerns and methods, and provide an overview of the dissertation. Chapter two develops the concept of settler colonial racial projects to examine the practices and discourses that unevenly allocated water resources across racial lines. I show the explicit and subtle ways that officials undermined tribal sovereignty even while promoting the NIIP. Settler officials’ support for the NIIP strongly resonated with federal termination policy seeking to end government support for tribes and assimilate individuals into mainstream white society. The settler colonial racial projects at work thus helped ensure that the NIIP accomplished colonial objectives of appropriating Native waters. Chapter three analyses the SJCP and water development in the Middle Rio Grande Valley. I apply relational theories of inequality to understand how actors constructed and mobilized socio- spatial boundaries to claim control over the San Juan water. The SJCP primarily benefits urban water users in Albuquerque. Yet during legislative proceedings, discussion and project justifications centered on the project’s rural benefits. Each of these justifications constructed rural places for urban benefit and symbolically mobilized rurality in a way that enabled urban places to claim greater control over the state’s water supplies. Chapter four examines how bureaucratic administration enacted settler colonial projects to prevent the NIIP from achieving its stated objectives. The water project promised economic assistance for the Navajo in the form of thousands of jobs, local community development, and water for municipal and industrial purposes—all of which failed to materialize. My analysis points to three bureaucratic mechanisms that delayed and remade the NIIP in ways that undermined the success of the project. These mechanisms contributed to continued water insecurity and injustice on the Navajo Nation. I conclude by discussing the dissertation’s contributions to the literature on critical environmental justice.

by Laura Ann Bray

A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Sociology

Raleigh, North Carolina 2021

APPROVED BY:

______Thomas Shriver Kim Ebert Committee Chair

______Stefano Longo Michael Schulman

BIOGRAPHY Laura A. Bray grew up in Weatherford, Texas. She graduated from Austin College (Sherman, Texas) in 2009 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology and Political Science. She spent several years managing a bookstore in Lancaster, Pennsylvania before beginning graduate studies at North Carolina State University. Laura earned a Master of Science in Sociology from North Carolina State University in 2015. She studies environmental sociology, environmental justice, and social movements.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My deepest appreciation to all those who made this dissertation possible. First to my chair, Tom Shriver. Over the past eight years, Tom has gone from my professor and advisor to frequent col- laborator and friend. He saw a future for me within academia before I could envision one for myself and guided me each step of the way. Thank you for keeping me on track, for turning drafts around faster than humanly possible, and for being available regardless of country or time zone. Thank you also to my committee members: Kim Ebert, Stefano Longo, and Michael Schulman. Your voices informed my inner critic, continuously pushing me to sharpen my arguments and ultimately strengthening the project. Bethany Cutts gave me a second academic home in the department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism Management (PRTM). Her commitment to reimagining intellectual community in ways that counteract the alienation of academia has been a constant source of support and inspira- tion. She has also pushed me to think more seriously about how my scholarship and teaching can contribute to building a more just society. For this and your friendship, I am immensely grateful. The Environmental Justice and Health Working Group in the department of Sociology and Location Matters Lab in PRTM surrounded me with a network of incredible scholars and educa- tors. Thank you for giving me a soft place to land, learn, and recharge. I also found unexpected friendship through the Project Bridge research in Robeson County. My gratitude to Hannah Goins, Nathan McMenamin, Margaret Crites, Sallie McLean, and Angela Allen for showing me how to do research in community with others. Numerous other colleagues have enriched my graduate experience. Special thanks to Kelly Godwin for the concerts, beach trips, and bonding over books and dogs. To Marie Gualtieri for the late-night laughs and making me an (amateur) foodie. To Jennifer Lutz for ensuring we always had a place to celebrate holidays and birthdays. To Olivia Vilá for being the frientor I didn’t know I needed. To UE150, the Graduate Workers Union for making the university a better place to work. And to Nicholas Membrez-Weiler for doing this grad school thing and beyond by my side. As always, my parents Jill and Mark Bray offered unwavering support. Thank you for the many cross country moves, camping trips, and only occasionally asking “how much longer?” Last but never least, thank you to Blue and Ollie, my more-than-human family, for your patience, love, and daily reminders to move and play.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES ...... vi LIST OF FIGURES ...... vii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... viii

Chapter 1. Introduction ...... 1 Positioning the Navajo Indian Irrigation and San Juan-Chama Projects within Western Water Politics...... 2 Federal reclamation: Developing water in the West ...... 2 Native Nations in the Colorado River Basin: Unsettling western water ...... 5 Theoretical Foundations: Critical Environmental Justice ...... 7 Rural environmental justice and relational development ...... 8 Settler colonialism and Indigenous environmental justice ...... 10 Research Design and Methods ...... 12 Chapter Overview ...... 14

Chapter 2. Settler Colonialism and Rural Environmental Injustice: Water Inequality on the Navajo Nation ...... 17 Abstract ...... 17 Introduction ...... 17 Settler Colonial Racial Projects and Rural Environmental Inequality Formation ...... 18 Data and Methods ...... 22 The Navajo Indian Irrigation Project and Water Development in the San Juan Basin ...... 24 Findings...... 26 Explicit denial of sovereignty: Contesting tribal water rights ...... 26 Moral bases of support: Solving the “Navajo problem” ...... 29 Termination and assimilation: Making the “good citizen” ...... 32 Environmental paternalism: Questioning Indian natural resource management ...... 34 Discussion and Conclusion ...... 36

Chapter 3. Water Justice and the Symbolic Mobilization of Rurality in Natural Resource Conflicts ...... 39 Abstract ...... 39 Introduction ...... 39 Water justice across the rural-urban interface ...... 40 Data and Methods ...... 44 The San-Juan Chama Project and Urbanization in the Rio Grande Valley ...... 45 Selling the San Juan-Chama Diversion: Rural Justifications for Urban Water ...... 48 Water for farms: Agriculture and rural development ...... 49 Water for freedom: National defense and security ...... 52 Water for fun: Rural recreation, tourism, and conservation ...... 56 Discussion and Conclusion ...... 58

Chapter 4. Organizing Environmental Inequality: Indigenous Marginalization in Western Water Politics ...... 62 Abstract ...... 62

Introduction ...... 62 Settler State Power and Legal-Rational Domination ...... 63 Data and Methods ...... 67 Case Background ...... 67 Findings...... 68 Organizational segregation: Weakening bureaucratic capacity ...... 69 Administrative obstruction: Reappraising, reevaluating, restudying ...... 74 Mission shift: From economic assistance to profit maximization ...... 80 Discussion and Conclusion ...... 85

Chapter 5. Conclusion ...... 87

References ...... 92

LIST OF TABLES Table 1.1 Overview of dissertation chapters and research questions ...... 14

Table 4.1 NIIP appropriations history: Programmed versus actual funding, 1964-1969 ...... 71

Table 4.2 Timeline and summary of post-authorization modifications to the NIIP ...... 75

Table 4.3 Estimated annual benefits of the NIIP, 1960 ...... 82

Table 5.1 Summary of dissertation findings and contributions ...... 88

LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1 Timeline of significant events in western reclamation, federal Indian policy, and NM water development ...... 23

Figure 3.1 Area map of the San Juan-Chama Project ...... 47

Figure 3.2 Trinity base camp and atomic explosion, Alamogordo Bombing Range, New Mexico, 1945 ...... 54

Figure 3.3 CRSP promotional material illustrating the projects’ national security benefits ..... 55

Figure 4.1 Annual and cumulative NIIP appropriations: Programmed versus actual funding, 1964-1969 ...... 71

Figure 4.2 Construction progress on NIIP canals, 1967 and 1970 ...... 77

Figure 4.3 Gravity irrigation on the San Juan Branch Agricultural Experiment Station, 1967 and center pivot sprinkler irrigation on Block 4 of the NIIP, 1980 ...... 79

Figure 4.4 NIIP lands, Navajo Nation, New Mexico ...... 83

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS BIA Bureau of Indian Affairs

BOR Bureau of Reclamation

CRSP Colorado River Storage Project

DOI Department of Interior

M&I Municipal and industrial water

NAPI Navajo Agricultural Products Industry

NARA National Archives and Records Administration

NEPA National Environmental Protection Act

NIIP Navajo Indian Irrigation Project

O&M Operation and maintenance

PIA Practicably irrigable acreage

SJCP San Juan-Chama Project

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CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION Over the past several decades, the complex web of water governance in the American West has only grown more tangled as users place more and more diverse demands on an overallocated and increasingly uncertain water supply. The increased demands and recognition of alternative ways of valuing water have intensified longstanding tensions, between rural and urban places, new and traditional uses, and competing economic sectors. At the same time, issues of water justice and inequality have grown more salient. The popular quip that “water flows uphill towards money” captures the widely perceived injustices associated with western water governance and allocation. These complexities call for new ways of studying and understanding western water problems that account for intersecting forms of inequality and the processes that produce and maintain water injustices. In this dissertation, I draw on the critical environmental justice framework (Pellow 2018) to ask new questions about water justice and inequality, centered on the rural dimension of environmental justice and Indigenous environmental injustice. Critical environmental justice expands on the concerns and theories of older environmental justice traditions (Kojola and Pellow 2020; Pellow 2016b, 2018). Two lines of research within this literature inform this dissertation. First, research on rural environmental justice examines the unique aspects of rural environmental problems (Liévanos, Greenberg and Wishart 2018; Mckinney 2016; Pellow 2016a). Rural environmental justice research draws attention to the social, cultural, and economic differences between urban and rural places that shape the formation and experience of environmental harms. Recent work has also begun to link rural injustices to urban practices, highlighting spatial relations and the distant places that benefit from environmental destruction (Purifoy and Seamster 2021; Seamster and Purifoy 2020). I build on this literature by examining the role of race and racism with rural environmental inequality formation (chapter 2) and how urban actors construct socio-spatial boundaries to claim control over water resources (chapter 3). Second, researchers have begun to pay greater attention to Indigenous environmental justice and how settler colonialism produces ecological violence (Bacon 2019; Norgaard 2019; Whyte 2018). Theories of settler colonialism describe how the permanent occupancy of settler societies creates ongoing structures of domination that shape ecological landscapes and racial structures (Veracini 2010; Wolfe 1999). Settler colonialism provides a framework for racial analysis that centers land and natural resources within processes of racial formation (Glenn 2015; McKay, Vinyeta and Norgaard 2020; Saito 2020) and highlights the unique aspects of anti-Indian

racism (Berger 2009; Cramer 2006). I build on this literature by examining how settler colonial racial projects contribute to rural environmental inequalities (chapter 2) and the state bureaucratic mechanisms used to enact settler colonial projects (chapter 4). This study takes a historical case study approach to explore: (1) racial projects within rural environmental inequality formation, (2) the construction and mobilization of socio-spatial boundaries within natural resource conflicts, and (3) bureaucratic mechanisms of state power used to enact settler colonial projects. The case study focuses on two closely related federal water projects, one for rural development on Indigenous lands and the other supporting urban growth. Authorized in 1962, the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project (NIIP) was designed to develop family farming and the agricultural industry within the Navajo Nation. The project would bring water from the San Juan River in northwestern New Mexico to the reservation near Shiprock. At the same time and as a condition for approving the NIIP congress authorized the San Juan-Chama Project (SJCP) to divert water from the San Juan River to the Rio Grande River Basin, primarily for use in Albu- querque. By 1938, the Rio Grande waters had been fully appropriated, leaving central New Mexico to search for alternative supplies to sustain population and economic growth. New Mexico’s project was completed by 1973, while the Navajo project remains unfinished nearly six decades later and suffers from perpetual underfunding and deteriorating infrastructure. As such, the NIIP’s failure contributed to many of the water problems familiar to Indigenous communities. Tracing the history of these two projects with divergent outcomes offers insight into the social forces upholding water injustices in Indigenous communities and between urban and rural places. In the remainder of this introduction, I first position the case study within the history of western reclamation and American Indian water rights. Second, I review literature on critical environmental justice, focused on how research on rural environmental justice and settler colonialism have contributed to this emerging body of scholarship. Third, I summarize my data and methods and provide an overview of the remaining chapters of the dissertation.

Positioning the Navajo Indian Irrigation and San Juan-Chama Projects within Western Water Politics

Federal reclamation: Developing water in the West Private interests began lobbying for federal reclamation late in the 19th century after earlier attempts to develop private and local irrigation projects failed, leading many to conclude that settling

the West required federal involvement (see Reisner 1986; Stegner 1992; Worster 1985). In response, Congress established The Reclamation Service in 1902 (renamed the Bureau of Reclama- tion in 1923) to finance and develop irrigation projects in western states. The Reclamation Act was originally designed to irrigate small family farms, yet this goal soon became secondary to the ca- reer ambitions of Bureau engineers, who saw dam building as an end in itself (Reisner 1986; Wor- ster 1985). The BOR quickly became a global leader in constructing water storage, diversion, and transmission projects. To date, the Bureau has constructed over 600 dams and reservoirs across seventeen western states (US BOR 2020). The Bureau’s efforts to manage and transform nature went largely unchecked until the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) became law in 1970 in response to the upsurge of environmentalism over the previous decade. NEPA requires federal agencies to assess the environmental impacts of proposed actions by conducting environmental impact statements and elicit- ing public input. The “old guard” engineers subsequently saw their influence in the bureau decline as the organizational culture evolved to incorporate ecological and cultural considerations, in addition to technical concerns (Espeland 1998, 2001). By the close of the 1970s, the era of big dam building had come to an end—in part due to changing social, political, and economic contexts, and in part because the good dam sites had all been taken (Billington, Jackson and Melosi 2005). The mission and focus of the Bureau have since shifted from building new projects to the sustainable management of old ones. However, although damming rivers has become unpopular, water man- agers continue to propose large-scale water transfer projects (Fort et al. 2012). The BOR currently brings water to 31 million people, provides irrigation for one in five western farmers, and comes in as the second largest producer of hydroelectric power in the United States (US BOR 2020). However, the original aim of the Reclamation Act—to support homestead- ing and small farmers—has gone largely unfulfilled. The act sought to prevent land speculation by requiring landowners to reside on the land, use at least half of the irrigable area for agriculture, and limited landholdings to 160 acres (320 for a married couple). From the beginning, large grow- ers ignored these requirements and the BOR made little effort to enforce them. Instead, the 1982 Reclamation Reform Act increased the allowable acreage to 960 acres. As a result, reclamation projects continue to disproportionately benefit large agribusiness operations (EWG 2004). Since mid-century, the Bureau’s mission has also shifted away from its original rural focus as the West became increasingly urban.

Although the BOR builds, maintains, and operates water projects in the West, state and local laws govern water rights and allocation (Christian-Smith and Allen 2012). Eastern states primarily allocate water according to riparian rights, a system that developed from English common law and ties water use to property rights. Water rights in western states follow the doctrine of prior appropriation, commonly summarized as “first in time, first in right.” Prior appropriation originated in nineteenth-century mining customs on federal land, where seniority granted users priority (Getches, Zellmer and Amos 2015). Under this doctrine, those who first put water to “beneficial use” (as defined by the state) gain rights beginning at the date of first appropriation. Senior users can claim priority in times of scarcity and use their full allotment before junior appropriators receive any water. Wasting water or failure to put appropriated water to its intended use, however, can result in the loss of appropriative rights. A 1921 Supreme Court case extended the doctrine of prior appropriate across state boundaries, raising alarm in states within the Colorado River Basin that rapid growth in California and other downriver states would leave slower-growing states without a future water supply. The seven states in the Colorado River Basin began negotions on how to share the river, which led to the 1922 Colorado River Compact. The Colorado River Compact forms the foundation of what would become known as the “Law of the River”—a complex set of federal laws, interstate compacts, international treaties, court decisions, and regulatory guidelines that govern the river (US BOR 2008). Briefly, the Colorado River Compact divides the river into an Upper and Lower Basin at Lees Ferry, Arizona, and requires that the Upper Basin deliver 7.5 million acre-feet of water to the Lower Basin annually, roughly half of what was believed to be the river’s average flow. States in two basins subsequently negotiated among themselves on how to divide their half of the water. Following the Upper Colorado River Basin Compact of 1948 dividing the waters between Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, Upper Basin states introduced the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP) in Congress—including both the NIIP and SJCP. The United States’ push to gain territorial control during the twentieth century contributed to the construction of a White colonial state and national identity (Berry and Jackson 2018). Un- surprisingly then, western water development has generally worked to dispossess Native nations and Indigenous people (Deloria 1985; Lawson 1994; McCool 1994). The major interstate water compacts of the 20th century largely ignored and excluded Native nations entirely. Reservoirs flooded Indigenous land and displaced tribes from their territory. And tribes have struggled to

build and fund water infrastructure for agriculture, domestic, or industrial use. Yet across the 20th century, the US Supreme Court also granted and repeatedly confirmed priority rights of Native nations to western waters.

Native Nations in the Colorado River Basin: Unsettling western water The Southwest is home to 170 federally recognized tribes, twenty-nine of which can make legal claims to the water of the Colorado River. Native nations in the Colorado River Basin have quan- tified rights to about twenty percent of the river’s flows (approximately 2.9 million acre-feet of water annually), a quantity larger than Arizona’s total allocation (Walton 2015). Yet many tribes lack the infrastructure and resources to put their full allocations to use and thirteen tribes still have unsettled claims (Colorado River Research Group 2016). Because demands on the river already exceed reliable supply (US BOR 2012), state officials and water experts view the sizable and outstanding tribal claims with concern because of the uncertainty they create in a region already facing considerable uncertainty from climate change (Haddeland et al. 2014). Tribal water rights in the US are governed by a series of judicial rulings, known collectively as the Winters doctrine, or federal reserved water rights (see Brougher 2011). In Winters v. United States (1908), the Supreme Court ruled that the federal agreements creating reservations implied rights to enough water to fulfill the reservation’s intended purposes. That is, a reservation of water accompanied the reservation of land. Indian water rights under Winters therefore date back to the founding of reservations and supersede state water law. Unlike appropriative claims, water rights under Winters are not forfeited if tribes fail to exercise their claims. However, the Winters decision did not outline any method for quantifying water rights and many tribal nations lacked the practical means to put water claims to use. As a result, for over fifty years following Winters, western states and the federal government planned and constructed many large-scale water projects with little consideration for Indian water rights (National Water Commission 1973). The Supreme Court would not take up the issue of Indian water rights again until Arizona v. California in 1963 (see Cordalis and Cordalis 2014). In this case, the Court upheld Winters and affirmed federal reserved rights for twenty-five tribes in the Lower Basin of the Colorado River. The Court also appointed a Special Master to investigate and make recommendations on the division of the river’s water. The Special Master’s report allocated water between the three Lower Basin states (Arizona, California, and Nevada), and five tribes along the mainstream of the Colo- rado River and the Gila River, the primary lower basin tributary. The same report proposed a 5

method for quantifying Winters rights based on “practicably irrigable acreage” (PIA) or the amount of water needed to irrigate all reservation lands that could reasonably be brought into agricultural production. The PIA standard was based on the logic that the original purpose of reservations included developing an agricultural economy, but “other uses, such as those for industry…were not contemplated at the time the Reservations were created” (Special Masters Report 1960: 255). However, the case only adjudicated claims for five tribes, leaving most tribal claims in the region unsettled. Following Arizona v. California, tribes began pressing water claims in state courts. How- ever, the cost, time, and uncertainty of adjudication eventually led Indigenous nations to prefer negotiated settlements with states. Negotiated settlements have allowed a greater range of options to meet communities’ present and future needs and result in infrastructure and project funding more often than adjudication (Colby, Thorson and Britton 2005; McCool 2006). However, most Indian water right settlements require that tribes designate the purposes for which the water can be used, quantify their rights, and waive Winters claims (Cordalis and Cordalis 2014). These conditions have led some scholars to liken negotiated settlements to the earlier treaty era of federal Indian policy, where the government settled “claims to land by specifically delineating which lands would remain Indian and which were to pass to the pressing masses of white settler” (McCool 2006:8). Native nations throughout the US face significant water challenges (Berry 2012; Robison et al. 2018). A 2011 report from the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources (2011:viii) summarizes many of these problems: The Navajo Nation has severe water infrastructure deficiencies that impact the health, economy, and welfare of the Navajo people. The lack of adequate domestic and municipal water is the greatest water resource problem facing the Navajo Nation. Given the limited tribal resources, and the limited federal budgets and authorizations, the water resource problems will become increasingly acute, intensifying the poor socioeconomic conditions on the Navajo reservation. The end of the era of big water projects and governments’ new focus on balancing economic with ecological concerns also raises questions for rural communities that have yet to develop adequate water infrastructure (Flint and Krogman 2014). Understanding these challenges and the potential for water justice requires attending to the sociohistorical processes through which water has been allocated between competing interests, people, and places.

Theoretical Foundations: Critical Environmental Justice The historic First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991 laid out seventeen wide-ranging principles of environmental justice, including universal protection from environmental toxins and hazards and the “fundamental right to clean air, land, water, and food.” Yet beyond these mainstays of environmental justice, the document also articulated a transforma- tive vision embracing anti-racism, anti-militarism, anti-imperialism, ecological sustainability, and democratic self-determination. To a large extent, environmental justice scholarship has only begun to develop the theoretical foundations to match the expansive vision contained in this now 30- year-old document (Holifield 2018; Pellow 2018). In this section, I briefly sketch the origins and evolution of environmental justice scholarship before elaborating on the critical environmental justice framework informing this study. Environmental justice research emerged in the early 1980s, inspired by grassroots activism against the siting of hazardous facilities in communities of color. Most early work—so-called “first generation” environmental justice research—focused on documenting the proximity of poor and minority communities to toxic sites and debating the relative influence of race and class in producing environmental injustices (Been and Gupta 1997; Brown 1995; Bryant and Mohai 1992; United Church of Christ 1987). After the first decade of research, scholars began calling for studies to move beyond documenting unequal outcomes to study processes underlying the production of environmental injustices (Pellow 2000; Szasz and Meuser 1997; Weinberg 1998). “Second generation” environmental justice research has made great strides in exploring dynamic social, economic, and political processes of environmental injustice (Pellow 2000; Pulido 2000) and expanding into new areas including food, climate change, occupational health, and environmental amenities (Mohai, Pellow and Roberts 2009; Sze and London 2008). Second-generation scholarship also began devoting greater attention to additional forms of inequality, including gender, age, ability, citizenship, and indigeneity (Abbott and Porter 2013; Amar and Teelucksingh 2015; Day 2010; Di Chiro 2008; Kennedy and Dzialo 2015; Newman et al. 2004; Schlosberg and Carruthers 2010; Shah 2012; Sze 2011; Whyte 2011). Critical environmental justice emerged from and builds on this second-generation scholarship. David Naguib Pellow and Robert Brulle (2005) first used the term “critical environmental justice studies” in their call for more diverse methodologies and epistemologies in environmental justice research to better inform activism. Other scholars have since adopted the term (Adamson

2011; Holifield, Porter and Walker 2009), but the most comprehensive statement of the framework comes from Pellow’s (2018) recent book, What is Critical Environmental Justice? (see also Kojola and Pellow 2020; Pellow 2016a, 2016b). Pellow proposes four “pillars” of critical environmental justice: (1) recognition of intersecting social inequalities and forms of oppression, (2) focus on multiple spatial and temporal scales in analyzing the causes and consequences of environmental injustices, (3) the centrality of state power in producing social and environmental inequalities, and (4) the “indispensability” of marginalized groups and non-human nature for achieving environmental justice and ecological sustainability. Within the emerging literature on critical environmental justice, I draw from and extend two subareas that center rural environmental justice and settler colonialism.

