“Mní wičhóni”. “Water is life”.
The Indigenous tribes of the Great Plains of North America understood this Lakota phrase as a tenement of water’s necessity to human life and their understanding of the sacred world around them. The dry plains of North America have been home to numerous Indigenous tribes, including the Lakota and Blackfoot, for thousands of years. Before colonization and western expansion, these tribes developed and practiced their own techniques for living in harsh, arid conditions that combined religious and spiritual stories with observations of the natural ecological world. These tribes understood relationships within the environment that modern ecologists are just now beginning to study, including the dynamics between beavers and their dams' abilities to produce freshwater oases which the Blackfoot utilized to access water for daily living.
Devastatingly, these practices and sacred connections to the natural world and its resources have been forcibly removed from many Indigenous communities. The genocide, erasure, and purposeful segregation of Indigenous people in the United States and Canada has detrimentally impacted public health outcomes for these communities with one of the largest harms being a lack of access to clean water.
Across the US, Indigenous communities are some of the most vulnerable populations due to a lack of clean, accessible, and affordable water for drinking or sanitation. The US Water Alliance estimates that 58 of every 1,000 Indigenous households lack indoor plumbing compared to only 3 of 1,000 white households. Local officials suspect this number may be even higher due to limited resources for monitoring and a lack of national effort to effectively address water inequity on many tribal reservations. In the Navajo Nation, the second largest tribal group in the US, 30% of residents lack access to any running water and are forced to haul water, often traveling over 40 miles every few days to collect water for drinking, bathing, and cooking. Not only is this time-consuming but costly. A resident reported that it costs them $200 dollars a month in gas from their various trips to collect water for their household. Some residents do have indoor plumbing but it is frequently inconsistent or unsafe and contaminated. Rheana Apachitto, a resident of the Navajo community To'hajiilee in New Mexico, brings in her drinking water from nearby Albuquerque but uses her piped water for showers. She states, “In the past couple of years it’s been more like orange, On our hair, it makes it hard. Our skin is drier. Sometimes it comes out orange, brown, black.”
Across the Navajo Nation, groundwater is consistently contaminated by the 521 abandoned uranium mines that litter the Southwest. The adverse health effects of drinking or bathing in contaminated water are numerous. The CDC has linked low water services to respiratory infections, gastric diseases, and higher rates of cancers across Indigenous reservations and communities. Secondary effects of low water services include higher rates of diabetes in the Navajo Nation due to increased consumption of sugary beverages, often more readily available than clean water.
The Indian Health Services estimates that $200 million is needed to provide all Navajo homes with basic water and sanitation. This is one of the many barriers to providing clean and accessible water to tribal lands. A key factor in this barrier is that federal funding for any water infrastructure is scarce. Indigenous communities are not the only US residents who experience low water service. 44 million people across the US each year are served by water systems that have had Safe Drinking Water Act violations. Many federal officials cite inaccessible areas, logistical complications, and widely spread rural communities as reasons for inaction. However, the major barrier is simply the sheer cost of these projects, many of which are deemed outside of the governmental budget. The Indian Health Service claims that 28% of proposed projects to bring Indigenous households up to national water and sanitation standards were deemed “infeasible” due to cost. The IHS estimates that the total cost of projects deemed “feasible” by the government is over $900 million dollars. These projects are slow-moving, very costly, and difficult to complete, resulting in small band-aid fixes to water systems that should be rehauled from the ground up.
Nowhere is this more clear than in Alaska. Alaska is home to two-thirds of the nation’s federally recognized tribes, with 229 distinct groups located within its borders. The cost to bring Alaska's sanitation systems up to standard is an estimated 1.4 billion dollars. Alaska serves as one of the most severe examples of barriers preventing Indigenous access to clean water. Indigenous communities are predominantly rural, largely due in part to the reservation and land grant systems that the US government used to segregate Indigenous people from colonizers. In Alaska, this looks like numerous rural communities with less than 500 people and that can only be accessed by small planes. While rural Indigenous communities in the continental US are marginally more accessible, most national projects to provide water still face geographic and logistical issues when designing community-wide water systems. Combined with the legacy of persecution of Indigenous peoples by the US government that has resulted in prejudice and racism, cost and logistical issues continue to stall water access projects across the US. Additionally, many of the upkeep costs of these large-scale water projects are left to the communities they serve, which become impossible as almost a quarter of Indigenous people live below the poverty line.
Nonprofits and national alliances are being forced to step up to fill the cracks. Community Outreach and Patient Empowerment (COPE) works in the Navajo Nation by partnering with local convenience stores and trading posts to provide clean water, emphasize water within Diné culture, and maintain filtered water systems in schools and childcare centers. The National Tribal Water Center serves tribal communities, primarily those in rural Alaska, by providing health initiatives that promote the use of treated water, research into the most cost-effective ways to deliver safe water, and art rooted in local culture to engage community members in water education. Additionally, Indigenous activists have been fighting to protect access to contamination-free water by protesting pipelines and oil drilling with the Water is Life movement. This Indigenous-led movement has prevented continued construction on the Transnational Keystone XL pipeline and pushed the Supreme Court to acknowledge that the Dakota Access Pipeline has been built and continues to be built against environmental laws.
Indigenous people continue to be this land's most committed caretakers. The US’ widespread inaction to provide clean and safe water for these communities continues to perpetuate harm, especially to the most vulnerable. Only through continued advocacy for clean water programs, centralizing Indigenous communities and knowledge, and increased federal funding for sanitation projects can the US begin to address water inequity. Water is life, and it's high time we start prioritizing it and the lives of those who lack it.
Author
Phoebe Norman is currently finishing up her last year at the University of Vermont, where she is studying Public Health and Microbiology. Her dream job is to one day to combine health advocacy and epidemiology researching women's reproductive and sexual health internationally. In the meantime, she’s an avid rock climber and hiker, spending most of her free time outside exploring with friends.
Cover photo: Photo by Jolanda Kirpensteijn on Unsplash
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