Rural environmental justice and relational development Despite the rural origins of the environmental justice movement in Warren County, North Carolina (McGurty 2009), much of the early environmental justice research centered on urban or urbanizing areas of the US (e.g., Downey 2006; Morello-Frosch and Jesdale 2006; Sze 2006). The expanded scope of environmental justice studies, however, has included a wider range of issues, including resource extraction and industrialized agriculture, and increased attention to environmental struggles occurring in rural places (Harrison 2011; Malin 2015; Malin and DeMaster 2016). This research contributes to the critical environmental justice perspective by drawing attention to larger spatial scales and how spatial inequalities intersect with other forms of oppression (Malin, Ryder and Lyra 2019; Sharma-Wallace 2016). Four decades ago, Buttel and Flinn (1977:255) pointed out that most environmental sociologists “readily accept and assume that rural and urban environmental problems have interde- pendent causes and consequences.” These assumptions, however, were and have remained largely implicit within environmental sociology. Environmental justice research has recently begun to incorporate these insights more explicitly by exploring how urban practices produce rural injustices (Ashwood and MacTavish 2016; Carolan 2020; Kelly-Reif and Wing 2016; Pellow 2016a). The defining structural features of rural communities—open space and low population density—combined with high poverty, low education, and limited economic opportunities makes them the seemingly rational and often unquestioned sites for landfills, extractive industries, and other locally unwanted land uses. Yet the ecological violence of resource extraction and other economic activ-

ities associated with rural places creates environmental “sacrifice zones” within poor and minoritized communities that disproportionately benefits urban people (Austin and Clark 2012; Fox 1999; Hooks and Smith 2004; Malin 2015; Sanderson and Frey 2014). Building on these insights, scholars have begun to develop more relational place-based models of environmental injustice (Ranganathan and Balazs 2015). In a series of recent articles, for example, Purifoy and Seamster (2021; 2020) describe how the mundane municipal activities of white places extract and hoard resources from nonwhite places in ways that inflict environmental harm, such as depriving communities of basic water infrastructure (see also Purifoy 2019). Mechanisms of extraction include resource theft, gradual erosion of environmental quality and basic services, and political exclusion (Seamster and Purifoy 2020). Through these mechanisms, white places gain resources for development, directly benefiting from environmental racism. As the authors point out, environmental justice scholars have paid little attention to either the white places benefitting from environmental harm or the more mundane practices that maintain environmental injustices, often without overt struggle. This research on relational development thus charts a path for continued critical work on the mechanisms underlying rural environmental injustice. In addition to material practices, the production and maintenance of rural environmental injustices involves the creation and use of symbolic boundaries. A large body of research within rural sociology documents the cultural meanings associated with rural people and places (Cloke 2006; Willits, Bealer and Timbers 1990; Woods 2011). Environmental justice scholars recognize how these meanings help justify environmentally destructive industries and prevent resistance (e.g., Bell and York 2010), but have yet to investigate how social actors construct and mobilize socio-spatial boundaries within processes of environmental inequality formation. Symbolic boundaries play a fundamental role within the reproduction of inequality. Social actors create distinctions to sort and categorize others. Through these categorical distinctions, dominant groups claim valued resources and exploit individuals in other categories (Massey 2007; Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt 2019). From this perspective “urban” and “rural” do not represent neutral differences but contested social categories through which groups compete over scarce resources. Urban-rural boundaries can therefore reinforce social, economic, and political hierarchies (Lichter and Ziliak 2017) in ways that create and maintain environmental injustices.

Studying the rural dimension of environmental justice can also offer fresh insights into processes of racial formation (Omi and Winant 2015) within the production of environmental inequalities. Racial inequalities have long been a core concern of environmental justice literature, but few studies center the production of race and other forms of social difference (exceptions include Kurtz 2009; Park and Pellow 2004; Teelucksingh 2007). The construction of racial difference occurs in part through environmental conflicts, aiding dominant groups in land appropriation and access, as well as resource extraction, processing, and disposal (Pulido 2016b). Recognizing racial formation as an ongoing and situated historical process (Omi and Winant 2015) that is tightly linked to space and environment suggests that racialization occurs differently for rural people and places (Lipsitz 2007; Neal 2002; Neely and Samura 2011). Yet widespread cultural associations of rurality with whiteness mask the importance of rural communities of color for understanding America’s racial stratification system (Snipp 1996). Research into rural racialization provides a corrective to this oversight, while expanding the emergent literature on rural environmental justice.

Settler colonialism and Indigenous environmental justice Critical environmental justice perspectives emphasize the embeddedness of spatial and social hierarchies within broader political-economic systems, including capitalism and colonialism (Pulido 2016a; Ranganathan 2016; Van Sant, Milligan and Mollett 2020). This focus advances earlier work theorizing the institutional production of environmental justice (e.g., Pellow 2000) by highlighting common structures underlying different forms of oppression. Theories of settler colonialism have made a notable impact on critical environmental justice scholarship, contributing to increased attention to Native nations and Indigenous people (Bacon 2019; Cantzler and Huynh 2016; Norgaard 2019; Vickery and Hunter 2016). This scholarship offers a framework for understanding the unique dimensions of Indigenous environmental justice by drawing attention to the location of Indigenous people within the US racial structure and the role of state power, particularly legal forms of domination, in maintaining environmental inequalities. Settler colonialism describes the structures and processes enabling settler societies—including the US, Canada, Australia, Israel, Brazil, and South Africa—to occupy and appropriate Native lands (Coulthard 2014; Veracini 2010; Wolfe 2006). As a framework for racial analysis, settler colonialism draws attention to the multiple logics through which white supremacy operates (Glenn 2015; McKay, Vinyeta and Norgaard 2020; Smith 2012; Wolfe 2001). Race scholarship in

sociology often centers on the black-white binary—a racial hierarchy based on the commodification of labor and the logic of slavery (Smith 2012)—while ignoring or downplaying the ways that settler societies acquire access to land and natural resources. When acknowledged, race scholarship tends to relegate the removal and genocide of America’s Indigenous populations to the past and view Native people as relatively unimportant to contemporary racial formations. Settler colonialism by contrast sees the appropriation of Indigenous land and resources as an ongoing colonial project (Veracini 2015) that “licenses the disappearance of indigenous peoples, the expropriation of indigenous spaces, and makes others infinitely exploitable and/or expendable (e.g. slaves, immigrant labor, prisoners)” (Bonds and Inwood 2016:720). The permeant occupancy of colonizers distinguishes settler colonialism from other forms of colonialism and requires the destruction of Indigenous societies to yield land and resources to newcomers. The dominant logic of settler colonialism is thus the elimination of the native (Wolfe 2001, 2016). Colonizers eliminate the native in a variety of ways, including genocide, removal, and confinement to reservations. However, settler societies also disappear Indigenous people through cultural and biological assimilation. Settler societies—including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the US—share a number of similar assimilation policies targeting Native people. Child abduction, boarding schools, and missions all sought to erase Indigenous cultural distinctiveness. White society also sought to “breed out” native stock through intermarriage. Indian eli- gibility for assimilation into white society stands in stark contrast to the rules for racial categorization imposed on Blacks. The value of Black people (as property and labor) to whites produced racial ideologies that worked to increase the population of enslavable people, while Indigenous people continuously disappear. As Glenn (2015:62) notes, “Given the transformation of Native Americans into ghosts, it is not surprising that everyday conceptions of race came to be organized around a black-white binary rather than a red-white binary.” Settler colonialism also highlights the unique forms of racism experienced by Indigenous people, often enacted through law and legal mechanisms. Legal forms of anti-Indian racism operate to deny the political sovereignty of Native nations (Cramer 2006). “The basic racist move at work in Indian law and policy,” Berger (2009:599) writes, “is to racialize the tribe, defining tribes as racial groups in order to deny tribes the rights of governments.” Racialized understandings of tribal belonging risk reinforcing colonial domination by misrecognizing Indigenous groups as fundamentally racial rather than political. However, as a result of state and colonial practices, “blood

politics” have become central within struggles over tribal recognition and sovereignty, making race an important dimension of Indigenous politics (Byrd 2011; Garroutte 2003; Sturm 2014). As such, researchers must account for both the political and racial status to understand how Indigenous inequality is produced and resisted. Through the settler colonialism framework, environmental justice scholars have begun to rethink the relationship between race and environment (Cantzler and Huynh 2016; Norgaard 2019; Pellow 2018). As a political project centered on land acquisition and natural resource access, settler colonialism perpetuates severe environmental injustices by diminishing tribal sovereignty and disrupting Indigenous relationships with the environment (Bacon 2019; Whyte 2018). Examples include military and toxic waste concentrated near Indigenous communities (Hooks and Smith 2004; Malin 2015), the destruction of traditional foodways (Norgaard, Reed and Bacon 2018; Weisiger 2011), and displacement through western water control practices (Berry 1998; Mauer 2020). This work contributes greatly to our understanding of how racial and colonial practices create Indige- nous forms of environmental justice. In this study, I advance critical environmental justice research by merging insights from settler colonialism and rural environmental justice to examine the intersection of race and space within the production of environmental inequality.

Research Design and Methods Historical methods offer important insights into the origins and processes of environmental injustice (Boone and Buckley 2018; Sicotte 2016). I take a historical case study approach (Amenta 2009) that uses the NIIP and SJCP as a window into broader issues of water inequality, particularly in rural Indigenous communities. I began by collecting and reading secondary historical sources on the two water projects. The NIIP has received the most attention because of its large size, failure to deliver on many promises, and as an early example of negotiated water settlements between western states and Native nations. These sources provided a general timeline of events and pointed towards important aspects of the broader context. The few previous in-depth historical studies on the NIIP, particularly Judith Jacobsen’s (1989) detailed dissertation, also supplied a list of primary sources and archives to begin gathering primary data. Other secondary sources aided my understanding of western water development, American Indian water rights and law, and southwestern history. I am particularly indebted to (in no particular order) geographer Kate Berry’s (1998, 2012; Berry et al. 2017) writing on Indigenous water policy and history, Ira Clark’s (1987) exhaustive

reference on water in New Mexico, political scientist Daniel McCool’s (1994, 2006) seminal books on Native water politics, and Peter Iverson’s (2002) history of the Navajo people. Primary data collection began with a trip to the National Archives and Records Admin- istration in Denver, Colorado (September 2017) where I spent three days digitizing the Bureau of Reclamation’s annual project histories for both water projects. The project histories detail the water projects’ post-authorization construction, development, and management. The following year (October 2018), a grant from the Rural Sociological Society allowed me to travel to Santa Fe, New Mexico to collect additional archival material from the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives. At the State Archives, I digitized relevant files from the governor’s office and the Office of the State Engineer. These included communications and promotional material related to the SJCP and NIIP, as well as water development in New Mexico more generally. Thousands of pages of additional government publications and reports came from online sources, primarily the Ha- thiTrust Digital Library, a large repository of digitized content from dozens of research libraries. These documents included hearings from the Senate and House subcommittees on Irrigation and Reclamation Important as Congress debated the NIIP and SJCP for nearly a decade; reports from numerous federal agencies, particularly the Bureau of Reclamtion and Bureau of Indian Affairs; and economic and extension reports from university researchers involved in project development. Important documents unavailable digitally or missing from the archives, I located and borrowed through interlibrary loan. Data analysis started with open coding as I moved through the data chronologically. While reviewing the data, I took extensive notes and copied salient excerpts verbatim from both primary and secondary sources. I organized and coded these notes in Microsoft Word documents. Open coding identified broad themes related to project justification and opposition, racial meanings, and issues of legal rights and sovereignty. This first round of coding also enabled me to put together a more detailed timeline of events. I then imported the coded data notes and excerpts into qualitative data analysis software (NVivo 12) for deeper analysis. The second round of axial coding began refining and connecting theoretical categories. New themes and unanticipated historical connec- tions also emerged as I analyzed the data more closely. These often sent me back to the history books to make sense of the unexpected themes. I also revisited the primary data sources frequently

to recontextualize excerpts and validate interpretations. For each of the empirical chapters, I developed a separate codebook based on emergent themes. More details on these coding schemes can be found in the corresponding article chapters.

Chapter Overview In the following three chapters, I analyze different aspects of the water projects that divided the San Juan River to gain insight into the historical formation of water inequality in New Mexico. My overarching research objective seeks to understand the intersection of race and space in the production of rural environmental injustices. Table 1.1 provides an overview of the research questions and data associated with each empirical chapter.

Table 1.1. Overview of dissertation chapters and research questions

Chapter Research Questions Data and Approach Chapter 2. Settler Colonial- How do racial projects contribute Explores racial meaning during leg- ism and Rural Environmen- to rural forms of environmental islative debates and early negotia- tal Injustice: Water Ine- inequality? How do settler efforts tions over the NIIP (1953-1962) us- quality on the Navajo Na- to acquire and control natural re- ing minutes of congressional hear- tion sources contribute to the social ings, project reports, secondary production of racial difference? sources on Indian water rights and irrigation.

Chapter 3. Water Justice How do social actors construct Focuses on the construction of spa- and the Symbolic Mobiliza- and use socio-spatial boundaries tial boundaries during legislative tion of Rurality in Natural during natural resource conflicts? debates over the SJCP (1953-1962) Resource Conflicts How does the construction of using minutes of congressional symbolic boundaries contribute to hearings, project reports, and sec- urban-rural environmental ine- ondary sources on urbanization in qualities? NM.

Chapter 4. Organizing En- How do state bureaucracies enact Examines bureaucratic mechanisms vironmental Inequality: In- settler colonial projects? What are of inequality during NIIP construc- digenous Marginalization the bureaucratic mechanisms tion and post-authorization devel- in Western Water Politics maintaining environmental ine- opments (1963-1985) using NIIP qualities? annual project histories and congressional hearings.

Chapters two and three rely primarily on legislative hearings and project reports leading up to the authorization of the NIIP and SJCP in 1962 to understand differences in how officials characterized and treated the two projects. Chapter two develops the concept of settler colonial racial projects to examine the practices and discourses that unevenly allocated water resources

across racial lines.1 I show the explicit and subtle ways that officials undermined tribal sovereignty even while promoting the NIIP and eventually approving substantial financial resources for the project. Settler officials carefully framed their support for the project in moral terms, denying that the Navajo held any legitimate legal claims to the water. These efforts resulted in large part because New Mexico politicians strategically packaged the NIIP with the more controversial SJCP. Offi- cials’ moral arguments in support of bringing water to the Navajo, presented as a means to correct past injustices, made opposing the bill politically risky. At the same time, the Navajo project strongly resonated with federal termination policy that sought to end government support for tribes and assimilate individuals into mainstream white society. The settler colonial racial projects at work during the project negotiations and legislative proceedings thus helped ensure that the NIIP accomplished colonial objectives of appropriating Native waters and other resources. Chapter three analyses the SJCP and water development in the Middle Rio Grande Valley. I apply relational theories of inequality to understand how actors constructed and mobilized socio- spatial boundaries to claim control over the San Juan water. The SJCP brings water from the mostly rural San Juan River Basin to New Mexico’s major population centers, primarily for the benefit of Albuquerque. Yet during legislative proceedings, discussion and project justifications centered on the project’s rural benefits, including economic development in distressed rural communities, natural resource development for national defense needs, and rural recreational opportunities. Each of these justifications constructed rural places for urban benefit and symbolically mobilized rurality in a way that enabled urban places to claim greater control over the state’s water supplies. Chapter four returns focus to the NIIP to understand how bureaucratic administration enacted settler colonial projects to prevent the water project from achieving its stated objectives. The water project promised economic assistance for the Navajo in the form of thousands of jobs, local community development, and water for municipal and industrial purposes—all of which failed to materialize. Drawing on archival data, annual project histories, and congressional hearings, I explore legal-rational forms of domination within post-authorization project construction and development. My analysis points to three bureaucratic mechanisms—organizational segregation, administrative obstruction, and mission shift—that delayed and remade the NIIP in ways that undermined the success of the project. These mechanisms of inequality contributed to continued water

1 Chapter two is forthcoming in a special issue of Rural Sociology on “Race, Ethnicity, and Rural- ity in the United States.” 15

insecurity and injustice on the Navajo Nation, preventing the tribe from claiming their full allotment of San Juan water, and making that water available to other users in the region. Chapter five concludes by revisiting the theoretical themes introduced in this chapter. I synthesize findings from the three empirical articles and detail the study’s contributions to critical environmental justice scholarship. The primary contributions include: (1) connecting rural environmental injustice with urban actors and interests to who how racial and colonial practices come together to drive spatial inequalities, (2) showing how environmental conflicts contribute to rural racialization, and (3) revealing how mundane forms of legal-rational domination provide flexible tools that can perpetuation and legitimize environmental inequalities.

CHAPTER 2. SETTLER COLONIALISM AND RURAL ENVIRONMENTAL INJUSTICE: WATER INEQUALITY ON THE NAVAJO NATION2

Abstract Environmental justice research highlights the distinct processes generating environmental problems in rural places. Rural communities of color suffer the dual disadvantage of spatial and racial marginalization, yet we know little about the role of race and racism within rural environmental inequality formation. This study draws on theories of settler colonialism and rural environmental justice to investigate the historical formation of water inequality in the American Southwest. In 1962, Congress authorized two water projects to divide the San Juan River between the Navajo Nation and New Mexico. The Navajo Indian Irrigation project (NIIP) would develop family farms on the Navajo Nation, while the San Juan-Chama Project (SJCP) diverted water into the Rio Grande Basin for urban use. While New Mexico’s project was completed ahead of schedule in 1973, the NIIP has yet to be finished today, almost six decades later. Using archival material, government documents, and secondary accounts, this study examines racial meanings in the years leading up to NIIP approval. Findings reveal that settler officials used the NIIP as a mechanism to appropriate Native resources. I show how racial projects within NIIP negotiations contributed to colonial domination by diminishing the political sovereignty of the Navajo Nation.

Introduction Recent research on rural environmental justice shows that rural people and places face unique forms of environmental domination, yet few studies have examined the role of race and racism within rural environmental inequality formation. For rural communities of color, the combination of spatial and racial marginalization shapes both the production and experience of environmental injustices. However, these processes unfold differently across racialized groups, requiring that environmental justice scholars engage more seriously with theories of race to understand the development and persistence of rural environmental inequality. This study extends the literature on rural environmental justice by showing how settler colonial racial projects contribute to environmental inequality in rural Indigenous communities. Specifically, I examine the formation of water inequality in the Southwestern United States through a historical case study of the Navajo Indian

Irrigation Project (NIIP), a federal water project that divided the San Juan River between the Nav- ajo Nation and state of New Mexico. Congress approved the NIIP in 1962 to develop family farming and alleviate the chronic poverty on the Navajo Nation. At the same time, and as a condition for NIIP approval, Congress authorized the San Juan-Chama Project (SJCP) to bring water from the San Juan River to the adjacent Rio Grande River Basin, primarily for urban use in Albuquerque. Despite their joint authorization, the two water projects quickly diverged in their funding and progress. The Bureau of Reclamation completed construction on New Mexico’s project ahead of schedule in 1973. The NIIP, by contrast, remains unfinished today, more than five decades later. As such, the NIIP failed to deliver on its many promises to improve social and economic conditions on the Navajo Nation, and the tribe continues to struggle with severe water infrastructure problems. Analysis of the NIIP offers insight into the role of racism within rural environmental injustices, particularly the development and persistence of water inequality in Indigenous communities. Data for this research include archival sources, government documents, and secondary historical accounts focused on the NIIP, as well as federal reclamation and Indian water policy more generally. I concentrate on the years leading up to project authorization in 1962. The data were coded for themes related to project justification, water claims, and other discursive practices used to divide the waters between competing people and places. Findings show that for settler officials, the NIIP served primarily as a mechanism to appropriate Native water resources for use in white communities. During project negotiations, state and federal actors routinely racialized the Navajo Nation in ways that diminished tribal sovereignty. Settler colonial racial projects took four primary forms: (1) openly contesting the Navajo’s legal right to the water, (2) constructing moral rather than legal justifications for supporting the NIIP, (3) promoting Indian assimilation and tribal termination through the NIIP, and (4) legitimizing environmental paternalism. The findings provide insight into the eventual failures of the NIIP, as well as how settler colonialism contributes to racialized forms of spatial inequality.

Settler Colonial Racial Projects and Rural Environmental Inequality Formation In recent years, a small but growing number of sociologists have begun to engage theories of settler colonialism to examine environmental justice (Cantzler and Huynh 2016; Mauer 2020), ecological disruption (Bacon 2019; Holleman 2017), and racial formation (Fenelon and Trafzer 2014; Glenn

2015). As a framework for racial analysis, settler colonialism offers a historically grounded approach to understanding racial formation and domination in the US and other settler societies. Settler colonialism represents an ongoing structure—rather than discrete event—that combines white territorial control with a racialized system of labor exploitation (Glenn 2015; Wolfe 2001). In the US, the encounter between settlers and Native nations represents a defining moment in white racial formation. As permanent occupiers, settler societies require access to a land base and natural resources, a task that first necessitates eliminating the original inhabitants of the land (Veracini 2010; Wolfe 2006). American colonists justified this genocide and land appropriation by racializ- ing Indigenous people as “savage” others, in contrast to their own “civilized” whiteness (Dunbar- Ortiz 2014; Glenn 2015). The white supremacy underlying settler colonial racial regimes became inscribed within the national identity and political and legal institutions, and continues to shape contemporary processes of racial formation (Bonds and Inwood 2016; Moreton-Robinson 2015). Racial projects, a concept that links racial meanings and structures, refers to both material practices that structure differential access to resources along racial lines, as well as discursive practices that legitimize or challenge racial hierarchies (Omi and Winant 2015). Under settler colonialism, racial projects take on unique forms. Settler societies operate through the ongoing oc- cupation of Native land and appropriation of Native resources, making the elimination of the Na- tive a central organizing logic (Veracini 2010; Wolfe 2006). Colonial domination takes on many forms, but all work to “institutionalize [white] settler privileges materially and discursively” (Steinman 2016:221). US policies of genocide, removal, and reservation confinement physically emptied the land of many of its original occupants. Settler society has also eliminated Indigenous people through cultural assimilation. Child abduction, boarding schools, and missions all sought to erase Indigenous cultural distinctiveness. These and other assimilationist policies draw attention to a core contradiction in the rules of racial categorization under the US settler regime. Black Americans, whose historical value was linked to labor rather than land, were racialized in a way that increased the number and visibility of enslavable people, while Native people were disappeared and must continuously prove their “Indianness” (Garroutte 2001). Theorizing race from a settler colonial perspective destabilizes widespread assumptions that racism against American Indians works the same as anti-Black racism. Scholars frequently organize the US racial hierarchy around a Black-white binary that makes anti-Black discrimination the paradigm of racism. Like African Americans, Native people suffer from racial violence and

high disparities in healthcare, education, employment, and incarceration. However, anti-Indian racism also departs from the “classical” model in significant, but frequently misrecognized ways. The history of federal Indian policy and law illustrates the distinct manifestations of racism against American Indians. Berger (2009) shows how notions of racial inferiority within Indian policy and law legitimize government efforts to diminish tribal sovereignty. Sovereignty refers to the right of nations to self-govern and determine their own way of life (Cobb 2005). Institutionalized forms of anti-Indian oppression target the collective political rights of Native people, while seeking to assimilate individuals into white society. In one of the most famous examples, the 1887 Dawes Act privatized communal land holdings of tribes and allotted plots to individual head of households, opening the “surplus” land for white settlement. The act facilitated white settler theft of over 80 million acres of Native land, while separating individuals from tribes. Ongoing colonialization and the sociopolitical status of American Indians distinguishes tribes from other subordinate racial and ethnic groups. Because of these differences, Native people often assert radically different goals compared to other struggles for racial justice. Greater inclusion within dominant social structures as promoted by the civil rights movement, for example, can threaten elimination through assimilation for Native people. Non-Native politicians have also used “racial equality” and “civil rights” to encroach on tribal sovereignty (Berger 2009). As a result, many Indigenous scholars and activists reject minoritized conceptions of Indigenous identity in favor of political categories (Stevenson 1998). While tribes are not only or even primarily racial groups, overlooking the racial dynamics within political struggles for sovereignty limits our understanding of the current status of Native people and nations, as well as US racial structures more generally (Byrd 2011; Sturm 2014). The tension between race and tribal sovereignty, however, further underscores the need for theoretical frameworks that recognize the unique aspects of anti- Indian racism. As a racial project centered on land and resource acquisition, settler colonialism creates deep environmental injustices for Native people (Bacon 2019; Whyte 2018). Environmental justice encompasses varied and contested meanings, but broadly refers to the principle that “all people and communities are entitled to equal protection of environmental and public health laws and regulations” (Bullard 1996:495). However, as numerous scholars have pointed out, traditional (western) conceptions of environmental justice fail to account for the unique legal position or cultural practices of Native communities (Vickery and Hunter 2016; Whyte 2011). As political entities,

Native nations have the power to define membership conditions and rights, collect taxes, enact environmental regulations, and engage in government-to-government negotiations, among other governmental functions. Indigenous environmental justice must address these issues of tribal sovereignty, self-determination, and the federal trust relationship (Cantzler and Huynh 2016). Indig- enous scholars also articulate distinct ecologies that depart from the human-centric framework of traditional environmental justice (McGregor 2018; Whyte 2018). The cultural heritage of over 600 federally and state recognized American Indian tribes cannot be reduced to a single framework, but most traditions share a sense of kinship with the natural world based on mutual responsibility (LaDuke 1999; Whyte 2018). Settler colonialism creates environmental injustices by denying or ignoring tribal sovereignty (Coulthard 2014) and disrupting place-based webs of relationships (Bacon 2019). By explicitly linking processes of racial formation with landscapes, settler colonialism offers a promising lens through which to understand rural environmental injustice. Analyses of environmental inequality formation center the socio-historical processes and power structures that produce uneven distributions of environmental burdens and benefits (Pellow 2000, 2002). An emerging body of research shows that the development of environmental inequality in rural places follows distinct pathways because of differences in social, cultural, and economic arrangements (Liévanos, Greenberg and Wishart 2018; Malin and DeMaster 2016; Pellow 2016a). For one, urban and rural places contend with different types and sources of environment problems, largely resulting from land use patterns. Environmental contamination and degradation from industrial agriculture and other extractive industries tends to concentrate within rural areas (e.g., Fox 1999), whereas legacy pollution from manufacturing and poor air quality present greater threats in urban places (e.g., Morello-Frosch, Pastor and Sadd 2001). Limited economic opportunities and resources also make rural residents more financially dependent on offending industries, and potentially less likely to resist (Malin and DeMaster 2016). Second, rural cultural practices can introduce different pathways of toxic exposure. Greater reliance of gardening and subsistence hunting, for example, may expose rural residents to higher levels of toxins through the food chain (Mckinney 2016). In many rural areas, particularly Indig- enous communities, environmental damage also detrimentally affects social and cultural practices through the disruption of subsistence routines and other ecological relationships (Norgaard, Reed and Bacon 2018). Third, institutional actors treat urban and rural spaces differently. McKinney

(2016) shows that bureaucratic structures within the EPA prioritize urban over rural remediation of toxic sites because of population density. Similarly, Van Wagner (2016:311) demonstrates how the law in Ontario constructed rurality in a way that “reinforces the value of rural places as either preserved amenity spaces or sites of industrial and extractive development.” These studies show how cultural ideas about rurality can permeate institutional spaces in ways that legitimize and reinforce spatial patterns of environmental inequality. In this study, I argue that settler colonial theory offers additional insight into the formation of rural environmental inequality. Although popular media and thought paints rural America as both demographically and culturally white, rural communities of color remain crucial for understanding racial dynamics in the United States (Snipp 1992, 1996). Many rural communities of color—including African Americans in the “Black Belt” South, Latinx populations in unincorpo- rated borderland “colonias,” and Native Americans on reservations—face serious environmental challenges. Through analysis of a case of water inequality in the American Southwest, this study advances our understanding of how processes of spatial and racial marginalization come together to produce rural environmental injustices.

Data and Methods This research employs a qualitative, historical case study approach to examine the cultural representations and institutional practices used to divide the waters of the San Juan River between the Navajo Nation and state of New Mexico. Data sources include archival material, government documents, and secondary historical sources related to the development of the NIIP. Archival material came from the National Archives in Denver, CO and the State Records Center and Archives in Santa Fe, NM. The National Archives houses collections for the Bureau of Reclamation and Bu- reau of Indian Affairs, including annual project histories for both the SJCP and NIIP. The State Records Center and Archives in Santa Fe, NM houses records for the New Mexico State Engineer, the office responsible for administering the state’s water resource. This collection includes reports on the San Juan Basin dating back to the 1920s, communications between the state and tribal government, and other material related to the allocation of the San Juan waters.

Figure 2.1. Timeline of significant events in western reclamation, federal Indian policy, and NM water development

Government documents were also collected, focused primarily on the legislative history of the two water projects. Publications include reports from a variety of government agencies on the project feasibility, benefits, costs, and wider effects. Additionally, congressional records were analyzed, primarily the proceedings of the subcommittees on Irrigation and Reclamation. Congres- sional hearings focused first on approval of the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP), which passed in 1956 but excluded the NIIP and SCJP despite efforts by tribal and state representatives from New Mexico. Annual hearings in the house and senate in subsequent years debated legislation that would authorize the NIIP and SCJP as participating projects of CRSP, which finally became law in 1962. Finally, secondary sources provide historical context on federal reclamation and American Indian water rights. This paper focuses on the development of the NIIP leading up to its authorization in 1962 and contextualized within the history of western reclamation, New Mexico water development, and federal Indian policy. Figure 2.1 provides a timeline of significant events within each of these areas. Analysis of the data began with qualitative immersion in order to refine theoretical categories and develop a coding scheme (Stryker 1996). Extensive qualitative excerpts were drawn from the data for in-depth analysis using NVivo 12. Initial coding focused on broad themes, including type of document, date, institutional actors, the meaning/use of rural and urban space, and cultural ideas about Indigenous people. Based on emergent themes, subsequent rounds of coding focused on the construction of citizenship, use of “the Navajo Problem,” American Indian water rights, and natural resource use and development. Taken together, these data provide insight into how settler officials enacted racial projects within the conflict over the waters of the San Juan River.

The Navajo Indian Irrigation Project and Water Development in the San Juan Basin The San Juan River begins as snowmelt high in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado and drains approximately 24,600 square miles of land in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona on its journey west to meet the Colorado River. Nearly 60 percent of land in the San Juan watershed belongs to Indigenous people, with the Navajo Nation claiming by far the largest area. This has led some to call the San Juan “one of the most ‘Indian Rivers’ in the United States” (Aton and McPherson 2000:3). Yet despite historical and legal claims to much of the river’s flow, 30 percent of families in the Navajo Nation lack potable water in their homes and must haul water, often long distances, for domestic use (Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources 2011). Insufficient

water infrastructure has also hindered economic development on the Navajo Nation, contributing to persistently high poverty rates. The establishment of the Navajo reservation in 1868 pre-dates Anglo and Spanish settlement in the San Juan River Basin, granting the Navajo people large claims to the San Juan River under colonial law. However, the region soon came under competition for water with the adjacent Rio Grande River Basin. Following the Great Depression, Albuquerque became one of the fastest growing cities in the nation, with a population increasing from 22,000 in 1930 to 200,000 in 1960. Population growth and the siting of industrial and national defense facilities, combined with depression era drought, placed pressure on northern New Mexico to secure additional water supplies. Because the Rio Grande had been fully appropriated with the Rio Grande Compact (1938), New Mexico began investigating a transbasin diversion to deliver water from the San Juan River for municipal and industrial use in Albuquerque. In 1953, a San Juan diversion became part of negotiations for the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP), a plan to develop dams and reservoirs in Upper Basin states to put their share of the Colorado River to beneficial use. The Navajo Nation joined CRSP discussions to oppose the San Juan diversion and assert tribal water rights (Glaser 1998a). As a result, New Mexico’s attempt to appropriate water from the San Juan had to contend with the Navajo’s competing claims. Con- gress authorized the San Juan-Chama and Navajo Projects together in 1962, nearly ten years later, after “complicated and often heated negotiations pitting Indian water rights against non-Indian claims to the San Jan River water supply” (Glaser 1998b:10). Final legislation provided for 110,000 acre-feet of water to be diverted each year through tunnels in the San Juan Mountains to the Chama River and eventually the Rio Grande. In return, the Navajo project would irrigate 110,630 acres of the Navajo reservation near the town of Farmington with 508,000 acre-feet of water.3 Following authorization, the two projects diverged sharply in their construction and funding. In 1971, the National Society of Professional Engineers celebrated the San Juan-Chama Pro- ject as an outstanding civil engineering achievement, while progress on the Navajo project lan- guished. New Mexico’s project was completed by 1973—ahead of schedule and before the NIIP had irrigated a single acre—and now provides up to 90 percent of Albuquerque’s drinking water.

3 One acre-foot of water equals 325,900 gallons, the amount of water needed to cover an acre of land one foot deep. 25

The Navajo project, which planners estimated would take 14 years to construct, has yet to be completed and suffers from perpetual underfunding. Further, “at nearly every possible step, the bureaucrats in charge of NIIP reconsidered and reshaped it” (Jacobsen 1989:133), eventually transforming the entire project from developing small family farms to an agribusiness corporation. The NIIP would eventually bring benefits to the Navajo Nation through the creation of a tribal agricultural enterprise that employs between 200-500 seasonally (Navajo Pride n.d.). However, the tribe’s continued struggles to complete and fund the project, develop infrastructure for municipal and domestic use, and protect water rights speaks to enduring and racially based water inequalities.

Findings Findings reveal four main ways that state and federal officials enacted settler colonial racial projects to deny Navajo tribal sovereignty and exert greater control over Native resources during NIIP negotiations. In the first strategy, settler officials openly contested tribal water rights, denying that the Navajo had priority claims to the San Juan River. More frequently, however, government officials relied on more subtle strategies, including (1) constructing moral rather than legal bases of support for the NIIP, (2) promoting tribal termination and Native American assimilation, and (3) justifying environmental paternalism. All four instances show how white settlers racialized the Navajo Nation in ways that enabled continued colonial domination of Indigenous people and the environment.

Explicit denial of sovereignty: Contesting tribal water rights American Indian tribes enjoy large priority claims to western waters under federal law, yet state and federal actors routinely denied the Navajo Nation’s legal rights to the San Juan River during negotiations over the NIIP. This section outlines the legal basis of American Indian water rights, before showing how settler officials openly contested the legal rulings that granted the Navajo preferential rights. This explicit denial of tribal sovereignty significantly shaped negotiations by hindering the tribe’s ability to meaningfully participate in western water development and further subordinating Indigenous rights to colonial authority. Water bureaucracies and policies in the American West emerged out of nineteenth-century colonialist expansion that sought to “reclaim” the land and resources for white settlers. The doctrine of prior appropriation forms the basis of water law in western states (Berry and Jackson 2018). Commonly summarized as “first in time, first in right,” under prior appropriation, users who first

put water to “beneficial use” (as defined by the state) establish priority claims based on the date of the original appropriation. Waste or failure to put appropriated water to its intended purpose can result in the loss of rights. The system of prior appropriation, based in state law and beneficial use, however, directly conflicts with American Indian water rights. Tribal water rights in the US are governed by a series of judicial rulings, known collectively as the Winters doctrine, or federal reserved water rights (Shurts 2000). In Winters v. United States (1908), the Supreme Court ruled that federal treaties and agreements creating reservations implied tribal rights to enough water to fulfill the reservations’ intended purpose. In most cases, Indian water rights under Winters date back to the establishment of reservations and supersede state water law. Unlike appropriative claims, Winters rights are based on future need rather than past use and are not forfeited if tribes fail to exercise their claims. However, many Native nations lacked the practical means to put their water claims to use and for most of the twentieth century western states and the federal government routinely ignored Indian water rights when developing water projects (McCool 1994). When rumors that New Mexico was planning a transbasin diversion began circulating in the late 1930s, the Navajo initially opposed the project and asserted claims to the entirety of the San Juan River. Yet the Navajo government eventually agreed to support the San Juan diversion— relinquishing claims to 110,000 acre-feet of water a year—knowing that in order to put the water to use, they would have to trade their priority claim for water projects. As longtime Navajo tribal attorney Norman Littell observed: [The U.S. Supreme Court] has said unequivocally that the Indians’ rights to their water cannot be taken away from them, but what can you do with them without money? It will take millions of dollars. And to get that money from Congress you...have to be party to some sort of compromise with the States that are affected... (Tribal Council Meeting Minutes, July 12, 1950, quoted in Jacobsen 1989) As a result, the Navajo Nation began negotiating with New Mexico to divide the river between an Indian irrigation project and transbasin diversion to Albuquerque. During early negotiations, New Mexico officials actively denied the existence of Indian’s preferential rights. In one telling 1951 exchange, New Mexico Senator Clinton Anderson, who would later sponsor the bill authorizing SJCP and NIIP, pushed back against the doctrine of Indian reserved water rights by referencing the 19th century forced removal of the Navajo: Howard Gorman [Navajo Tribal Council member]: We know that we have a priority right to that river, and that our preferential rights should be considered from times immemorial.

Sen. Clinton Anderson [NM]: How about the people who were there ahead of you when you were imprisoned? (Dept. of the Interior, San Juan-Chama Meeting 1951, quoted in Jacobsen 1989) Between 1864 and 1868, the US government interned over 8,000 Navajos at Bosque Redondo, a reservation near Fort Sumner in eastern New Mexico, following a scorched earth military cam- paign (Iverson 2002). The 300+ mile “Long Walk” from the Navajo homeland to the site left hundreds dead. An estimated 1,500 more would die from exposure, disease, and starvation at Bosque Redondo. Anderson’s suggestion that the internment nullified Navajo priority rights speaks to the insensitivity, if not outright hostility, of many settlers towards Indian rights, as well as officials’ efforts to diminish Navajo political standing within the negotiations. After the water projects became part of the CRSP, overt opposition to Indian water rights all but disappeared, at least for bill proponents. Because New Mexico packaged the San Juan- Chama and Navajo irrigation projects together, bill proponents actively advocated for both and generally sought to avoid the issue of Winters rights entirely. Although the Bureau of Indian Af- fairs and other Native interests continued to assert the Navajo’s priority claims to the river, New Mexico and the Bureau of Reclamation took the official position that Indian water rights were irrelevant. A 1953 report from the State Engineer of New Mexico flatly rejects the “so-called Win- ters case,” asserting that “New Mexico has never acceded to the construction placed on the [Win- ters] decision…by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the tribes” that gives Native nations preferential rights (State Engineer of New Mexico 1953:14). The report concludes that whatever the rights of the Indians may be, they “need not hinder or impede the orderly development of the water resources of the San Juan River” (State Engineer of New Mexico 1953:14). At other times, settler officials recognized Navajo rights to the water, but under standards of prior appropriation. New Mexico representative Antonio Fernandez explained in a hearing that the Navajo’s prior rights were established the same way as white settlers: The Indians there have had long prior rights to any rights of the white settlers, just as the irrigation works now in existence by the early pioneers in San Juan would certainly have prior rights under any operation of the upper Colorado Basin. (US House Hearings 1954:551) Similarly, a Colorado representative asserted that “the allocation of the waters of New Mexico and even the Indian rights depends upon the laws of the State of New Mexico” (US House Hearings

1954:610), ignoring their preferential rights under federal law. Applying state law of prior appropriation would drastically undercut the potential size of the Navajo Nation’s claim, as well as pressure the tribe to develop “beneficial” uses for the water to maintain their rights. Settler officials’ dismissal of Indian water rights under Winters diminished tribal sovereignty by incorporating the Navajo into the dominant (white) legal structures and denying their collective rights as a Nation. Despite denying the existence or relevance of Winters rights for dividing the waters of the San Juan River, many of the same state and federal actors actively advocated for the NIIP. To do so, settler officials and politicians constructed alternative bases for supporting the project that fit more squarely within the dominate white water regime.

Moral bases of support: Solving the “Navajo problem” Officials’ motives and rationale for supporting the NIIP reveal the settler colonial logic underlying the project and negotiations. For many New Mexico residents and politicians, the NIIP provided a mechanism to transfer Indigenous water resources to settlers (Deloria 1985). This can be seen in settler officials’ insistence that Congress consider the two water projects together, making political support for the NIIP contingent on New Mexico’s ability to appropriate San Juan water. However, settler officials obscured this motive by presenting the NIIP as a solution to the “Navajo problem” and appealing to moral rather than legal arguments. Congress should fund the NIIP, proponents argued, to relieve the chronic poverty on the Navajo Nation, not because the tribe had any legal claims to the water. This framing mobilized white sympathy for the Navajo, aiding in the passage of the controversial SJCP, while continuing to deny Indian priority water rights under federal law. Despite the clear tensions between Native and non-Native water interests, New Mexico representatives expressed strong support for the Navajo project. Packaging the San Juan and Nav- ajo projects together legislatively allowed proponents to leverage sympathy for the Navajos in order to pass their own project, a strategy known as the “Indian blanket” (McCool 1994). This strategy was widely known, if not publicly acknowledged (Jacobsen 1989). During the 1955 house hearings, a Representative from California questioned the Commissioner of Indian Affairs about the motives for supporting the Navajo project: Rep. Craig Hosmer [CA]: As I understand it, you have lived in this area a long time, and I heard that the real reason behind this Navaho project is to get municipal water down to the city of Albuquerque. Do you know anything about that? Glenn Emmons [BIA]: No, sir. That is not in my province, sir. I do not know anything about it. (US House Hearings 1955:236)

Although denying the allegations, the exchange suggests that the “Indian blanket” was an open secret, meant to raise the political cost of opposing the San Juan diversion. In another rare instance during the 1961 hearings, the San Juan Reclamation Association denounced New Mexico’s use of the “Indian blanket”: We particularly have opposed concurrent consideration of the San Juan-Chama and the Navajo Indian irrigation projects and deplore and condemn the confusion of the issue by proponents of the San Juan-Chama project in trying to make the successful promotion of the project the price for consideration of the Navajo project. (US House Hearings 1961:72- 73) The group argued that this strategy had silenced opposition to the transbasin diversion within San Juan County because residents feared that speaking out against the SJCP would endanger the NIIP. Project proponents sought to mobilize support for the bill by framing the NIIP as a solution to the “Navajo problem” that would provide desperately needed jobs and economic development. According to the initial plans, the NIIP would create 1,500 family farms, directly supporting nearly 8,000 people. Factoring in indirect benefits, the BIA estimated that the project would bring employment opportunities to a total of 18,000 Navajos, one-fifth of the reservation population. Of the numerous secondary benefits, the NIIP promised to ease pressures on rangeland from grazing, reduce the cost of education and social services, provide municipal and industrial water supplies, and attract private industry. As such, the legislation offered a solution to the “distressing poverty,” “misery and degradation,” and “privation” on the Navajo Nation. Settler officials and NIIP supporters argued that the US had a moral obligation to deliver water to improve economic conditions on the reservation and rectify past abuses. New Mexico Representative John Dempsey, for example, testified that: It is an opportunity to right in some degree the wrongs that have been done [to] these people by our Government during the last century. For years they have been held in what we must confess closely approaches bondage...They have been economic outcasts in this greatest of all nations far too long. In the long run construction of the [NIIP] will pay off not only financially but morally for the American people. (US House Hearings 1955:232) Similarly, promotional material released by the Upper Colorado River Commission promised that the Colorado River Storage Project offered a “A New Hope for the Navajo” and described the conditions of the Navajos as a “baffling” injustice. The NIIP offered a solution to this “Navajo problem” by bringing about the end of a “sad and deplorable series of events” (Upper Colorado River Commission c. 1955:12).

In addition to the need to correct past injustices and improve economic conditions, many supporters appealed to the Treaty of 1868—which freed the Navajo from Bosque Redondo and created the Navajo reservation—to bolster their moral argument. The Chamber of Commerce in Farmington, New Mexico, a town on the western edge of the Navajo Nation, wrote in support of the project: One can well imagine the chagrin of destitute Navaho Indians who have watched this wasteful practice [of unused water] for the past 75 years, even though the Great White Father had promised them aid and assistance in becoming self-supporting, through the treaty of 1868. (US Senate Hearings 1955:726) The 1955 BIA feasibility report quoted the treaty at length and noted that the NIIP would help make “the provisions of article V of the treaty of 1868 a reality” (McKay and Emmons 1955:300). Article V offered land grants of 160 acres to any head of family and 80 acres to any individual willing to farm. Yet, as Navajo officials pointed out, “there were not then, and have never been at any time since 1868, sufficient cultivable lands to comply in a measurable degree with said treaty” (Resolution of the Navajo Tribal Council, January 14, 1955). The 1868 treaty also promised education for tribal members, including a schoolhouse and teacher for every 30 students. As late as 1945, less than a third of Navajo children were enrolled in school (Coombs 1962). The NIIP would help address this problem by concentrating the rural population, reducing the cost and difficulty of providing educational services. Referencing treaty obligations, rather than the Winters doctrine, allowed non-Native interests to advocate for the project without ceding any water rights. This was made clear during an exchange between a Representative from Texas and a member of the Interstate Stream Commis- sion in San Juan County: Rep. Ken Regan [TX]: What is the nature of those solemn agreements [between the US and Navajos] to which you refer? I. J. Coury [Interstate Stream Commission, San Juan County, NM]: I was referring particularly to that portion of the treaty that promised the Indians 1 school classroom for every 30 children, which they have not kept up. If they build the project, it would help carry that out. Rep. Regan: There is no solemn agreement to build this dam. You think that would be a means to accomplish that. Mr. Coury: That is right. (US House Hearings 1954:606) Officials’ use of descriptors such as “solemn agreement” and “promise”—rather than “right” or “entitlement”—shows that the 1868 Treaty represented a moral obligation, but did not carry the

same legal weight as interstate compacts or international treaties. Paul Jones, chair of the Navajo Tribal council, pushed back against this tendency to frame their rights in moral terms, asserting that: “The Federal Government has not moral obligations, but explicit treaty obligations to the Navajo Tribe” (US House Hearings 1960:66). However, moral framing remained the predominant approach, allowing the Bureau of Reclamation and Western states to continue developing water resources with minimal regard for Indian rights.

Termination and assimilation: Making the “good citizen” Settler officials made the additional moral argument that the NIIP would help transform the Navajo into “good citizens.” This version of citizenship included white cultural values and practices that would assimilate the Navajo into white society, with the ultimate objective to end government support to the tribe entirely. As such, the NIIP clearly resonated with termination era goals. Ter- mination policy dominated Congress for most of the 1950s and 60s and sought to end to the federal-tribal relationship by dismantling reservations, ending financial support, and eliminating tribal sovereignty (Wilkinson and Biggs 1977). These ideas found frequent expression in debates over the NIIP. White citizenship values can first be seen within the NIIP’s original design, which continued the government’s longstanding ambition to settle the Navajo on farms. The US first attempted to transform the Navajo from pastoralists into modern farmers during their imprisonment at Bosque Redondo, an experiment that resulted in repeated crop failure and widespread starvation. The 1868 treaty nonetheless encouraged Indians to take up settled agriculture by offering land grants to individuals willing to farm. After returning home, the Navajo resumed their traditional pastoralism and developed an economy based on livestock, primarily sheep and goats. However, by midcentury a combination of drought, population growth, and stock reduction programs had devastated the grazing economy (Weisiger 2011). In response, US officials proposed irrigation to both revitalize and provide an alternative to herding. Yet NIIP plans, based on westernized agricultural and family structures, made little effort to accommodate Navajo cultural practices or explore alternative farming models more compatible with Navajo pastoralism and communalism. Proponents also argued that the NIIP would encourage “good citizenship” by promoting self-sufficiency and independence. New Mexico representative John Dempsey explained that, “We now have the opportunity to restore [the Navajo] to the status of self-respecting, self-sustaining American citizens” (US House Hearings 1955:232). However, self-sufficiency did not mean 32

greater sovereignty or self-determination at the tribal level. The NIIP authorizing legislation com- mitted considerable resources to Navajo water development, but proponents made clear that the ultimate goal was to terminate state and federal assistance programs. As one BIA official argued, “the only fair thing for the United States Government [to do is] build these people up so that the United States Government can step out” (US House Hearings 1955:234-35). With greater economic development and employment opportunities, the government could reduce welfare pay- ments and other assistance programs, eventually ending federal aid altogether. In addition to reducing overall government expenditures, the irrigation project would make better American citizens by enabling the Navajo to contribute to the national interest through taxes. Navajo tribal representatives, in their efforts to legitimize the project, participated in this citizenship framing.4 In his testimony before the Senate, Sam Ahkeah, chair of the Navajo Tribal Council, spoke at length about how the project would enable the Navajo people to become better citizens: These people will become self-sufficient and can live with dignity. They will become taxpayers, because even though we do not now pay taxes on our lands, when we make money we pay income tax, and whenever we buy things with the money we have earned, we pay the taxes on these things… (US Senate Hearings 1954:306) Proponents’ emphasis on the Navajo becoming taxpaying citizens resulted in part from how the NIIP would be financed. Unlike most reclamation works, Indian irrigation projects were “non- reimbursable” under federal law and did not require repayment by the eventual water users. This placed heightened scrutiny on project cost, within a context already heavily reliant on financial cost-benefit analyses. Yet the idea that the Navajo needed to contribute more as taxpayers and reduce their economic dependence presented government expenditures as a handout, rather than collective treaty rights gained in exchange for millions of acres in Indian territory. At the time, the question of Native American citizenship remained a current and contested issue. Indians in New Mexico had only gained voting right a few years prior, in 1948, after suing the state.5 The New Mexico constitution previously excluded Indians who did not pay property

4 As Iverson (2002:198) points out, “Many Indians were not entirely unhappy with the idea of termination” after decades of “federal mismanagement and control.” However, the removal of federal protection paved the way for greater intervention by local, state, and private interests. Indeed, local boosters in the Southwest played a major role in institutionalizing termination policy as part of their efforts to gain control of Indian resources (Needham 2014). 5 The 1924 Indian Citizenship Act granted Native Americans US citizenship, but several states, including New Mexico and Arizona, continued to disenfranchise American Indians through the 1940s. 33

taxes—Native Americans living on reservations—from voting. Frequent reference to Navajo ability to contribute taxes and reduce welfare spending through the irrigation project shows the continued suspicion of Navajo fitness for American citizenship. Notably, the legal disenfranchisement and continued suspicion applied primarily to Indians with strong ties to the tribe, those residing on reservations. Greater integration into white society, including making Indians “self-sufficient” and terminating of tribe’s “special” status as sovereign nations, promised to ease these settler concerns. As such, proponents constructed a model of responsible American citizenship incompatible with tribal membership and sovereignty.

Environmental paternalism: Questioning Indian natural resource management The final settler colonial racial project justified the US government’s paternalistic policies by casting doubt on the ability of the Navajo Nation to responsibly cultivate and care for the land. NIIP legislative debates and planning process revealed settler skepticism towards Indian ability to responsibly manage natural resources in two primary ways: (1) questioning the ability of the Navajo to farm, and (2) suggesting that Navajo society exceeded the carrying capacity of the land. These narratives undermined tribal sovereignty by encouraging settler intervention and continued federal control over the development of Navajo water resources. Throughout the legislative process, the Navajos faced persistent assumptions about their inability to productively farm the land and make use of the irrigation project. Navajo Tribal Coun- cil chair Sam Ahkeah addressed these concerns directly in his written statement, affirming that “We Navahos want to farm…Ever since there have been Navahos we have farmed…Where we can get irrigation water we use it now” (US Senate Hearings 1955:128). To counter the suggestion that the Navajo would not make good irrigation farmers, proponents pointed to the relative success of two prior irrigation projects. The Navajo tribe also established and funded a program to train irrigation farmers in preparation for project approval. Paul Jones, chair of the Navajo Tribal Coun- cil, spoke to the program’s success in 1960: We have a 1,200-acre farm…upon which we train 24 Navajo Indians at a time in modern, scientific, irrigated farming…By means of our training farm we are already producing fully qualified farmers…We are ready for the project. (US House Hearings 1960:37) The concerns of settler officials over the Navajo’s ability and willingness to take up western agriculture is understandable given issues of cultural fit, low levels of literacy and education, and lack of experience with irrigation technologies. Yet this skepticism forced the Navajo to constantly

defend their qualifications to receive water resources and presented an additional obstacle not faced by other project recipients. Further, officials’ persistent concern was not matched by the planning and funding needed to address any potential problems (Jacobsen 1989). Politicians and bureaucrats also periodically raised the issue of population growth and carrying capacity of the land in discussions of the “Navajo Problem.” Following catastrophic bliz- zards that hit the Navajo Nation in the winter of 1947-48, the Department of the Interior launched an investigation into the roots of poverty on the reservation and concluded that “chronic poverty resulted from a land base that could support only 35,000 of the area’s 55,000 inhabitants” (Burt 1986:88). This “surplus population” theory of Navajo poverty subsequently informed termination efforts, particularly work relocation programs that moved 30,000 Indians from reservations to cities in the 1950s. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Glenn Emmons repeated the surplus population theory in the NIIP hearings and noted that: We do know that developing all of the resources on most reservations in the country is not going to solve the pressure on the Indian land and that is the reasons we have the voluntary relocation program…and all of these other things. (US House Hearings 1960:50) Representative Wayne Aspinall of Colorado cautioned about the potential for overdevelopment: “I only hope that we do not have so many people and will not have too little land so that we will find our land over farmed and become barren country” (US House Hearings 1955:691). The theory of a surplus Navajo population thus both reinforced termination logic, suggesting the need to disperse and integrate the population, and provided a rational for limiting water resource development. Overgrazing, population growth, climate change, and encroachment by non-Native ranch- ers meant that Navajo pastoralism could no longer be sustainably practiced on a large scale. But defining the problem as a matter of population (people or livestock) exceeding the carrying capacity of the land vastly oversimplified the issue (Weisiger 2011). Further, although government reports and officials raised environmental concerns related to other projects—primarily groundwater depletion, siltation, and water-loving invasive species—overpopulation only entered the conversation for Indian land. Population growth presented a problem for Albuquerque and the Rio Grande Valley only insofar as the areas required additional water resources from the San Juan Basin. Narratives of Indigenous environmental irresponsibility recalled earlier racist colonial tropes legitimizing the dispossession of Native land. As political philosopher John Locke (1988 [1689]) famously articulated, the failure of the original occupants to cultivate the land permitted

white settlers to appropriate it without consent. In the same way, settler officials could justify their domination over water resource planning because of the Navajo’s perceived inability to properly manage their own land and resources. Among other consequences, this environmental paternalism created significant barriers for project funding and enabled US officials to unilaterally remove municipal and industrial water uses from the project.

Discussion and Conclusion Recent work on the rural dimension of justice highlights the unique grammars and structures of injustice in the countryside (Carolan 2020). Rural areas across the US face serious challenges related to water quality, quantity, and infrastructure (Flint and Krogman 2014). For tribal nations and other rural communities of color, racial subjugation further compounds these problems (Berry 1998). The history of the San Juan River water development in New Mexico illustrates many of these inequities. Although the Winters doctrine establishes Navajo rights to potentially large amounts of the river’s flow, severe deficiencies in water infrastructure have contributed to economic underdevelopment and pervasive water insecurity. By examining how processes of spatial and racial marginalization come together, scholars can better understand the development and persistence of these rural environmental injustices. This study contributes to the emerging research on rural environmental justice by showing how racial projects contribute to rural forms of environmental inequality. Analysis of the water politics that divided the San Juan River between the Navajo Nation and Albuquerque, NM shows how settler colonial racial projects targeted the collective rights of the Navajo in ways that undermined tribal sovereignty. Political support for the NIIP emerged primarily from settlers’ desire to appropriate San Juan water resources for non-Indian use. Despite the Navajo Nation’s legal claims, racialized ideas about tribal nationhood meant that their water rights carried little weight compared to other state actors. Throughout the approval process, settler officials downplayed or denied the Navajo’s legal right to the water, framing federal assistance instead as a moral obligation. The water would help solve the “Navajo problem” by transforming the Navajo into “good citizens” and incorporating them into white society. Settler officials drew on these assimilationist ideas to advance termination policy, seeking to end federal funding and protections to tribes. The state further justified environmental paternalism by questioning the ability of the Navajo Nation to responsibly manage their land and natural resources. Ultimately, moral claims would prove a precarious basis for tribal water rights and failed to carry authority when it 36

came to appropriations or procuring the organizational resources needed to successfully carry out the project (Jacobsen 1989). As such, setters’ diminishment of Navajo political sovereignty hindered the tribe’s ability to meaningfully participate in western water development and further subordinated Indigenous rights to colonial authority. This study makes several contributions to the environmental justice literature. First, analysis of the NIIP illustrates the utility of theories of race for understanding processes of rural environmental inequality formation. Past research identifies how cultural ideas and economic structures in rural places contribute to environmental injustices but has yet to thoroughly examine how rurality intersects with other forms of social inequality. The concept of racial projects usefully links cultural ideas with material outcomes (Omi and Winant 2015), showing how racial discourse provided the “ideological scaffolding” to legitimate inequality (Roscigno et al. 2015). Specifically, my analysis shows how the discursive practices of settler officials facilitated and justified the uneven distribution of environmental resources along racial lines. Second, this study draws attention to the unique aspects of anti-Indian racism within cases of Indigenous environmental injustice. Analyzing race through settler colonial theory highlights how anti-Indian racism operates to deny the collective political rights of Indigenous people and facilitate white appropriation of Native resources. In this case study, this meant that racism operated through greater inclusion rather than exclusion from the citizenship category. These unique dynamics could easily be overlooked without a theoretical framework attentive to the socio-historical circumstances underlying distinct racial formations. Finally, this study contributes to recent research casting doubt on the ability of the state to meaningfully address environmental injustices and reinforces the understanding of environmental racism as a form of state-sanctioned violence (Pulido, Kohl and Cotton 2016). As demonstrated by the NIIP, even when acting with the express intent of correcting past abuses, the state often reinscribes racial and colonial forms of domination. This underscores the importance of Indigenous models of environmental justice that recognize the need for decolonization, rather than liberal inclusion (Cantzler and Huynh 2016). Future environmental justice work can build on these findings through comparative studies that examine how specific racisms affect environmental inequality formation for different racialized groups. By highlighting both the distinct dynamics and common structural and cultural factors underlying various forms of racism, this work can provide a strong foundation for understanding

environmental inequality across diverse settings. Additionally, greater research is needed to understand the production and experience of environmental inequality in other rural communities of color and how it may differ from urbanized settings, as well as from white rural populations.

CHAPTER 3. WATER JUSTICE AND THE SYMBOLIC MOBILIZATION OF RURALITY IN NATURAL RESOURCE CONFLICTS

Abstract Studies on water justice show that rural residents in the US are disproportionately burdened with insecure and unsafe water supplies, a problem particularly severe for Native nations and communities of color. However, studies rarely link these rural problems to urban dominance. This study advances research on rural water injustice by examining the process through which urban users claim control over water resources. Relational theories of inequality show how the construction and mobilization of social categories allows actors to claim valued resources, yet these insights that have yet to be widely incorporated within environmental justice research. Through a historical study of water development in the Southwest, this study asks how the construction of socio-spatial boundaries during natural resource conflicts contributes to urban-rural environmental inequalities. Congress authorized the controversial San Juan-Chama Project (SJCP) in 1962 as part of a federal project allocating the waters of the San Juan River between urban and rural uses in New Mexico. The SJCP would divert water from the San Juan River into the adjacent Rio Grande River Basin for urban use in central New Mexico. Analysis of archival material, government documents, and secondary accounts shows that, although the SJCP would primarily benefit urban places, proponents relied heavily on the project’s rural benefits for justification, symbolically mobilizing rurality in a way that supported urban growth and development. Rural arguments in support of the SJCP fell under three key themes: agriculture and rural economic development, national defense, and recreation and tourism. These findings have important implications for understanding spatialized forms of environmental inequality.

Introduction Research on water justice finds that rural communities in the US face significant barriers to accessing safe and reliable water supplies, as well as participating as equals within water governance. These “rural problems” frequently implicate urban powerful urban interests, yet environmental justice scholars having only recently begun examining the relationship between urban and rural environmental conditions. This study contributes to the emerging body of US-based water justice literature by showing how social actors construct and mobilize socio-spatial boundaries within natural resource conflicts. Symbolic boundaries play a crucial role in the reproduction of inequality

by enabling social actors to claim valued resources from categorically distinct “others.” Using the case of the San-Juan Chama Project (SJCP), a federal water project built to divert water from the rural San Juan River Basin into central New Mexico for urban use, this study investigates how official actors construct and mobilize spatial categories to claim control over water resources. The San Juan River cuts across the northwest corner of New Mexico before entering Utah where it eventually empties into the Colorado River. This rural watershed contains few major settlements but became a significant resource for urbanization in the post-World War II period. The major cities in New Mexico—Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Las Cruces—developed within the Rio Grande Valley, yet by 1939 the waters of the Rio Grande River had been fully appropriated. A combination of drought and population growth led government officials to look north to secure additional water supplies for the Rio Grande Valley. The San Juan River, officials and residents asserted, was truly “New Mexico’s last water hole.” The controversial SJCP would carry San Juan River water out of its natural basin to the major population centers in central New Mexico. In this study, I examine the processes through which urban interests claimed control of rural water resources. Specifically, I ask how urban and rural water users mobilize symbolic spatial boundaries and how these meanings challenge or reinforce place stratification. This article takes a historical case study approach to analyze “the San Juan problem” in New Mexico. Data comes from both primary and secondary historical sources, including archival material, government documents, transcripts of legislative proceedings. Data was coded for themes related to urban and rural water uses, project justifications, and oppositional arguments. Findings show that, although the SJCP would primarily benefit urban users in Albuquerque, proponents relied heavily on rural uses to justify the project. Specifically, they argued that the project was needed to support agriculture, the national defense industry, and recreational opportunities. These findings who how official actors mobilized symbolic boundaries in their effort to appropriate rural resources, providing insights into the mechanisms underlying rural water injustices.

Water justice across the rural-urban interface Water injustice in the US has gained increased attention in recent years (Balazs et al. 2012; Liévanos 2017; Switzer and Teodoro 2018), particularly since the water crisis in Flint, Michigan (Pulido 2016a; Ranganathan 2016). The concept of water justice expands on previous environmental justice research and refers to equal access to safe and affordable water, meaningful inclusion in water governance, and recognition of culturally appropriate uses and management of water 40

resources (Zwarteveen and Boelens 2014). Although often considered a “third world” problem, over 2 million Americans live without access to safe drinking water or sanitation (Dig Deep and US Water Alliance 2019). US-based water justice studies show racial and class disparities in access to safe drinking water, with water systems serving low-income populations and communities of color more likely violate safe drinking water standards (Balazs et al. 2012; Switzer and Teodoro 2018). Problems with insecure and unsafe water also disproportionately affect rural areas (Allaire, Wu and Lall 2018; Flint and Krogman 2014). Rural America faces multiple forms of water injustice. Economic underdevelopment and disinvestment have starved rural communities of the funding needed to build and maintain water infrastructure (Fedinick, Taylor and Roberts 2019). Rural landscapes can further complicate water delivery. Even in areas with plentiful supplies, geography and physical distance can make infrastructure projects prohibitively expensive (Flint and Krogman 2014). As a result, rural communities often lack adequate water and sanitation infrastructure, leading to frequent water safety violations and other threats to public health (Allaire, Wu and Lall 2018; Flowers 2020). In the west, declining groundwater levels also threaten domestic water supplies, particularly for rural residents reliant on private wells (Perrone and Jasechko 2017). Water privatization and commodification has further depleted groundwater and lowered surface water levels, causing significant damage to local ecosystems (Glennon 2002; Jaffee and Newman 2013). Observers often frame these issues as “rural problems,” yet rural water access is tightly linked to cities and processes of urbanization (Ranganathan and Balazs 2015; Seamster and Purifoy 2020). Recognizing the relationship between rural and urban environmental problems, environmental justice scholars have recently begun to interrogate the spatial interdependencies underlying rural environmental injustices (Mckinney 2016; Pellow 2016a; Sharma-Wallace 2016). Water conflicts frequently pit urban against rural interests, both because most urban water originates in rural places and because the agricultural sector consumes large amounts of water, making it a prime target for urban users seeking new water sources (Garrick et al. 2019; Howe, Lazo and Weber 1990; Walton 1992). In the western US, most early water conflicts occurred between agricultural interests as farming or ranching operations sought to expand (Greider and Little 1988). This changed during the post-WWII population boom when cities began to demand a growing share of western water (Wilkinson 1993). Conflicts between urban and rural water users have only intensified in recent years, with both rural communities and cities struggling to meet water

demands with shrinking and uncertain supplies (Baker 2016; Brean 2017; Cortese 2003). Yet as many scholars have pointed out, the political-economic dominance of cities frequently marginal- izes rural interests while concentrating social and ecological benefits in urban place (Ashwood and MacTavish 2016; Carolan 2020; Flint and Krogman 2014; Sanderson and Frey 2014). The resulting place stratification—or inequality between territorial units (Lobao 2004)—includes a significant environmental dimension. The construction and maintenance of social categories forms the basis of inequality (Massey 2007; Schwalbe et al. 2000; Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt 2019). Social actors create distinctions to sort and categorize others. These categorical distinctions enable dominant groups to claim valued resources and exploit individuals in other categories. Scholars have widely applied this “relational” model of inequality to understand the creation and maintenance of inequality across class, racial and ethnic, and gender differences. Surprisingly, environmental justice research has yet to widely incorporate insights from relational theories of inequality to explain environmental disparities or the reproduction of environmental inequalities. To better understand the production of rural water injustice, this study examines the construction and use of urban-rural boundaries within a water conflict. Conceptualizing the rural-urban interface as a symbolic boundary draws attention to how spatial categories help perpetuate spatialized forms of inequality (Lichter and Ziliak 2017). In their review of the social science literature on boundaries, Lamont and Molnár (2002) differentiate between symbolic and social boundaries. Symbolic boundaries provide “conceptual distinctions” to categorize people, objects, time, or space. Social actors use these classifications as tools within struggles to define reality and claim resources. When symbolic boundaries become widely accepted, they can harden into social boundaries that “manifest in unequal access to and unequal distribution of resources” (Lamont and Molnár 2002:168). Boundary definitions imply social hierarchies that allow actors to divide the world into “us” and “them” in ways that reinforce or challenge existing power arrangements. However, symbolic and social boundaries are not immutable, but exist on a continuum of malleability and permeability (Alba 2005; Fox and Guglielmo 2012). Although some scholars question the relevance of the “rural” category as spatial boundaries increasingly blur in a globalized society (Bell 2007; Friedland 1982), strong cultural ideas about rurality persist in ways that shape social and ecological landscapes (Garner 2017; Partridge 2016).

Rural-urban boundary definitions can reinforce social, political, and economic hierarchies, contributing to place stratification. Three common conceptions of rural America illustrate construc- tions of urban and rural boundaries. First, rural America is, paradoxically, associated with both cultural virtue and deviance. One of the most common and enduring rural imaginaries paints the countryside as a repository of cultural values, including hard work, devotion to family and community, religiosity, and patriotism (Bridger 1996; Willits, Bealer and Timbers 1990). The idea that “real Americans” live in small towns explicitly contrasts the rural lifestyle with that of city-dwellers, thought to widely embrace secular values, hedonism, and vice. Yet rural imaginaries also include narratives of rural America as culturally deviant and backwards (Isenberg 2017; Wray 2006). Negative stereotypes cast rural people as uncivilized, uneducated, and unintelligent. Cities, by comparison, exemplify sophistication, elegance, and affluence. Notably, both positive and negative images of rural America offer cultural justifications for rural poverty. Positive stereotypes suggest a willing embrace of simplicity, thrift, and subsistence practices that require only modest economic resources, whereas negative stereotypes resonate with “culture of poverty” arguments that naturalize economic inequality and pathologize rural culture (see Byrd 2019). Second, the countryside symbolizes urban America’s storehouse of natural resources, including crops, water, minerals, metals, and fossil fuels. Most natural resources extracted in rural places are intended for urban consumption, providing the food, fuel, and fiber to sustain and grow urban society. Urban dependency on rural resources has created spatially unequal relations, where urban interests dominate rural space and benefit disproportionately from rural resource extraction (Austin and Clark 2012; Sanderson and Frey 2014). External control and economic dominance have long characterized rural spaces in both popular and academic thought (Carolan 2020; DeVoto 1934; Lovejoy and Krannich 1982). In addition to economic hegemony, natural resource industries and occupations also inform rural identities and values (Bell and York 2010; Little 2002). Despite declining employment within many natural resource industries, including agriculture and coal, many rural communities and people remain strongly attached to economic identities associated with extractive industries. Likewise, popular representations frequently make rural life synony- mous with farm life in ways that misrepresent the experience of the (non-farm) rural majority. Third, the countryside has long represented a recreation destination and “escape” for city- dwellers, particularly the urban elite (Taylor 2016). Since the postwar period, rural places with desirable environmental “goods”—including mountains, beaches, and rivers—have increasingly

become “sites of consumption” for people with strong urban ties (Krannich and Petrzelka 2003). Natural amenities can offer rural communities an appealing development strategy, but one that comes at the cost of catering to urban desires and expectations. In-migration driven by amenity- based tourism and recreation, for example, can result in the displacement of community traditions with packaged cultural experiences oriented towards outsiders (Canan and Hennessy 1989; Woods 2019). Strong place attachment among both residents and visitors can also create conflict between “newcomers” and longtime residents with divergent values and interests. Through these conflicts, urban people and ideas can transform rural landscapes and communities. Despite classifications that often fail to either align with resident understanding of place or capture underlying social structures (Hoggart 1990), official definitions of “rural” remain consequential for policy decisions and resource allocation. Government agencies rely on various meas- urements to divide the country into rural and urban (or “non-metropolitan” and “metropolitan”). The chosen measurement can significantly impact programs and policies available to rural communities, as well as bureaucratic understanding of place (Isserman 2005). Yet the more informal and symbolic meanings within policy and political processes also matter. Van Wagner (2016), for example, shows how Canadian law constructs rurality in a way that privileges resource extraction and the preservation of open space. Other research has shown how cultural categories and elite perception of deservingness shapes policy outcomes (Skrentny 2006; Steensland 2006). This suggests the need for a greater understanding of how political actors construct and use spatial boundaries within transboundary conflicts. Guided by relational theories of inequality, this article seeks to understand how urban actors construct and use rural categories within natural resource conflicts. Previous research shows that cultural meanings frequently cast rural places as appropriate sites for environmentally destructive activities but has yet to investigate how social actors actively construct and use these meanings within environmental conflicts. Water governance and infrastructure, systems that materially connect urban and rural places and frequently lead to claims of rural injustice, presents a compelling and important arena to study these issues.

Data and Methods This research takes a historical case study approach (Amenta 2009) to examine how political actors constructed symbolic boundaries around urban and rural categories during the midcentury negotiations to divide the waters of the San Juan River in New Mexico. I focus on the development of 44

the San Juan-Chama Project (SJCP), a transmountain diversion that transferred water from the rural San Juan Basin into the Rio Grande Basin for urban use in Albuquerque. Data sources include archival material, government publications, and secondary historical sources related to the SJCP and water development in New Mexico. Archival material was collected from the National Ar- chives and Records Administration in Denver, Colorado and the New Mexico State Records Cen- ter and Archives in Santa Fe. The National Archives at Denver houses records of the US Bureau of Reclamation (BOR), including annual project histories of the SJCP and NIIP. The New Mexico State Records Center and Archives contains records for the office of the New Mexico State Engi- neer, the institution responsible for administering water resources in the state. Records on the San Juan Basin water development date back to the 1920s and includes reports, communications between state and tribal governments, and resident and organizational letters to state politicians. Government documents collected from library and online sources focused on the legislative history of the water projects. Publications include reports from numerous federal agencies that assessed project cost, feasibility, and environmental impacts. Legislative hearings from the House and Senate subcommittees on Irrigation and Reclamation were also analyzed. Annual hearings, first on the Colorado Rivers Storage Project and later specifically for the SJCP and NIIP, continued for nearly a decade, between 1953 and 1962. Finally, secondary historical sources provide context on federal reclamation, water development in New Mexico, and urbanization in Albuquerque. This paper focuses primarily on the development of the SJCP leading up to its authorization in 1962. Data analysis began with qualitative immersion to establish a timeline of events and refine theoretical categories. Extensive excerpts were drawn from the data for analysis using NVivo 12. The first round of coding focused on broad themes, including the meaning and use of spatial categories, reasons for project support or opposition, and water right claims. Based on emergent themes, subsequent rounds of focused coding further developed these categories and included codes for rural poverty, agriculture, natural resource development, national defense, population growth, and industrialization.

The San-Juan Chama Project and Urbanization in the Rio Grande Valley The San Juan River snakes through the desert of the Intermountain West, spanning the Four Cor- ners region where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah meet. After drawing its headwaters from snowmelt in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, the River flows south into New Mexico where it travels for over one hundred miles before veering back north into Utah. In Utah, the San 45

Juan eventually empties into the Colorado River, making it part of one of the most contested, altered, and studied waterways in the United States. Human settlement in the San Juan area dates back at least twelve thousand years and multiple Native nations—including the Navajo, Ute Moun- tain Ute, Southern Ute, and Jicarilla Apache—continue to call the region home (Aton and McPherson 2000). Euro-American settlers only began moving into the San Juan area in the early twentieth century, clustering primarily around mining opportunities in towns like Farmington, NM and Durango, CO (Glaser 1998b). Despite a population boom during the postwar period, the region remains sparsely populated and predominantly Indian territory today. The Rio Grande Valley to the southeast of the San Juan Basin represents the oldest continuously occupied area in the US and site of the first Spanish settlement. For at least 500 years prior to Spanish arrival, Indigenous groups practiced water control, including sophisticated irrigation systems along the upper Rio Grande Valley to cultivate maize, squash, beans, and cotton (Meyer 1996). When colonization began around 1598, Indigenous labor (often forced) helped build the water systems of the new Spanish communities. Descendants of these Indigenous groups, the 19 Pueblo tribes of New Mexico, continue to inhabit towns along the Rio Grande and its tributary the Rio Chama. Following US annexation of the southwest from Mexico in 1848, Anglo Americans and European immigrants began moving into the region in large numbers, particularly to Albu- querque. Founded by Spanish settlers in 1706 on the banks of the Rio Grande River, Albuquerque grew into the territory’s industrial center (Gonzales 2019). The city was incorporated in 1891 following the influx of white settlers. During the Second World War, the population of New Mexico grew rapidly and became increasingly urban. At the close of the war, one third of the state’s population lived in urban areas and Albuquerque had become one of the fastest growing cities in the nation. The period also coin- cided with major developments in western reclamation. The Rio Grande River Compact, signed in 1938, divided the waters of the Rio Grande River between Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas. Ten years later, the Upper Colorado River Basin Compact was signed, granting New Mexico 11.25 percent of the Upper Basin’s share of the Colorado River—about 800,000 acre-feet annually according to reclamation studies. Population growth and industrialization, combined with depression era drought, placed pressure on Albuquerque to secure additional water supplies to support its growth. Because the Rio Grande had already been fully appropriated, the city looked north to the

San Juan River, New Mexico’s only means of accessing its portion of the Colorado River. How- ever, the Navajo Nation, the largest Indigenous group in the San Juan Basin, also laid claim to this water.

Figure 3.1. Area map of the San Juan-Chama Project. Source: US BOR 2019.

A proposed diversion to transfer water from the San Juan River into the Rio Grande Basin first emerged in a 1933 survey of the Rio Grande River in preparation for the Rio Grande Compact (Viessman 1975). In response, the Navajo Tribal Council passed a resolution objecting “to any such diversion which would impair the rights of the Navajo Indians to water from the San Juan River” (Resolution, July 12, 1934; cited in Jacobsen 1989:110). However, recognizing that they would be unable to put their water rights to use without federal assistance, the Navajo eventually entered into negotiations with New Mexico to divide the water supply between an Indian irrigation project and transbasin diversion for Albuquerque (see Bray, forthcoming). Negotiations proceeded alongside planning studies throughout the 1940s and 1950s. In 1953, both the SJCP and NIIP became part of discussions for the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP), a large-scale water development plan for the Upper Basin states. Congress first authorized the CRSP in 1956 but

excluded both of New Mexico’s projects. Legislation authorizing the SJCP and NIIP finally passed in 1962. According to the authorizing legislation, Central New Mexico would receive 110,000 acre-feet of water annually, diverted through tunnels beneath the continental divide to the Chama River and eventually the Rio Grande (see Figure 3.1). In return, the federal government would build the NIIP to irrigate 110,630 acres on the Navajo reservation with 508,000 acre-feet of water. Projects that transfer water out of its natural basin historically invite conflict between in- basin and out-of-basin interests and the SJCP proved no exception. The heated debates across the nearly ten years that Congress was considering the SJCP revealed conflicting interests across the state and across the urban-rural continuum.

Selling the San Juan-Chama Diversion: Rural Justifications for Urban Water During New Mexico’s decades-long fight to secure water from the San Juan River, officials made clear that the SJCP would primarily benefit urban users by bringing domestic and industrial water to Albuquerque. Prior to approval, the city had already applied for nearly 50 percent of the imported water. Discussions about urban need largely revolved around population growth, which provided one of the most common justifications for the region’s need for the additional water supply. A representative from the Middle Rio Grande Flood Control Association testified to the “critical” situation: Stated in round arithmetical terms, the [Rio Grande] valley possesses more than one half of the State’s population and less than one-third of its known supply of available water. Population is increasing rapidly, municipal and industrial requirements for water are sky- rocketing, and the known supplies that are available for beneficial use are fully appropriated. In fact, they are over-appropriated. (US Senate Hearings 1960:2088) Given the large population in the Rio Grande Valley, the SJCP would “result in the greatest benefit for the greatest number of the State’s citizens” (US BOR 1960:63). Surprisingly, continued economic prosperity and growth, while mentioned periodically and underlying many arguments for the water, occupied little time or explicit discussion during the legislative proceedings. Despite the urban focus of the SJCP, officials and other proponents relied heavily on rural needs and benefits to justify the project. The rural uses fell under three primary categories: (1) supplemental agricultural water, (2) national defense and military installations, and (3) recreation and tourism. Through these justifications, officials mobilized ideas about rurality in their effort to appropriate the state’s water supplies for urban-centered purposes.

Water for farms: Agriculture and rural development New Mexico officials and other proponents continuously touted the agricultural benefits of the SJCP, an urban project that would not irrigate any new agricultural lands. Proposals to expand irrigated land in the Rio Grande Basin disappeared from SJCP plans early in the process out of fear that they would reduce support for entire project. A report from the State Engineer of New Mexico emphasized that “The real [urban] needs of the area must be protected and the justification of the project should not be endangered by marginal [agricultural] needs and potential uses which would tend to throw doubt on the whole project” (State Engineer of New Mexico 1953:34-35). Bill proponents would continue to repeat this point throughout project negotiations. In the 1954 House hearings New Mexico Senator Clinton Anderson reiterated that agriculture was not the focus of the water project: “We need [the water] for industrial and domestic purposes…We are not trying to use this water for the development of additional agricultural lands” (US House Hearings 1954:253). Nonetheless, agricultural uses figured prominently within project discussions and provided the most common rural justification for the San Juan diversion. Although the SJCP would not expand agricultural land, proponents argued that it would benefit existing agriculture by (1) replacing groundwater depletions in the Albuquerque area, (2) providing supplemental irrigation water below the Elephant Butte reservoir, and (3) supporting economically distressed rural areas reliant on subsistence agriculture. First, state and city officials argued that bringing San Juan water into the Rio Grande Valley would increase the amount of Rio Grande water available for agriculture in the region’s Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District. At the time, the city of Albuquerque relied on groundwater supplies as its primary source of domestic water. Despite evidence that the Rio Grande aquifer and surface water were hydrologically connected, the Rio Grande Compact made no mention of groundwater. As a city commissioner explained, The present source of our water supply is from wells located in the saturated valley fill. This source is satisfactory at present; however, we are…aware that the amount of ground water available for recharge is unknown, and the effect of the pumping on the flow of the Rio Grande has not been determined. (US House Hearings 1954:528) In 1951, Texas sued New Mexico for failing to meet its water delivery obligations under the Rio Grande Compact. The New Mexico State Engineer, in recognition that groundwater pumping had reduced surface flows, began requiring that all new groundwater permits be accompanied by the equivalent surface water rights (Daves 1995; De Stefano et al. 2018). The city of Albuquerque

responded to this change in water management with a lawsuit laying claim to the “absolute and unconditional right to divert and use so much of the surface and underground waters of the Rio Grande as is necessary for its use and that of its inhabitants” (City of Albuquerque v. Reynolds, 1962).6 The lawsuit ultimately failed, and the New Mexico Supreme Court ruled that the city’s continued groundwater withdrawals infringed on the water rights of other users. Despite Albuquerque’s attempt to assert greater control over the state’s water supplies, city and state officials argued that the SJCP would benefit agriculture in the Rio Grande Valley. Offi- cials from Albuquerque’s Bernalillo County described how “municipalities have been withdraw- ing ground water which must be replaced by surface flows set aside for irrigation” (US House Hearings 1954:539). Officials therefore urged that Congress pass the SJCP to protect the agricultural sector. Representative Dennis Chavez of New Mexico, for example, asserted that “The city of Albuquerque must do everything possible to maintain the stability of the agricultural development in the area, since it is one of the principal trade centers in the State” (US Senate Hearings 1958:25). Likewise, a [1955] report from the BOR echoed that the project was needed to “minimize future curtailment of irrigation and agricultural production in the area due to withdrawals of ground waters for municipal and industrial supplies” (US BOR 1960:61). Second, SJCP proponents argued that the project would benefit downstream agricultural interests. Project plans originally included supplementary irrigation supplies for the Elephant Butte Irrigation District, located in southern New Mexico in the lower Rio Grande.7 Yet despite claims that the water would be welcomed by farmers, the irrigation district rejected the water and opposed the project entirely, arguing that upstream users would control and consume the imported water to the detriment of downstream farmers. Downstream agricultural interests raised concerns about the transbasin diversion because of New Mexico’s poor track record meeting its commitments under the Rio Grande Compacts. Another complicated project in the basin, they feared, would exacerbate

6 In City of Albuquerque v. Reynolds (1962), the city claimed it had inherited so-called “Pueblo rights”—a legacy of Spanish Colonial law giving cities paramount and unlimited water rights. This argument appears particularly disingenuous because the original Spanish settlement, known as “Old Town,” remained a separate community until Albuquerque annexed it in 1949. 7 The 1939 Rio Grande Compact dictates that New Mexico deliver water to Texas above the Ele- phant Butte Reservoir in New Mexico, about 100 miles north of the border. As a result, Texas represents southern New Mexico within Rio Grande Compact proceedings. 50

existing water governance problems. Texas took a similar stance. The Rio Grande Compact Com- missioner for Texas objected that the SJCP would give New Mexico “absolute control of the principal tributary of the Rio Grande, which in turn supplies all of the water for the Rio Grande Federal reclamation” (US House Hearings 1954:676). The third way that the SJCP would benefit agricultural interests, according to proponents, was by alleviating rural poverty within Rio Grande tributary units, including Pueblo Indian communities. Irrigation along the tributaries—the Cerro, Taos, Llano, and Pojoaque units—served primarily small subsistence farms. A 1955 BOR report described the communities: The residents of these [rural communities] are largely descendants of the original Spanish settlers, with deep-seated ties to their homesites and traditions of family subdivision of ownerships. The economy of these rural areas is based on irrigated agriculture... Over the many years, the erratic water supply, subdivision of ownerships among heirs, deterioration of irrigation works, and pressure of the ever-increasing population, all have combined to make generally difficult the accomplishment in these areas of even a subsistence living from agriculture. (US BOR 1960:59) Pueblo Indians in the Rio Grande Valley faced similar challenges: “Holdings are small, resources are meager and, like their non-Indian neighbors, the Indians have extended their irrigation to the last acre of land possible to serve with the limited water supplies” (US BOR 1960:62). Rural poverty and economic development became a central focus during many congressional discussions. Supplemental water for irrigation would help address rural poverty within these “primitive area[s]” (US House Hearings 1960:38). Multiple project proponents, primarily tributary farmers, described how they had been left behind and made into second-class citizens. In a statement for Congress, one farmer noted that “the national per capita farm income is around $4,100, while New Mexico’s is $500—I ask you gentlemen, is this 1960 America?” (US House Hearings 1960:149). Another farmer pleaded, The rural population, Indian, Spanish American, and Anglo, are all citizens of the Unites States, and deserve the right to the American way of life. These people should not be rele- gated to that of second-class citizen… Keep us off the relief rolls. Help us hold our heads up and be first-class citizens. We want to help ourselves. Please give us a chance. (US Senate Hearings 1958:126) As such, the SJCP promised to raise the standard of living for these farming communities, making them on par with “other Americans.” During congressional hearings, most officials accepted the poor tributary farmers as de- serving recipients of water and rarely objected to the use of SJCP for supplementary irrigation

supplies. One representative from California, however, cast doubt on New Mexico’s narrative that the SJCP would ultimately benefit agricultural interests: [T]he senior Senator from New Mexico… [said that] the water will be almost entirely used as municipal water. So whatever arguments you have made with respect to the assistance to the agricultural economy here are to be disregarded because this water is going to be used for municipal purposes. (US House Hearings 1961:23-24) In response, the New Mexico governor acknowledged that “there is a possibility that everything on the Rio Grande River could be used for municipal or industrial uses.” Because state water laws allowed rights to be retired, traded, and sold, cities and private entities could potentially gain control over the entirety of the imported San Juan water. The large emphasis on agriculture stemmed from multiple trends within western reclamation. During this time, the Bureau of Reclamation was transitioning from its traditional focus on irrigation to more urban-centered projects. Discomfort and resistance to this organizational “mission creep” manifested in debates about the purpose of the BOR, as well as the continued reliance on justifications that resonated with the bureaus original organizational purpose, to “put water on land.” In the words of the manager of the Elephant Butte irrigation district, “I have always understood that the original purpose of the reclamation program was to bring additional land under cul- tivation and irrigation…[The San Juan-Chama Project] would put the Federal Government in the municipal water supply and hydroelectric power business” (US House Hearings 1954:665). A representative from New York surmised, “if we stretch that reclamation [tent] too much, [I wonder] if it might not snap on us one day” (US House Hearings 1961:121). Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy responded that although some participating projects in the CRSP may serve non- agricultural purposes, when taken together the “predominance of the project will be irrigation” (122). As such, emphasizing the agricultural aspect of the project helped to align the SJCP with the organizational mission of the BOR, while simultaneously bringing a large portion of the state’s water supply under urban control.

Water for freedom: National defense and security The second argument concerning rural space centered on national defense needs. Project proponents argued that the imported San Juan water would meet national defense needs by (1) supporting military facilities, (2) developing natural resources needed in the defense industry, and (3) reducing the country’s vulnerability to nuclear attacks. During the World War II period, the US built multiple “extremely important” defense facilities within the Rio Grande Valley, including nuclear

laboratories at Los Alamos and Sandia, the White Sands missile range, and Kirtland and Holloman Air Force bases. These defense facilities required substantial amounts of water. As such, proponents contended that passing the SJCP represented a compelling national interest. According to representative Dempsey of New Mexico, “It is manifestly the obligation of the Congress to enact legislation which will help to insure important national-defense installations in New Mexico” (US Senate Hearings 1955:539). The chairman of New Mexico’s Interstate Streams Commission echoed these sentiments, noting that “The American people have billions invested in these atomic- energy installations… [that] are now opening a new era of economic progress and development for our Nation. We cannot afford to impair in any way that progress…” (US Senate Hearings 1958:89). Project proponents frequently pointed to Sandia and Kirtland, located on the edge of Albu- querque, to bolster the city’s claim to water. These facilities employed thousands of residents and contributed to the city’s population growth. The city manager of Albuquerque, for example, stressed the number of government employees in the city and noted that the “National Government alone contributed directly and indirectly to 60 percent of basic employment” in the Albuquerque metropolitan area (US Senate Hearings 1958:108). Other military installations throughout the Rio Grande Valley also provided proponents with a strong justification for the state’s water needs. In particular, nuclear research and development made the region important to national security efforts during the postwar period. During the 1954 hearings, Senator Clinton Anderson of New Mexico described the work conducted at the Los Alamos National Laboratories: [N]ear Santa Fe…is the great scientific laboratory of Los Alamos, which certainly was one of the germinating places if not the actual breeding ground of the atomic bomb. That high mesa …is very vital to the defense of the United States. New weapons are being developed there, new weapons of fantastic striking power, that this country needs if it is to keep abreast…of any nation that may cause it any trouble. (US House Hearings 1954:253) These defense facilities relied on both the space and natural resources of the rural southwest. The development of nuclear weapons vividly illustrates the value of rural space for the country’s midcentury defense industry. In the early 1940s, military planners sought out marginal areas to build and test nuclear weapons. The atomic bomb—created north of Albuquerque at the Los Alamos National Laboratory under the secretive Manhattan Project—was first tested on July 16, 1945 in New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto Desert (see Figure 3.2). This site was selected for its flat and remote landscape, with a sparse population that could be easily evacuated in case of dangerous levels of nuclear fallout (Bainbridge 1975). The success of the Manhattan Project also 53

spurred a uranium boom in the southwest, with the US government as the sole purchaser of the mined uranium ore between 1948 and 1971. Both the nuclear testing and uranium mining would have significant environmental and health consequences for New Mexico’s rural areas and people (Brugge, Benally and Yazzie-Lewis 2007).

Figure 3.2. Trinity test base camp (left) and atomic explosion (right), Alamogordo Bomb- ing Range, New Mexico, 1945. Image credit: US Department of Energy and Los Alamos National Laboratories.

Natural resource development offered proponents a second national security justification for supporting the water project. Most discussion of natural resources focused on passage of the Colorado River Storage Project and Participating Projects collectively. Promotional material described the upper basin as “the Nation’s treasure chest” that needed development to protect national security (see Figure 3.3). Senator Bennett of Utah, for example, testified that a secure water supply was needed for mining and processing metals and minerals: Metals and minerals were in critical short supply in World War II and in the Korean war. Sadly enough, we have learned that we cannot depend on foreign sources for these metals during time of war, and many times not even in peace. It is imperative that we develop these minerals to assure an adequate defensive posture. We must be prepared. (US Senate Hearings 1955:149) In New Mexico specifically, proponents emphasized the need for “water for the development of oil and gas, coal, uranium and the many other minerals and resources…that are of strategic importance to the safety and welfare of the entire country” (US Senate Hearings 1958:2).

Figure 3.3. CRSP Promotional material illustrating the project’s national security benefits. Left: Upper Colorado River Commission (c. 1955), Right: Upper Colorado River Grassroots (1955).

Third, rural space and resources in the upper basin would reduce the country’s vulnerability in case of a nuclear attack along the coasts or other major population centers. This argument, most frequently deployed in support of the larger CRSP, contended that development of the intermountain states was required if the coasts were bombed and people must evacuate inland. Developing inland resources would provide a “second line of defense” and “haven for people and industrial capacity” (US Senate Hearings 1954:160). The Civil Defense Administration also encouraged a more general dispersion of the coastal population to reduce the country’s vulnerability to attack: [S]ome atomic scientists said in 1945, at the time of the construction of the first atomic weapon, that the only hope of survival over the long pull was dispersal…If America is serious about survival in the nuclear age, then America must disperse. We have no other choice. If we are not serious…we can continue to pyramid our industrial facilities and wait to see what the future brings. (US Senate Hearings 1955:287)

Before the upper basin region could receive these populations, for either dispersion or evacuation, greater development was needed, including metals and minerals, agriculture, industry, and trans- portation and communication networks—all of which required water. Reclamation law and the legislative process incentivized officials to underscore the national benefits of water projects to gain support and the requisite votes. National security needs, based primarily on federal defense facilities within the Rio Grande Valley, provided project proponents with an almost indisputable justification based on the “benefit to the nation” amid the geopolitical tensions of the Cold War period. These defense projects, particularly the nuclear weapons development, also transformed “northern New Mexico from a primarily rural, agrarian economy to a military-industrial state” (Masco 2020:36). This transformation from an agrarian to nuclear economy relied on the region’s rural spaces and resources, including water supply, yet disproportionately benefited urban society. Officials’ construction of rural space as a resource for nation security during SJCP negotiations illustrates one mechanism through which the state’s rural resources came increasingly under urban control.

Water for fun: Rural recreation, tourism, and conservation The final rural justifications in support of the SJCP related to recreation and environmental conservation. The recreation potential of the SJCP came primarily from the reservoirs constructed to store imported San Juan water within project areas of Colorado and northern New Mexico. Pro- motional material for the CRSP published by the Upper Colorado River Commission touted the “extensive recreation benefits” of the Navajo Dam and other units of the SJCP: Navajo Dam will turn the muddy, sluggish San Juan River into a clear Reservoir. Trout will flourish where only suckers now abound…Recreational advantages of the smaller units of the project will provide picturesque recreational attractions in high, green valleys and in the mountains of the West. (Upper Colorado River Commission c. 1955:18) A 1954 National Park Service report similarly elaborated at length on the potential of the SJCP to meet the “growing need…for additional [recreation] outlets” (US BOR 1960:149) within Colorado and New Mexico. These opportunities catered primarily to urban visitors from the region’s major metropolitan areas: The region served by the project area extends far beyond local bounds…[and] certainly includes the capital urban area of Santa Fe…and the Albuquerque metropolitan area... Source of visitors to the project area extends generally down the Rio Grande Valley to and including the metropolitan area of El Paso, in Texas. (US BOR 1960:148)

As such, recreation opportunities were viewed as important for meeting the needs of the state’s growing population. Population growth offered a key rationale for the state’s need for increased recreation and tourism opportunities. The same report by the US Fish and Wildlife service noted that the affected project areas in New Mexico and Colorado did not lack recreational opportunities but that “the expanding population of New Mexico appears to be exceeding the capability of its streams and lakes to satisfy the demand of its citizens for fishing opportunities” (US BOR 1960:180). Project proponents also credited the state’s rural amenities for driving urban growth. The office of the state engineer of New Mexico described how the rural southwest offered “freedom” for urban migrants: The phenomenal growth of population in the southwest has been the result of many people’s desire to live away from the densely populated areas of the country. This area provides a freedom of living not experienced other places. It is a national problem to supply the means which our expanding population can utilize for establishing homes and making a livelihood. (State Engineer of New Mexico 1953:39) Officials from the small town of Truth or Consequences explained how they had become a fishing and boating destination because of their proximity to reservoirs in the Rio Grande Valley and now needed water to “maintain minimum levels in the lakes to at least sustain fish life during those periods when the reservoirs are drawn down” (US House Hearings 1954:546). Similarly, although not part of the original legislation, in 1964 San Juan water was allocated to provide a permanent pool for recreation in the Cochiti Reservoir (Kelly et al. 2007). Located within the boundaries of the Pueblo de Cochiti Indian Reservation, this controversial flood-control reservoir was built between 1965 and 1975 against the objections of the Cochiti Pueblo. Developers also envisioned a 40,000-person town on half of the reservation, designed as a “seven-day weekend paradise” and second home market for residents of Santa Fe, Los Alamos, and Albuquerque (Pecos 2007). The Cochiti Pueblo successfully blocked the development of this resort town, but the lake has become a popular recreation destination. Proponents of the SJCP also occasionally noted the need for the project to replace water used for environmental conservation and watershed improvements in the Rio Grande Basin. Fed- eral control over public lands motivated this argument. The 1934 Taylor Grazing Act placed 80 million acres of public land under control of the Deparment of the Interior to regulate grazing and improve rangeland. Twenty years later, soil erosion in the Middle Rio Grande Valley remained a serious problem. A 1950 US Department of Agriculture study found that 75 percent of lands in the

Valley lacked sufficient plant cover to control soil erosion. Project proponents claimed that watershed improvement projects implemented following the Rio Grande Compact to control erosion had reduced available water in the basin: “[I]t is recognized that the effect [of watershed improvement] is appreciable and, unless compensated for by importation of water to the Rio Grande Basin, will be reflected by further water shortages for irrigation and other uses” (US BOR 1960:61-62). Several federal agencies countered efforts to allocate project water to replace streamflow depletions from watershed improvement programs. The Forest Service, for example, noted that: “[because] little is actually known regarding the quantitative effects of past and future watershed improvement programs in the Rio Grande Basin on water economy, …the assignment of a definite amount of water use, and replacement cost, to this item appears unwarranted” (US BOR 1960:125). The Soil Conservation Service echoed these concerns and described the complex ecological processes resulting from erosion control and other conservation measures that complicated efforts to quantify any resulting water supply changes. They also pointed out that “many conservation activities save water” (126), yet these had not been incorporated into the water accounting. Likely as a result, water claims based on environmental improvement projects disappeared in the later years of project negotiations. SJCP proponents presented the natural amenities of New Mexico as a driver on in migration, vital component of rural tourist economies, and playground for urban residents of the southwest. A secondary related theme sought to replace water supplies used for conservation projects, including rangeland improvement and soil erosion. Concern about the impact of the project on non-human animals in the watershed focused on species important for fishing and hunting activities. However, beginning in the early 2000s after lawsuits from environmental groups, the City of Albuquerque agreed to reserve 30,000 acre-feet of imported San Juan water to protect the habitat of the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow—a species threatened because of river modifications, as well as pollution from nearby cities, and military and industrial facilities. As such, proponents use of rural recreation and conservation as a justification for the SJCP focused on “im- proving” rural places primarily for the benefit of urban society.

Discussion and Conclusion The San Juan-Chama transbasin diversion exemplifies many water conflicts within the American west that pit urban against rural interests, a phenomenon only expected to increase as cities con-

tinue to grow and look to reallocate rural water, particularly from agriculture. In Lucero and Tar- lock’s (2003:812) words, “Irrigated agriculture will be the new storage reservoirs of the twenty- first century.” Research on water justice shows that rural areas suffer multiple forms of disadvantage related to water access. The political and economic dominance of cities, combined with water law and development policies, enable urban areas to exert control over regional water supplies. Yet we know little about how the construction of and use of symbolic spatial boundaries contribute to urban-rural inequalities. Relational theories of inequality illustrate the importance of symbolic boundaries in the maintenance and reproduction of inequality. Analysis of the San Juan- Chama Project shows that social actors constructed spatial boundaries around “urban” and “rural” categories in multiple ways that ultimately privileged urban water users and uses. This study builds on water justice research by examining how urban officials claim control over natural resources. To help overcome objections from water users in the San Juan Basin, officials packaged the SJCP with an Indian irrigation project benefiting the Navajo Nation. Yet the SJCP also required support from within the Rio Grande Valley, itself encompassing competing interests and sectors. The project’s overriding objective aimed to secure water to meet the growing demands of New Mexico’s urban populations. Albuquerque would become the single largest ben- eficiary of the SJCP, eventually contracting for almost 7 percent of New Mexico’s share of upper Colorado River Water and 50 percent of SJCP water (Daves 1995). Yet to make their case, proponents continuously emphasized the project’s rural benefits. Rural justifications for urban water fell under three key themes. First, proponents argued that the imported water would help stabilize agriculture in the state by providing supplementary water to subsistence farmers in poor rural communities, as well as more prosperous irrigation districts in the state. Testimony related to rural poverty and subsistence farming frequently sought to establish the rural residents’ deservingness and fitness for citizenship based on their work ethic and multigenerational land tenure. Commercial farming in the Rio Grande Valley, by contrast, was valued more for its contributions to the state’s economy. These agricultural justifications helped to garner wider support within the state, placed the project more squarely within the traditional realm of the BOR, and increased the amount of water transferred into the Rio Grande Basin. Once in the basin, this water became more available for municipal and industrial purposes through buy- ing or leasing water rights or converting agricultural land to residential, industrial, and commercial land uses—what Perramond (2018) terms “water dispossession through urbanization.”

Second, project proponents argued that the water was needed to protect national security because of the multiple defense facilities located within the Rio Grande Valley. The postwar nuclear economy provided the most pressing and prevalent national defense justification. The growing defense industry fueled urbanization in the state, while relying on rural resources—including water—to operate. The nuclear industry also depended on open space and uranium found in the region for weapons testing and development. The ongoing environmental and health legacy of the nuclear industry has severely impacted the rural southwest, while the economic benefits accrue more to urban people and places. Lastly, the project would provide recreational opportunities by creating reservoirs and providing water for fish and wildlife. These opportunities were again linked to the cities in the region, with officials noting the need for greater recreation opportunities to meet the demands of the growing urban population, as well as out of state visitors. This study makes several contributions to literature on water justice and urban-rural inequality. In line with recent calls from other scholars (Pellow 2016a; Seamster and Purifoy 2020), my findings reiterate the need to analytically connect rural environmental injustices to urban actors and practices. Water and water infrastructure materially link spatially, socially, and culturally distant places and people. As Flint and Krogman (2014:201) point out, “Rural interests have often been marginalized when confronted by the circulation of urban-centered capital and manipulation by powerful urban interests, and nowhere is this clearer than in the case of water.” The SJCP case shows that, despite both urban and (mixed) rural support, project proponents were able to symbolically mobilize rural meanings during debates in a way that reinforced urban dominance. Rural scholarship has long drawn attention to the cultural meanings associated with rural landscapes and communities. Many of these rural ideals provide ideological justifications for social and environmental inequalities, such as a dumping site for society’s waste and expendable populations. Yet more positive images can also contribute to rural marginalization. In debates over the SJCP, officials emphasized the natural amenities and contributions to the nation’s national security. In the process, social actors symbolically constructed rurality in a way that transformed rural space into a resource for urban use. By analyzing the construction of symbolic boundaries within natural resource conflicts, this study also draws attention to how these meanings become embedded within policy and infrastructure.

The end of the big dam era of federal reclamation, diversification of actors and interests represented in water management, and continued demographic, economic, and political transfor- mations in rural America have inevitably influenced categorical definitions within water and other natural resource conflicts. Notably, claims to leave water “in place” to fulfill cultural and ecological functions have gained increased legitimacy over recent decades. These meanings do not simply reflect changing cultural values, but are actively constructed, contested, and deployed within struggles over natural resources. Greater attention to these processes will yield valuable insight into how urban-rural environmental inequalities develop and persist.

CHAPTER 4. ORGANIZING ENVIRONMENTAL INEQUALITY: INDIGENOUS MARGINALIZATION IN WESTERN WATER POLITICS

Abstract Emerging research in the critical environmental justice perspective has begun to question legalistic approaches to environmental justice and instead emphasizes the role of state power in perpetuating environmental harm. I contribute to this research by examining how state bureaucratic administration enacts settler colonial projects. In 1962, the Navajo Nation exchanged its priority rights to the San Juan River for water development funding and infrastructure. The Navajos would receive an irrigation project (the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project, NIIP) in return for allowing New Mexico to divert San Juan water for urban use in the Middle Rio Grande Valley (the San Juan-Chama Project, SCJP). Following Congressional authorization, the two water projects diverged sharply in their funding and construction progress. Beyond delaying project completion seemingly indefi- nitely, project officials transformed the NIIP in ways diminished Navajo water rights. Drawing on archival, governmental, and secondary sources, I use the NIIP as a case study to examine state bureaucratic mechanisms of environmental inequality. Findings reveal three bureaucratic mechanisms: (2) organizational segregation, (2) administrative obstruction, and (3) mission shift.

Introduction Environmental justice activism and scholarship in the US have historically centered law and legal reform as a means for achieving greater social and environmental parity. Following the civil rights movement’s success, environmental justice activists pushed for laws guaranteeing equal protection from environmental hazards and equal access to healthy environments. As a result, both the federal government and most states now require public agencies to consider environmental justice concerns. Despite the proliferation of environmental justice laws and policies, environmental burdens and disparities continue to persist in ways that disproportionately harm poor and working-class people, communities of color, and Indigenous groups (Foster 2018; Konisky 2015). In recent years, the failure of legal reform to meaningfully reduce environmental disparities has led scholars to question legalistic approaches and center state power in analyses of environmental injustices (Bacon 2019; Kojola and Pellow 2020; Pellow 2018; Pulido, Kohl and Cotton 2016). Drawing on theories of critical environmental justice and settler colonialism, this article contributes to this

emerging scholarship by examining the state bureaucratic mechanisms that enact settler colonial projects and uphold environmental inequalities. This article analyzes the history of the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project (NIIP) to understand the state bureaucratic mechanisms that reproduce environmental injustices. Congress authorized the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project (NIIP) in 1962, alongside the San Juan-Chama Project (SJCP), a transbasin diversion to support urban growth in the Rio Grande Valley. The NIIP promised to alleviate poverty and economic distress on the Navajo Nation by providing employment opportunities, providing municipal and industrial water supplies, and facilitating broader community development on the reservation. Despite priority claims to the region’s water supply under federal law, the NIIP remains incomplete nearly six decades later, while the SJCP was completed ahead of schedule in 1973. The Navajo Nation continues to struggle with severe water quality and infrastructure problems. Data for this study include archival material, government documents, and secondary historical sources. I take a historical case study approach, with the analysis focusing on the first decades following project authorization, between 1963 to 1985. Qualitative coding focused on themes related to the organizational division of labor, administrative implementation of project legislation, and organizational mission and objectives. Results reveal three bureaucratic mechanisms that pre- vented the irrigation project from achieving its objectives: (1) organizational segregation that weakened bureaucratic capacity to fund and construct the project, (2) administrative obstruction through which bureaucrats continuously modified the project, and (3) mission shift that transformed the NIIP into a profit-oriented project.

Settler State Power and Legal-Rational Domination The critical environmental justice framework, first elaborated by Pellow (2016b, 2018), expands on earlier perspectives through a greater focus on the common structures underlying environmental inequalities, including colonialism and capitalism. Within this perspective, state power represents a core “pillar” underpinning ecological destruction and environmental disparities. As Pellow (2016b:231) explains, “the very purpose of the state is to exert dominance over populations, resources, and territory.” This approach contrasts to earlier perspectives that tended to view state actors as potential allies or neutral arbitrators in environmental conflicts. Yet thirty years after the implementation, environmental justice legal reforms have shown only limited success in improv- ing environmental conditions and reducing class and racial disparities. An increasing number of 63

environmental justice scholars have thus turned their attention to the state’s role in perpetuating environmental injustices (Alvarez 2020; Banerjee 2013; Harrison 2019; Pulido 2016b). Environmental justice scholarship recognizes the complicity of government actors in creating environmental inequality but has historically taken a legalistic and state-centric approach to achieving greater environmental parity. This reformist orientation resulted in part because of the ideological alliance between researchers and the environmental justice movement. With close ties to the civil rights movement, the environmental justice movement has long framed their demands and grievances in legal terms, including calls for equal protection under the law and equal enforcement of environmental regulations (Bullard et al. 2014; McGurty 2009). These efforts have successfully institutionalized environmental justice policies and laws beginning in the 1990s. But despite the proliferation of legal reforms, environmental disparities continue to persist, and in some instances worsened, in ways that disproportionately harm poor and working-class people, communities of color, and Indigenous groups. The legal and civil-rights oriented approach to environmental justice has largely failed to produce the intended results (Foster 2018; Gordon and Harley 2005; Konisky 2015). The shortcomings of President Clinton’s 1994 Executive Order 12898, requiring that all federal agencies consider the environmental justice implications in their actions, for example, have been well doc- umented (Deliotte Consulting 2011; Holifield 2007; Noonan 2015). The order succeeded in creating greater administrative infrastructure for public participation but has failed to effectively integrate environmental justice into decision making (Gauna 2015). Environmental justice through the courts has encountered similarly limited success. Lawsuits under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment must establish discriminatory intent on the part of the government, an almost impossible standard of proof (Cole and Foster 2001). Complaints based on Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Acts, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, have had a success rate of less than 1% (Pulido, Kohl and Cotton 2016). Uneven enforcement of environmental regulation illustrates another area of failure in state-centered environmental justice efforts (Konisky and Reenock 2013, 2018). The failure of legal reform to meaningfully address environmental inequalities has led scholars to question legalistic solutions and center state power in analyses of environmental injustice (Kojola and Pellow 2020; Kurtz 2009; McGregor, Whitaker and Sritharan 2020; Pellow 2018; Pulido, Kohl and Cotton 2016; Purucker 2021). Existing environmental justice research on state

power highlights issues of regulatory capture, cooptation, and institutional logics that produce and maintain environmental inequalities. Faber (2008:9) points to the role of corporate elite who “col- onize and restructure” the state to institute pro-business policy and roll back environmental regulation. When the state does recognize environmental justice, the concept often becomes coopted and institutionalized in a way that does little to address the social hierarchies and domination at the root of the problem (Holifield 2012; Liévanos 2012). Researchers have also gone “inside” government agencies to understand the production of environmental injustices. In her study, Har- rison (2016, 2019) finds that bureaucrats’ conceptions and priorities deviate from movements’ in important ways that shape the implementation of environmental justice policies. Drawing on theories of settler colonialism, I build on this research by investigating the state bureaucratic mechanisms that maintain environmental injustices. Work on settler colonialism further underscores the need to center state power in environmental justice research (McGregor, Whitaker and Sritharan 2020; Saito 2020). As a settler colonial state, the US exerts multiple forms of domination over Native nations and Indigenous people (Bacon and Norton 2019; Steinman 2016). Settler colonialism represents on ongoing structure centered on acquiring and maintaining a land base and access to natural resources (Veracini 2010; Wolfe 1999). The continued existence and territorial claims of Native nations and people shows that the settler colonial aims to eliminate the land’s original occupants through assimilation, genocide, or cultural erasure remain unfinished and ongoing. Sociologists have begun theorizing how settler colonial structures shape racial formations and state domination (Glenn 2015; McKay, Vinyeta and Norgaard 2020; Steinman 2012). As legal scholar Natsu Taylor Saito (2020:154) writes, the US settler state is “responsible for sustaining the settler class’s territorial claims and the relationships of privilege and subordination that ensure its control over political, economic, and social institutions.” As a racial project centered on land, settler colonialism perpetuates ecological violence against Native people and creates deep environmental injustices (Bacon and Norton 2019; Norgaard, Reed and Bacon 2018; Whyte 2018). US government weapons testing and uranium mining, for example, has left a toxic legacy in and around Native communities in the West (Hooks and Smith 2004; Malin 2015). River modification under the direction of federal agencies has also detrimentally affected Indigenous people by flooding their lands and damaging ecosystems in ways that disrupt social and cultural life (Lawson 1994; Mauer 2020). The ongoing Indigenous

resistance to oil and gas pipelines draws further attention to ways that the state aids and enables environmentally damaging activities (Bacon 2020; Emanuel 2017; Estes 2019; Temper 2019), for example by passing laws criminalizing protests targeting pipelines and other “critical infrastructure” and through police violence against water protectors. “Colonial ecological violence” (Bacon 2019) often operates through rational-legal forms of domination (Steinman 2012). Legal authority, based on abstract rational rules and exercised through complex bureaucracies (Weber 1978), organizes environmental practices in modern society. Perhaps more than any other group, legal authority represents the predominant form of state power wielded against Native American tribes. Although often coerced and under the threat of violence, tribes entered treaties with the US government in good faith and on a nation-to-nation basis. Yet the federal government has consistently subordinated Native sovereignty to US law and interpreted treaties in ways that diminish the status and rights of tribes (Bacon and Norton 2019; Wilkins and Lomawaima 2001). The US Supreme Court for example has variously interpreted Indian tribes as foreign nations, conquered peoples, domestic dependents, and wards of the state— designations which all remain “good” legal precedent today. The federal government also legally defines “Indian” identity to control access to resources, including social services, monetary awards, and treaty rights. No single federal definition exists, rather Congress has defined “Indian” on an ad hoc basis, resulting in at least thirty-three different definitions that may or may not align with tribal citizenship requirements (Garroutte 2001). The byzantine terrain of federal Indian law means that the “application of legal authority over American Indian tribes has been strikingly, perhaps uniquely, unconstrained by any identifiable legal principles” (Steinman 2012:1093), leading political scientist and Indian scholar David Wilkins to describe the federal government as a “shape shifter” (Wilkins 2001) that uses legal means to cloak justice (Wilkins 2010). The prominence of rational-legal forms of domination in federal-tribal relations suggests the need for greater attention to bureaucratic mechanisms of inequality underlying environmental injustices. This article contributes to recent research on critical environmental justice and state power by examining how state bureaucratic administration enacts settler colonial projects. I use the case of the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project to trace how Congress and federal bureaucracies, primarily the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), administered the NIIP in ways that reproduced water injustices on the Navajo Nation.

Data and Methods Data for this article include archival material, government publications, and secondary historical sources related to the development of the NIIP. Archival material was gathered from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Denver Colorado, which houses collections for the BOR and BIA. The primary data collected from NARA was annual project histories (1963- 1985) from the BOR detailing project progress and modifications for both the NIIP and SCJP. Additional archival material came from the New Mexico State Records Center and Archives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The New Mexico Archives includes records for the Office of the State Engineer, the agency responsible for administering the state’s water resources. Additional government publications, including minutes from congressional hearings and project reports were gathered from online collections, primarily the HathiTrust Digital Library, and interlibrary loans. Fi- nally, secondary historical sources supplemented the primary data and included the official BOR history of the NIIP and SJCP (Glaser 1998a, 1998b), Judith Jacobsen’s (1989) detailed dissertation on the NIIP, and Daniel McCool’s (1994, 2006) classic work on Native water politics. This article takes a historical case study approach (Amenta 2009) and focuses on 1963 to 1985, the years between project authorization and when responsibility for NIIP operation and maintenance transferred from federal bureaucracies to the Navajo Nation. Analysis began with qualitative immersion and open coding to develop a coding scheme. Initial coding focused on constructing a timeline of events and identifying patterns of organizational behavior. Extensive excerpts were drawn from the data and imported into NVivo 12 for further analysis. Subsequent rounds of coding narrowed in conceptual themes related to the organizational division of labor, administrative implementation of project legislation, and organizational mission and objectives. Taken together, this analysis provides insight into the bureaucratic mechanisms within the state contributing to environmental inequality.

Case Background The Navajo Indian Irrigation Project (NIIP) serves one of the largest irrigated farms in the US. Located in the high desert of northwest New Mexico, the NIIP currently irrigates 70,000 acres of farmland within the Navajo Nation. The Navajo Government, through the Navajo Agricultural Products Industry (NAPI), owns and operates the farm as a modern agribusiness that produces “globally recognized” agricultural commodities under the “Navajo Pride” brand, with products including alfalfa, corn, winter wheat, potatoes, and pinto beans. Despite the impressive size and 67

global recognition, the NIIP still falls over 40,000 acres short of the 110,630 acres promised in the original project plans. The irrigation project has also failed to live up to its goals of providing economic support for over a quarter of the reservation population and spurring local development. Congress authorized the NIIP nearly 60 years ago, after decades of planning and negotiations. The project was part of the Colorado River Storage Project, a comprehensive federal reclamation plan to develop water resources in the Upper Basin states. The San Juan River cuts across the northeast corner of New Mexico and provides the state with its only access to the Colorado River. New Mexico asked for two projects to develop water in the San Juan Basin. The state’s primary water development objective was to move San Juan water into the adjacent Rio Grande River Basin, the main population center, to support urban growth. The Navajo Nation, however, asserted prior claims to the same waters and insisted on funding for an Indian irrigation project before ceding any rights to the river. Public Law 83-483 passed on June 13, 1962, authorizing construction of both the NIIP and the San Juan-Chama Project (SJCP), a transbasin diversion to bring San Juan water into the Middle Rio Grande Valley. Planners said the NIIP would deliver its first waters in 1971, with all construction complete by 1979. The estimated fourteen-year completion period quickly turned into decades. After eight years, the SJCP was two-thirds finished while the NIIP had not yet reached twenty percent (Glaser 1998a). The Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) celebrated early completion of the SJCP in 1973. It would take another three years before the NIIP delivered the first drop of irrigation water. Progress on the NIIP continued to creep along into the twenty-first century, slowly bringing additional acreage under irrigation but never reaching the final stage. Decades of underfunding has created a backlog of deferred maintenance problems. As NIIP infrastructure now nears the end of its service life, the Navajo Nation faces the additional prospect of costly breakdowns and emer- gency repairs—requiring funding beyond the already low operation and maintenance (O&M) and new construction appropriations (Bates 2016). These ongoing challenges to fund, build, and maintain the NIIP, as well as protect Navajo water rights, raises questions about the bureaucratic processes underlying environmental inequalities.

Findings Following project authorization, three bureaucratic mechanisms ensured that the NIIP would not live up to its many promises: (1) organizational segregation that placed responsibility for key aspects of the NIIP within a notoriously weak federal agency, weakening bureaucratic capacity to 68

fund or construct the project, (2) administrative obstruction through which bureaucrats continuously modified the project in ways that delayed progress and denied the Navajo promised benefits, and (3) mission shift that transformed the NIIP objectives from economic assistance to profit maximization.

Organizational segregation: Weakening bureaucratic capacity The complicated funding, construction, and operational arrangements between the Navajo tribe and various federal agencies introduced significant barriers to the timely completion of the NIIP. Although authorized as part of the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP) through the BOR, the organizational arrangements for the NIIP differed significantly from other participating projects. The resulting organizational segregation—where separate but linked organizations operate according to distinct logics, norms, and rules (Díaz Ríos, Dion and Leonard 2020)—ensured that state and federal actors could easily treat the NIIP differently from other reclamation projects, including the jointly authorized SJCP. In the case of the NIIP, organizational segregation contributed to chronic underfunding and disfunction between coordinating agencies. According to the authorizing legislation, the Navajo project would be constructed by the BOR, but funded through the BIA. This arrangement stemmed in part from the unique status of Indian irrigation projects. Under the 1932 Leavitt Act, projects on Indian land that exceeded the ability off the land to repay would be non-reimbursable and funded out of the general budget. Other reclamation projects under the CRSP that exceeded what water users could repay were supported by power revenue through a joint fund, the Upper Colorado River Account. Colorado representative and chair of the House Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Wayne Aspinall, made clear that the NIIP would not affect the financial status of the Upper Colorado Basin fund: [I]t should be understood in the legislation that these [projects, the NIIP and SJCP,] should be considered…as separate entities and that the Navajo participating project does not have any bearing as far as financial contribution to the upper basin fund or from the upper basin fund of the Colorado River storage and development program. (US House Hearings 1960:63) Aspinall purportedly insisted on this arrangement before allowing the bill through the House Inte- rior Committee “because the Bureau of Indian Affairs has considerably less influence in Congress than does the Bureau of Reclamation” (Berkman and Viscusi 1973:187). Once authorized, the reclamation lobby could rely on the weakness of the BIA and Indian interests, as well as budget cutting and cost effectiveness to prevent the full funding and water development (Jacobsen 1989).

Segregating the NIIP within the BIA also protected reclamation interests by ensuring the project could not damage the BOR’s record on cost effectiveness. Responsibility for irrigation projects in Indian country has historically shifted between the BIA and BOR, with neither arrangement producing particularly positive outcomes (Newell 1997). Between 1908 and 1975, Congress approved only nine “major” Indian water projects (as defined by the BIA).8 A third of these projects irrigated zero acres in 1975 and non-Natives farmed most of the irrigated land (McCool 1994). A saying circulated among BIA employees captures the longstanding failure of the agency to successfully fund and construct irrigation projects: “We began our first irrigation project in 1867 and we've never finished one yet” (McCool 1994:112). Scholars point to both internal and external factors to explain the BIA’s weakness as an agency, including lack of technical expertise, inadequate funding, and the strength of anti-Indian interests and the traditional reclamation lobby. The persistent problems plaguing Indian irrigation projects—particularly in comparison with the popularity and success of white reclamation projects—casts doubt on the sincerity of legislatures’ optimism for the project’s prospects under the BIA. The legislation of June 13, 1962 (PL 87-483) authorized $135 million to be appropriated through the BIA and then transferred to the BOR to construct the NIIP. The difficulties in obtaining funding through this arrangement immediately hindered project progress. James Officer, Associate Commissioner of Indian Affairs between 1962 and 1967, recalled the difficulty of appropriating funds for Indian irrigation projects: I found getting appropriations for Indian irrigation projects to be the most difficult task I had to face. The appropriations committees, as well as the representatives of the Budget Bureau, could find dozens of reasons for denying money to the BIA for Indian irrigation projects, while endorsing gigantic sums to finance reclamation projects with much worse cost-benefit ratios in the districts of influential congressmen. (quoted in McCool 1994:140) Table and Figure 4.1 compare the programmed and actual funding appropriations for the early years of the NIIP. Congress fully funded the project the first year, but appropriations quickly dropped to 45 percent of programmed funding or lower during the following five years. By 1969, cumulative actual appropriations for the project were $45.5 million below the programmed rate.

8 In the 1908 decision of Winters v. United States, the Supreme Court recognized priority water rights for Native nations that in most cases superseded non-Indian claims. 70

Table 4.1. NIIP appropriation history: Programmed versus actual funding, 1964-1969. Appropri- ation funds in USD millions. Data source: US Senate Hearings (1969:6).

Fiscal Annual Appropriations Cumulative Appropriations Year Programmed Actual % Difference Programmed Actual % Difference 1964 $1.8 $1.8 0.00% $1.8 $1.8 0.00% 1965 $9 $4.7 -47.78% $10.8 $6.5 -39.81% 1966 $12 $6.5 -45.83% $22.8 $13 -42.98% 1967 $13 $6.5 -50.00% $35.8 $19.5 -45.53% 1968 $18 $5.3 -70.56% $53.8 $24.8 -53.90% 1969 $20 $3.5 -82.50% $73.8 $28.3 -61.65%

A. $25

$20

$15

$10

$0 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969

Programmed Actual

B. $80 $70 $60 $50 $40 $30 $20 $10 $0 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969

Programmed Actual

Figure 4.1. Annual (A) and cumulative (B) NIIP appropriations: Programmed versus actual funding, 1964-1969. Appropriations in USD millions. Data from US Senate Hearings (1969:6).

The Navajo Tribal Council and other project officials continuously pushed for greater funding. In 1969, the chair of the Navajo Tribal Council, Raymond Nakai, appeared before a House appropriations committee to advocate for greater funding for the NIIP, noting that the SJCP had “proceeded at its scheduled rate, and through fiscal year 1968 is 45.3 percent funded” while the NIIP “is but 14.3 percent funded.” He added: We have no objection to the San Juan-Chama project continuing on schedule, but we are at a loss to understand why the Navajo Indian irrigation project has been slowed almost to a halt…It appears that the San Juan-Chama project will be completed on schedule, but at its present rate of progress the Navajo Indian irrigation project will not be completed, if at all, until the year 1996, and realistically, with the obvious penchant of certain persons drastically to cut this project, the first drop of water on Navajo land will probably not be delivered until 2007 A.D. (US House Hearings 1968:1275) A year later, the Tribe again returned to Congress, seeking passage of legislation that would raise the project’s cost ceiling to account for construction delays and price inflation. New Mexico Sen- ator Joseph Montoya again emphasized the slow rate of funding and construction: “Although the project was scheduled to be completed by 1979, 15 years from beginning of construction, it will now take 45 years or more to complete at the present rate of progress” (US Senate Hearings 1969:6). Recognizing the limitations of funding through the BIA, the Navajo Tribal Council issued a Resolution in 1967 requesting that Congress appropriate project funds through the BOR “in order to make up for the lost time in the construction of the project and keep up with the scheduled construction” (US BOR 1967:76). Despite progressively shifting project responsibilities to Recla- mation—including road construction and operation and maintenance—appropriation remained under the BIA. The drastic underfunding further complicated the already complex coordination between federal and tribal agencies, creating further delays in project construction. Project planning meet- ings reveal the operational difficulties. During a 1964 meeting, for example, participants raised the issue of how to keep animals out of the irrigation canals: Reclamation asked the BIA what its policy was going to be concerning fencing of stretches of open canal…The BIA stated that it questioned the advisability of fencing and the main objection was the maintenance costs…Reclamation stated that it was possible the stock in trying to get to the water would fall in and this could create quite a problem if the livestock were washed into the siphons…The BIA stated that the Tribe could pay for this…The question was raised as to whether the cost of fencing should be a capital cost or whether it was an operation cost. It was stated that this will be determined in the near future. (US BOR 1964:119)

The Project History for the following year showed little progress on the issue of preventing animals from drowning in the irrigation system. Minutes for a March 1965 meeting indicated that “After considerable discussion, it was decided to let the problem areas develop then determine the best solution for solving the problem” (US BOR 1965:200). The problem developed as predicted over subsequent years, with annual operation and maintenance reports from the early 1980s noting with increasing frustration the need to remove dead livestock from canals: “O&M forces removed over 40 head of cattle from the irrigation system due to lack of fence protection...All canals should be fenced” (US BOR 1981:88). Organizational segregation also contributed to poor project outcomes by placing the responsibility for on-farm development and financing on the BIA and Navajo Nation. The NIIP authorizing legislation financed the irrigation system itself, however funding for on farm development—purchasing farm supplies and equipment, training farmers, and building homes— fell under the purview of the tribe. During the initial planning stages, neither bureaucrats nor legislatures raised significant concerns about how the poor tribal government would be able to raise the requisite capital for successful on-farm development. The Navajo Government did generate some income through oil and gas leases, as well as a few tribal industries. But the income fell far short of the needed funds for comprehensive farm development and community planning, in addition to meeting the other pressing needs of the Navajo people. Beyond widespread poverty, the Navajo Tribe faced several additional hurdles to funding on farm development. The sparsely populated project area in the northeast corner of the reservation contained little existing infrastructure. Farm development thus required infrastructure for domestic water, electricity, and gas, as well as roads, schools, and homes for workers and their families. As late as 1977, a year after NIIP water irrigated the first field, project personnel still had no clear plan for housing or community development. Minutes from an October meeting detailed the challenges: Mr. McNeill [NAPI General Manager] said we have problems getting good people to come and stay because there isn’t any place to live… Mr. Weaver [BIA] again explained that we need some effective urban planning to bring all this together. No one has put up the money to do any effective planning at this point. He thought they would have to contract with NAPI for this urban planner or bureau employees. Farming operations cannot afford this type of thing… Mr. Quist [BIA] made the point that you are already past the point of domestic planning. You are already putting people to work and don’t have the facilities for

them…We have a need for the people and housing today, not two years down the road. (US BOR 1977:126, 30-31) The level of planning and coordination required, in addition to the financial requirements simply were not present to successfully develop permanent farm settlements. Similar problems plagued the training program. At the same 1977 meeting, Troy McNeill, general Manager of NAPI, explained the lengths the tribal farming enterprise had gone in attempt to fund education and training: “We have chased so many rainbows and we don’t want to continue chasing…It is expensive for the Navjao people for us to run back and forth looking for these funds and not get results” (US BOR 1977:94, 109). Financing farm equipment presented further compli- cations. Commercial farms entail substantial startup costs, typically financed through private banks. Yet most Indian farmers find traditional sources of capital inaccessible. Indian land held in trust by the federal government cannot be sold or mortgaged by the either the Tribe or individual Navajos to provide collateral for loans. This left the Tribe responsible for providing loans or obtaining federal grants to fund farm startup costs. The history of the NIIP suggests that organizational segregation occurred not in service of greater efficiency but as a strategy to weaken bureaucratic capacity to fund and complete the project. These organizational constraints complicated coordination on an already complex irrigation project. Once construction progress stalled, project officials encountered even greater difficulties convincing appropriations committees to fully fund the NIIP.

Administrative obstruction: Reappraising, reevaluating, restudying Almost as soon as the NIIP became law, bureaucrats and officials began a decades’ long process of rethinking and modifying the entire project (see Table 4.2). I use the term administrative obstruction to refer to bureaucratic delays or alterations that impeded project progress. Administra- tive obstruction represented the second major barrier the Navajo Nation encountered in trying to complete the NIIP. Most of the administrative changes to the NIIP responded to real problems and revealed that the project had not been as well conceived or planned as initially presented. Yet each new intervention not only delayed project completion but threatened to deny the Navajo the promised benefits of the irrigation project. Administrative obstruction jeopardized full project completion by reducing the NIIP water allocations, removing municipal and industrial (M&I) capacity, and attempting to downsize the project.

Table 4.2. Timeline and summary of post-authorization modifications to the NIIP

Year Project Modifications

1963 - BOR begins NIIP “reappraisal” to determine project feasibility. 1964 - Reappraisal Report recommends reducing the size of the main canal to cut costs. Re- moves M&I capacity from project. 1966 - Senator Anderson and Secretary Udall request a project “reevaluation” for the NIIP. Anderson recommends downsizing project to 77,000 acres. - Reevaluation Report released, deems a portion of the project lands unsuitable for irrigation. Considers five alternative project sizes between 62,200 and 110,630 acres. 1967 - Navajo Tribal Council ends the Shiprock training program and authorizes a Tribal farming enterprise. 1970 - Public Law 91-416 authorizes changes in project lands and higher cost ceiling based on the 1966 Reevaluation Report. - Navajo Agricultural Products Industry (NAPI) formed following failure of training program and recommendations from BOR. 1972 - Study from New Mexico State University on Alternative Farm Organizational Struc- tures further justifies corporate farming enterprise over family farms. - BOR/BIA joint development report proposing all-sprinkler irrigation. 1973 - BOR announces conversion from gravity flow irrigation to an all-sprinkler system. - Navajo Indian Irrigation All-Sprinkler Irrigation Report analyses the costs and benefits of an all-sprinkler system over gravity irrigation. 1982 - Solicitor General opinion denying Navajo entitlement to the water saved from switch- ing to sprinkler irrigation technology and limiting the NIIP to irrigation purposes.

Five months following NIIP authorization, the BOR requested a “reappraisal” of the entire project to “establish the lands are susceptible to sustained irrigation and that the project works are adequate to provide service at reasonable operating costs and deliver proper quantities of water to the project lands” (Reappraisal Report 1965:26, quoted in Jacobsen 1989:137). According to Bert Levine, Reclamation engineer and the first project director, the NIIP “preplanning wasn’t worth the paper it was written on…[Because the] BIA didn’t have the funds to do a real plan, we threw the whole plan out” (interviewed by Judith Jacobsen, 1989:138). Just a year later, project officials undertook yet another fundamental reevaluation of the project. Frustrated by construction delays and spiraling costs, New Mexico Senator Clinton Anderson requested Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall to reevaluate the project to “optimize the net benefits to the Indians from the water allotted to the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project” (US DOI 1966:1).

After learning about the “reevaluation” plans through newspaper reporting, the Navajo Tribal Council refused to participate in the task force and issued a scathing resolution accusing Senator Anderson of undertaking the study “with the objective of reducing [the] irrigation project to approximately 77,000 acres” (CAP-56-66, April 28, 1966). The resolution proceeded to list all the reasons that they found officials’ justifications for reevaluation “insincere.” Notably, the Tribe observed that reducing the project size would make more water available to New Mexico and that the original capacity of the SJCP could “only be filled by diversion of water rightfully belonging to the Navajos pursuant to the arrangement sought by Senator Anderson and Secretary Udall in ‘re-evaluation’ of the Navajo Irrigation Project…” (see US BOR 1966:214). The Tribe resolved to reassert their “paramount” water rights under the Winters Doctrine if the federal government failed to complete the NIIP as promised. The reevaluation report considered alternative project sizes as small as 62,200 acres, but ultimately recommended moving forward with developing the full 110,630-acre project (US DOI 1966). However, project reduction and early termination remained a looming, if often implicit, threat throughout the project’s history. Among the more consequential project alterations, the NIIP reappraisal and revaluation removed M&I capacity from the project. The NIIP law permitted reclamation to build M&I capacity into the irrigation system but required repayment contracts to be in place before beginning construction. Because no M&I contracts had purportedly been submitted by 1965, the BOR reduced the size of the main canal to save on construction costs. The reduced capacity meant that appropriating water for M&I would require building additional infrastructure, something the BOR admitted would likely be economically infeasible given the rough terrain (see Figure 4.2). The 1966 Reevaluation Report reaffirmed this decision and proceeded with construction of the smaller canal. The Navajo Tribal Council issued a second resolution on the reevaluation in October 1966 expressing their dissatisfaction with this change: All of the Irrigation Project facilities must be constructed with sufficient capacity to supply reasonably anticipated industrial and municipal needs…without reducing the 508,000 acre feet authorized for irrigation and without requiring such industrial and municipalities to construct supplemental storage terminals. (US BOR 1966:222-23) Although not the primary project purpose, M&I had always been important to the Navajos. In a 1961 hearing, Maurice McCabe, executive secretary of the Navajo Tribe, testified on the importance of domestic and industrial infrastructure: The economic value of the Navajo irrigation project is that it also makes possible and fea- sible industrialization of substantial areas of the reservation…Other Federal agencies are 76

assisting in bringing about housing projects for Navajo families in this and other areas of the reservation. This will, of course, require water, which in a large part we hope to obtain from the municipal and industrial water supply features of the Navajo Indian irrigation project. (US House Hearings 1961:34) Further, the Tribe only agreed to share shortages with the SJCP and other users, waiving their priority water rights, because of the promise of municipal and industrial water supplies and were in the process of securing the necessary water contracts at the time of the decision to remove M&I capacity (Jacobsen 1989).

Figure 4.2. Construction progress on NIIP canals, 1967 (left) and 1970 (right). BOR photos by T.R. Broderick and L.W. Tucker, NIIP Project Histories.

Other major project changes revolved around farm structure and management. Initial plans called for the construction of over 1,000 family farms. This plan came under scrutiny almost immediately. In a November 1964 meeting, BIA Project Engineer Gerald Keesee offered three methods for developing project lands: (1) individual farms between 100 and 110 acres, (2) a corporate farm of 500-to-5,000-acre units, managed by a tribal enterprise, and (3) non-Indian development under a lease plan. According to meeting minutes, officials’ believed that “the Tribal Enterprise would probably be more successful” and “the family type farm that had been considered was not going to work” (US BOR 1964:112). Family farms became an increasingly remote possibility as the 1960s proceeded. In 1967, the Navajo Tribal Council authorized a Navajo Farm Enterprise

(CMY-40-67) and three years later created a tribal farming enterprise, the Navajo Agricultural Products Industry (NAPI), to oversee the NIIP (ACAP-123-70).9 Reasons for the change in farm structure varied, but the most compelling related to problems with training and undercapitalization. In preparation for the NIIP, the Navajo started a 1,200- acre training farm near Shiprock. Despite hundreds of thousands in investment, the tribe struggled to adequately fund the program or expand it to a size appropriate for the original NIIP organization. More fundamentally, even if the Navajo could have found the money to successfully scale the program, prospective farmers had few job options because of ongoing delays in NIIP construction (Jacobsen 1989). Anticipated training needs also began to intensify as officials increasingly as- sumed commercial rather than subsistence farming ventures. A 1972 report from the department of agricultural economics at New Mexico State University noted the training needs beyond agricultural knowledge for commercial farms: To be successful, individual farmers must be competent in the areas of crop production and marketing and also in planning, financial management, and decision making. They must also be self-motivated individuals with a desire to work hard and be willing to assume the risks of an independent businessman. Training of individuals with no experience in commercial farming or in running an independent business to become successful farm operators presents a challenge. (Gorman et al. 1972:193) The same report also determined that a tribal enterprise provided advantages in capital development, employment, and profits. The second major operational change occurred in 1974 when the BOR converted the NIIP from gravity flow to sprinkler irrigation technology (see Figure 4.3). Despite the added cost, sprinkler irrigation offered numerous advantages, including increased efficiency, reduced runoff and erosion, and greater ease of operating for “inexperienced Indian labor” (US BOR 1974; Viessman 1975). The change also fit better with a centralized system of management and reflected the desire of project officials to create a “modern” farming enterprise. Yet the switch to a more efficient sprinkler irrigation system raised questions about who would benefit from the water savings. To

9 The creation of NAPI did not signal the complete demise of family farms on the NIIP. Tribal and project officials discussed multiple possible roles for the tribal enterprise that also included family farms, such as providing processing and marketing services for individual farm units and farming the land on a temporary basis while family farms were established. 78

irrigate 110,630 acres, the original gravity system required an estimated 508,000 acre-feet diversion and 252,000 acre-feet depletion per year.10 Under the all-sprinkler system, the same acreage could be irrigated by diverting 370,000 acre-feet, with an average depletion of 230,000 acre-feet. As such, the irrigation technology change “saved” 138,000 acre-feet in water diversion and 26,000 acre-feet in water depletion.

Figure 4.3. Gravity irrigation on the San Juan Branch Agricultural Experiment Station, 1967 (left) and center pivot sprinkler irrigation on Block 4 of the NIIP, 1980 (right). BOR photos by T.R. Broderick and H. Wittman, NIIP Project Histories.

The Navajo Tribal Council asserted their right to the full diversion of water, regardless of irrigation technology, as provided in the authorizing legislation—a position consistent with numerous resolutions released in the 1960s that repeatedly insisted: “The land area to be irrigated by the Project must not be reduced below authorized 110,630 acres and the annual diversion from the Navajo Dam for irrigation must not be less than the authorized 508,000 acre-feet…” The DOI responded with a series of opinions issued between 1974 and 1982 to address the debate. After vacillating on several important issues, the final opinion came from Solicitor William General Coldiron in 1982 and concluded that depletion determined the Navajo’s allocation (memorandum to Assistant Secretary, Land and Water Resources, April 23, 1982). A DOI reference guide on reclamation law summarized Solicitor Coldiron’s rational:

10 The distinction between diversion and depletion is important. Diversion measures the total water taken from the stream or river, while depletion indicates the amount “consumed” after diversion that does not return to the water system through drainage. 79

To allow total water use based only upon the quantity authorized to be diverted would have a clear, substantial, and adverse impact upon the availability of water in the Colorado River system for existing and proposed uses by other New Mexico water users. (DOI 1988:S321) Coldiron made three critical determinations: (1) the Navajo were entitled to the amount of water needed to irrigation 110,630 acres, not the full 508,000 acre-feet diversion, (2) the Navajo also were not entitled to the difference in water depletion resulting from the new technology, and (3) the Secretary of the Interior was not authorized to deliver water to the NIIP for any purpose other than irrigation. Even with Navajo consent, the Secretary could not permit water delivery for M&I purposes that might interfere with NIIP ability to irrigate 110,630 acres. Administrative obstruction took on variety of forms, but all worked to minimize the threat of the NIIP to other New Mexico water users. Across the numerous project modifications, Navajo voice was conspicuously absent. The federal bureaucracies in charge claimed to work closely with the Navajo Tribal Council and later NAPI, but Navajo input on major decisions tended to take the form of symbolic consultation rather than meaningful participation. In all the reappraisals and reevaluations, for example, no study addressed the preference of the Navajo people on farm structure or irrigation technology (DuMars and Ingram 1980). As a result, administrative decisions most often favored non-Indian interests by constraining the amount and use of project water.

Mission shift: From economic assistance to profit maximization The final organizational force that hindered the NIIP from meeting its intended goals came from what I call mission shift. The NIIP began as an economic assistance project with the primary purpose of providing employment and income to the Navajo. But over the course of construction, economic and political pressure slowly shifted project orientation away from an economic assistance model and towards profit maximization. The changing goal orientation informed farm operational decisions and ultimately resulted in a corporate farm that met few of the projects’ original objectives. The promises of expansive social and economic development went largely unfulfilled. NAPI today employees a few hundred Navajo workers—far short of the promised 17,000 jobs— and exports most food produced off the reservation, despite widespread food insecurity on the Navajo Nation (Pardilla et al. 2014).11

11 NAPI commodities go to major food processors like Frito Lay, Del Monte, and Purina. NAPI does provide a source of cheap food on the reservation through donations, mostly onions and potatoes, to the Navajo Chapters but has done little to contribute to Indigenous food sovereignty 80

In the years leading up to project authorization, bill proponents presented the NIIP as a moral obligation and solution to the “Navajo problem” of poverty and economic underdevelopment (see chapter 2). This morality framing downplayed the financial costs of the project, emphasizing instead the substantial social and economic benefits the irrigation project would bring to the Navajo, primarily through employment. The idea that the value of the NIIP should not calculated in “dollars and cents” appeared again and again during legislative hearings: The fundamental importance of the project to the Navaho people cannot be accurately measured in dollars and cents. (Representative John Dempsey, New Mexico, US House Hearings 1955:232) We cannot figure the long-term return to our Treasury solely in terms of the cost of the project and probable ultimate repayments. (William Zimmerman, Association of American Indian Affairs, US House Hearings 1955:696) There is much more involved [in this project] than cost—we cannot assign a dollar value to something which is needed to supply the human need of our own people. (Senator Dennis Chavez, New Mexico, US Senate Hearings 1958:23) Officials also relied on economic benefit-cost analysis to justify the NIIP, but this was secondary to the human need for the project. According to the original plans, the NIIP would provide economic assistance primarily through job creation and broader community development. Officials estimated that the project would create 1,120 family farms and employ an additional 2,240 families in allied industries, for a total of 3,360 jobs that would directly support 18,000 Navajos. To measure the full value of the irrigation project, officials considered three types of benefits: direct, indirect, and public. Direct benefits included farm income, indirect benefits came from secondary agricultural industries, such as caning and food processing, and public benefits derived from “improved settlement, employment, and investment opportunities, community and service facilities, and the stabilization of local and regional economy” (Keesee, US House Hearings 1960:53). To this, officials also added “education cost reduction” because of the reduced cost to the federal government of providing school- ing for Navajo children. The estimated annual benefits summed to over $8.5 million (see Table 4.3), with 65 percent of the total benefits deriving from direct farm employment and community development (direct, public, and school benefits).

(Frisbie 2018). Rather, the Diné Policy Institute (2014) has identified NAPI as a threat to food sovereignty by introducing GMOs into the Navajo food system. 81

Table 4.3. Estimated annual benefits of the NIIP, 1960. Data from SJCP-NIIP Coordinated Report (US BOR 1960:352) Type of benefit Annual amount Irrigation benefits $7,579,300 Direct 3,365,400 Indirect 3,019,900 Public 1,194,000 Education cost reduction 957,600 Total: 8,536,900

Ten years following authorization, employment estimates for the NIIP had dropped substantially. The 1972 report on Alternative Farm Organizational Structures reduced the number of farms from 1,120 to a maximum of 345. During peak periods, these farms would require an additional 900 laborers (Gorman et al. 1972). Including processing and infrastructure jobs, individually operated farms would generate a total of 2,352 jobs when fully developed. For the enterprise farm approach, employment levels would fluctuate between 600 and 2,350 workers in direct and indirect farm jobs.12 Although lower than the original prediction of 3,360 jobs—particularly considering that many positions would be part-time and seasonal—the 1972 employment estimates remained substantial. Even these reduced job numbers failed to materialize. NAPI currently irrigates 70,000 acres and employs around 300 (Oxendine 2020), far short of the nearly 1,900 predicted for the present stage of development (Gorman et al. 1972:160). Arguably the larger failure occurred in community development. The promise of community development depended on resettling at least 2,000 Navajos. A more concentrated population would reduce the cost of government services, as well as spur industrial and community development. In the words of New Mexico Senator Joseph Montoya: [T]he Navajo Indian irrigation project is going to give these people an opportunity to uplift themselves socially and to provide a community life which will enable them to develop schools and to be in one place instead of nomads all over the reservation. (US Senate Hearings 1969:7) The anticipated communities never emerged—an unsurprising outcome given the inadequate funding, planning difficulties, removal of M&I capacity, slow construction, and lower than expected

12 Individual farms would provide more jobs during the peak period, but the tribal enterprise maintained a larger workforce in the off season. The tribal enterprise also compared more favorably when converting the number of jobs created into “man-year equivalents” to compare total employment (Gorman et al. 1972). 82

employment numbers. Satellite imagery of NIIP/NAPI farmland in Figure 4.4 shows the lack of significant development in the project area. The few residential areas on or near project lands must instead rely on the nearby towns of Kirkland, Farmington, or Bloomfield for essential services. The NIIP likely contributes some to the economies of these established towns but the community benefits envisioned by project planners simply have not developed (Young and Mann 1993).13

Figure 4.4. NIIP lands, Navajo Nation, New Mexico. Project area includes several small housing settlements, but residents must rely on the nearby towns of Kirtland, Farmington, and Bloomfield for most essential services. Map credit: Google Earth Pro (April 6, 2019).

Employment and community development shortcomings resulted in part from a shift in project orientation from economic assistance to profit maximization (Jacobsen 1989). Particularly in the early reclamation era, the BOR and Congress relied almost exclusively on economic benefit- cost analyses to justify irrigation projects. In hearings over the NIIP, project opponents regularly attacked the NIIP on economic grounds. California’s state water agency, the Colorado River Board of California, for example, opposed both the NIIP and SJCP because “Neither project is econom-

13 As Young and Mann (1993) point out, broader changes in the agricultural sector also contributed to worse than expected employment and local development outcomes. 83

ically justified. Contrary to the unrealistic economic analyses in the [feasibility] report, both projects would have benefit-cost ratios less than unity” (US BOR 1960:421). Following authorization, benefit-cost considerations became increasingly important for project funding and development (Jacobsen 1989). The increased emphasis on cost effectiveness pushed project officials to prioritize profit maximization at the farm level rather than employment or local development considerations. The 1972 report analyzing farm organizational structures, for example, noted as one of the advantages of the tribal enterprise model that: “The infrastructure requirements for a tribal enterprise farm would be substantially different and less complex…Only limited housing would be required on the project lands…eliminating the need for costly utility network on the project” (Gorman et al. 1972:13). Eliminating utilities certainly saved on cost. But the lack of utilities and housing also represented a key rural development problem that the water project sought to address. Similarly, the decision to turn the NIIP into a tribal enterprise hinged on the increased profitability of an agribusiness corporations, as well as the challenges turning Navajo people into “successful busi- nessmen.” On multiple occasions, project officials made clear that profit maximization should guide NIIP operation and development. As a disadvantage of the tribal enterprise model, the 1972 report cautioned against the dangers of politics entering farm governance decisions: If tribal politics were to enter into management decisions and the goal of profit maximization was changed in favor of various social objectives, the tribal enterprise farm could fal- ter. It is difficult to operate a large business in a competitive industry without a clear-cut profit objective. (Gorman et al. 1972:190) During a 1977 NAPI planning conference, the chair opened the meeting by reminding participants that “we have objectives, and we have to make a profit… Back in the back of your mind this operation has to be a profit oriented approach” (US BOR 1977:59). An exchange later in the same meeting illustrated how profit maximization guided even seemingly minor decisions. A BIA official “caution[ed] the committee against planting too much irrigated pastures” because the cost- benefit ratio for the project had recently dropped from 1.76 to 1.46 and “If more pasture is considered, this could cause strong negative reaction from political leaders…” (US BOR 1977:76). Across the nearly ten years that congress was considering the project, officials and politicians made clear that the project was an Indian assistance program and therefore must be evaluated, funded, and treated differently from other reclamation projects. These evaluation criteria quickly

fell away during project implementation as politicians held the NIIP to the same economic standards as non-Indian projects. The mission shift from economic assistance to profit maximization meant that project officials no longer prioritized the social objectives that motivated the NIIP. The history of western reclamation shows that politicians and officials regularly overestimate the benefits and underestimate the cost of projects, Indian and non-Indian. However, the weakness of the BIA and Indian lobby in congress meant that the NIIP encountered greater scrutiny than non- Indian projects.

Discussion and Conclusion State power represents a core pillar of emerging critical environmental justice perspectives (Kojola and Pellow 2020; Pellow 2018). Recent research has begun to go inside the state to understand environmental inequality formation (e.g., Harrison 2019). This study expands on recent research into the state’s role in perpetuating environmental injustices by examining rational-legal forms of domination. For Native nations and Indigenous people, “colonial ecological violence” of the settler state produces deep injustices (Bacon 2019) and operates predominantly through legal mechanisms (Steinman 2012). Through a historical case study of the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project, this article shows how the state organizes environmental inequality through administrative processes. Following authorization of the NIIP, my analysis finds that three bureaucratic mechanism helped to reproduce environmental inequality on the Navajo Nation. Through organizational segregation, legislatures weakened bureaucratic capacity to fund and construct the project. The BIA’s weakness and notoriously poor track record on Indian irrigation project meant that reclamation interests could support the NIIP while minimizing the threat the project posed to non-Indian users. The predictable consequences of this arrangement, ongoing project delays and escalating costs, also gave the appropriations committee further reason to deny full funding to the project. Admin- istrative obstruction created additional project delays but more importantly enabled project officials to scale back the project little by little. Each new “reevaluation” or “reappraisal” became another opportunity to modify the project ways that advantaged traditional reclamation interests at the expense of the Navajos. Finally, mission shift altered the entire nature of the project. Rather than an Indian assistance program, the NIIP became oriented towards profit maximization. As a result, profit considerations began to override efforts provide extensive employment opportunities, provide municipal

and industrial water supplies, and spur local development. These bureaucratic mechanisms ultimately resulted in an irrigation project severely underfunded, with indefinite construction delays, escalating maintenance needs, and serving a purpose at odds with the original motivations. Rather than delivering water for small family farms and supporting local development, the NIIP serves a globally integrated agribusiness corporation with only a few hundred employees. The findings of this article provide insight into the inner workings of bureaucracies through which the state organizes environmental inequality. The daily activities of NIIP development and administration represent a form of rational-legal domination that obscured the state’s role in re- producing environmental injustices. The original NIIP/SJCP legislation received substantial attention from interests around the nation and state that insisted the NIIP be approved to correct historical and ongoing injustices against the Navajos. However, the subsequent bureaucratic decisions about NIIP development and implementation took place away from the public eye and could be easily justified on technocratic and legal grounds. Indeed, the BOR continued to claim the project as a success, touting their engineering feats and state of the art irrigation technologies, even as bureaucrats delayed and drastically reshaped the project, often against the explicit wishes of Nav- ajo officials. This article contributes to critical environmental justice scholarship by first showing how seemingly neutral bureaucratic procedures can reproduce environmental injustices. Recent research on environmental bureaucracies (e.g., Harrison 2016, 2019) show the importance of studying organizational processes for understanding the failure of the state to deliver environmental justice. As Purifoy and Seamster (2021) note, environmental justice research frequently overlook these more mundane activities of legal administration that lack overt conflict. Notably, none of the bureaucratic mechanisms necessarily reproduce inequalities. Yet my analysis, and theories of settler colonialism more generally, suggest that bureaucratic structures often offer a tool to enact and legitimize domination rather than constraining power (see Roscigno 2011). Second, my findings illustrate how bureaucratic administration can transform policies and legislation to better align with settler colonial goals. Other scholars point out that through water settlements and the quantification of water rights, the settler state limits and controls Indigenous access to resources (Curley 2019b; Deloria 1985). My analysis shows that this process continues post-settlement, through bureaucratic administration, as settler state officials make decisions that further interfere with Indig- enous water rights.

CHAPTER 5. CONCLUSION The struggle to fund and construct the NIIP has continued into the twenty-first century. In 2017, the Navajo Tribal Council created a Navajo Indian Irrigation Project Negotiation Subcommittee with the sole purpose of advocating for project completion and funding (Bates 2018). As reported by the Navajo-Hopi Observer (2017), the committee “told the [federal] officials that the NAPI enterprise is not able to reach its full capacity in terms of revenue, production, and job creation due to the funding deficiencies.” Meanwhile, the Navajo people continue to lack drinking water infrastructure, a problem that exacerbated the COVID-19 health crisis in 2020 and made the Nav- ajo Nation one of the hardest hit areas in the US (Hansman 2020). The 2005 Navajo Nation Water Rights Settlement with the State of New Mexico once again promised to begin remedying municipal water problems. In the agreement, the Navajo Nation released “claims to water that could displace existing non-Indian water uses in the [San Juan River] basin” (NM Office of the State Engineer n.d.) in exchange for more water development projects. Yet the largest of these, the Nav- ajo-Gallup Water Supply Project, will primarily serve non-Native communities, and settler officials blocked the project from bringing potable water to Navajo communities just across the border in Arizona, despite being within twenty miles of the water infrastructure, in an effort to force the tribe to settle claims in Arizona as well (Curley 2019b). Within New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley, rural Indigenous communities express similar frustrations with irrigation funding and maintenance. During 2014 senate hearings on In- dian irrigation projects, Stuart Paisano, governor of the Pueblo of Sandia reported that “irrigation facilities that only serve Pueblo lands have not been maintained as well as those serving non- Pueblo lands” (US Senate Hearings 2014:23). He explicitly linked these problems to Pueblo tribes’ location within the most populous area of the state, placing their water infrastructure under the authority of a regional water management organization, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy Dis- trict. Yet these types of funding and maintenance problems characterize Indian irrigation projects throughout the US. A 2006 study found that Indian irrigation projects needed $600 million worth of deferred maintenance (GAO 2006). This underinvestment deprives Native nations of their water rights to the benefit of non-Native users. As an engineer from the Wind River Reservation in Wy- oming explained during the 2014 senate hearings: “Because of our inefficient system, the deferred maintenance, the lack of storage, we can’t use the water when we have it. So the actual beneficiar- ies of our water at the present are the downstream users off the reservation” (US Senate Hearings

2014:57). Albuquerque, meanwhile, has water to spare despite continued population growth and scarcity. The SCJP now supplies Albuquerque with sixty to seventy percent of its water after the city completed a separate $400 million San Juan-Chama Drinking Water Project in 2008. In several recent years, with low Rio Grande flows and irrigation water in short supply, the city has agreed to use its unused portion of imported Colorado River water to keep the river wet, illustrating its control over regional waterscapes.

Table 5.1. Summary of dissertation findings and contributions

Article research questions Summary findings Summary contributions Chapter 2. How do racial pro- Settler colonial racial projects enabled Illustrates utility of applying jects contribute to rural forms settler officials to exert greater control theories of race to understand of environmental inequality? over Native water resources. Racial- rural environmental injustices; How do settler efforts to ac- ized ideas targeted the collective Draws attention to unique as- quire and control natural re- rights of tribe, seeking to terminate pects of anti-Indian racism sources contribute to the so- federal support and assimilation indi- within cases of Indigenous en- cial production of racial dif- viduals. Settler officials justified envi- vironmental injustice. ference? ronmental paternalism by questioning Navajo ability to manage resources. Chapter 3. How do actors Officials relied heavily on rural bene- Reiterates the need to analyti- construct and use socio-spa- fits to justify the primarily urban cally connect rural environ- tial boundaries during natural SJCP, including agriculture and rural mental injustices to urban ac- resource conflicts? How does economic development, national de- tors and practices; Shows how the construction of symbolic fense, and rural recreation and tour- actors mobilized rural meaning boundaries contribute to ur- ism. Rurality was constructed as a re- in ways that reinforced urban ban-rural environmental ine- source for urban use and allowed Al- dominance. qualities? buquerque to claim greater control over regional water resources. Chapter 4. How do state bu- NIIP administration accomplished Shows how seemingly neutral reaucracies enact settler colo- settler colonial projects through or- bureaucratic procedures repro- nial projects? What are the ganizational segregation that weak- duce environmental injustices; bureaucratic mechanisms ened bureaucratic capacity, adminis- Demonstrates how bureau- maintaining environmental trative obstruction to delay and mod- cratic administration can trans- inequality? ify the project, and change in mission form legislation to better align orientation from economic assistance with colonial goals. to profit maximization.

This dissertation investigates the historical formation of water inequality in the New Mex- ico through a case study of the Navajo Indian Irrigation and San Juan-Chama Projects. Informed by critical environmental justice perspectives, the study seeks to understand how race and space converge within rural environmental inequality formation. The three articles explore: (1) racial projects within rural environmental inequality formation, (2) the construction and mobilization of

socio-spatial boundaries during natural resource conflicts, and (3) state bureaucratic mechanisms that enact settler colonial projects. Table 5.1 summarizes the major findings and contributions of each article. Chapter two shows how racialized ideas shaped negotiations over the NIIP in ways that perpetuated rural environmental injustices. The concept of settler colonial racial projects describes how colonial and racial ideas work together to unevenly distribute resources and provides insight into how settler officials exerted control over Native water resources. My analysis shows that settler officials first denied the Navajo Nations priority claims by incorporating the tribe into the dominant legal structures and constructing alternative (non-legal) bases of support that better aligned with the dominant water regime. Moral framing relied on notions of deservingness and positioned the irrigation project as an act of charity that would solve the “Navajo problem.” This solution resonated strongly with termination policy that sought to end federal support for tribal governments and assimilate individuals into mainstream white society. Through the NIIP, settler officials would remake the Navajo into “good citizens” by enabling them to become self-supporting modern farmers. Yet questions about the Navajos ability to become farmers and responsibly care for the land revealed persistent undercurrents of environmental paternalism and the need for settlers to continue overseeing natural resource development and use within Navajo territory. These settler colonial racial projects show how racialized ideas connected to conflicts over land and natural resources in ways that contributed to rural environmental inequalities. Chapter three draws on relational theories of inequality to explore how actors construct and mobilize socio-spatial boundaries within natural resource conflicts. During project negotiations, bill proponents packaged the NIIP and SJCP together to garner support for the transbasin diversion, relying on the rural Navajo project to help appropriate water for Albuquerque. Yet New Mexico officials also cited multiple rural benefits and justifications for the San Juan-Chama diversion in the Middle Rio Grande Valley. Rural justification for urban water included agricultural development in depressed rural areas, natural resource development and the use of rural space for national security needs, and rural recreation and tourism opportunities. Through this process, rurality was construction as a resource for urban use with the majority of NIIP benefits accruing to urban users and places. The article thus shows how actors mobilized rural meaning in ways that reinforced urban dominance, implicating urban practices in the production of rural environmental injustices.

Chapter four analyses the post-authorization implementation of the NIIP. Unlike the SJCP, the NIIP largely failed to deliver on its many promises. Some of the blame rests with poor pre- authorization planning, but failure was also accomplished through project administration. Through bureaucratic mechanisms, officials enacted settler colonial objectives to limit Navajo access and use of water resources by hindering full project development. The original project organization weakened bureaucratic capacity to fund and construct the NIIP by segregating it within a notoriously weak agency. The ongoing delays resulting from this arrangement, in combination with poor initial planning, prompted almost continuous reassessments that modified the project in large and small ways. Each reassessment and modification threatened to reduce the size of the project or otherwise prevent the Navajo Nation from claiming the promised water allocation. Finally, settler officials shifted the mission of the project entirely from providing economic assistance to maxim- izing profit, thus reducing the social impact of the project. These bureaucratic mechanisms show how seemingly neutral state administrative procedures can reproduce environmental injustice, as well as transform policies and legislation in ways that align with settler colonial objectives. Taken together, this dissertation advances critical environmental justice scholarship in three primary ways. First, by connecting rural environmental injustices with urban actors and interests, the study shows how racial and colonial practices come together to drive spatial inequalities. Environmental justice scholars have begun to question more persistently who benefits from environmental harm and connect environmental disadvantage to environmental privilege. By looking at water development across the rural-urban interface, I show how officials representing urban interests not only limited the threat of the NIIP to non-Native users but also asserted greater control over regional water resources. Urban places benefited with a secure water supply for development while rural places continued to struggle with basic infrastructure needs. Second, I show how environmental conflicts contribute to racialization. During NIIP project negotiations, Navajo officials met with racialized ideas about citizenship, natural resource management, and tribal nationhood that worked to diminish Navajo sovereignty and legal claims to San Juan waters. These racial projects were specifically tailored to rural land use and resources, suggesting that racialization may occurs differently in urban and rural settings in ways that shape the formation and experience of environmental inequality.

Third, I expand research on the workings of state power within the production of environmental injustice by revealing mundane forms of legal-rational domination. These mechanisms provided flexible tools for project officials to reduce the impact of the NIIP under the cover of law. The Navajo Tribe recognized and resisted the many bureaucratic attempts to remake the project, but the conflicts attracted little public attention or controversy. The bureaucratic and legal cover thus helped to legitimize environmental inequality. In this case, the bureaucratic mechanisms worked to align the project settler colonial objectives of limiting Native access and control over natural resources but could easily be mobilized to accomplish other ends. The history of water development in the San Juan River Basin continues to hold relevance for water management and conflicts today. As others have pointed out, federal Indian water law grants Indigenous people priority rights but remains colonial law that and frequently fails Indige- nous people (Curley 2019a). Understanding the history American Indian water projects within settler colonial contexts can inform resistance and pathways toward more sustainable and equitable water futures. Resistance to water colonization comes in many forms, including asserting tribal rights to co-govern shared resources (Cantzler and Huynh 2016; Emanuel and Wilkins 2020), rejecting water quantification and rights settlements (Curley 2019a), and fighting fossil fuel and other extractive industries that threaten waterways (Estes 2019; Gilio-Whitaker 2019). Through these activities, Indigenous people have taken the lead in imagining alternative ways of living with water (McGregor, Whitaker and Sritharan 2020; Wilson et al. 2019).

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