Geography Creative Lab

Unraveling Water Governance in Arizona: A Historical Tale of Colonial Exploitation in the Navajo Nation

Ella Schubiger creates an original ArcGIS story map exploring Indigenous land use and colonial water relations in the Navajo Nation through the fictional life of one indigenous member. Read her introduction to this project below.

Explore the project HERE.

Ella Schubiger is a postgraduate scholar at the Geography Department at the University of Zurich.

Written and created by: Ella Schubiger

Edited by: Jasnea Sarma

In 2016, I arrived as a foreign exchange student in Arizona, a state in the USA that is often only recognized for its hot, dry desert climate, the Grand Canyon, and towering Saguaro cacti. Back then, I wondered how I would ever survive the heat and drought that plagues the state for more than six months every year. Soon I noticed that nearly every single-family house in the Phoenix suburbs had a swimming pool, and some communities were even centered around artificial canals and lakes. I asked myself how this type of water management could be sustainable. The loss of water to urban landscape beautification, private recreational use, and the unhindered loss of water to evaporation in a region with intense solar radiation and heat appeared wasteful to me. In Switzerland, I was accustomed to a different approach to water management, whereby most of the water supply is kept underground or covered and only few people have private pools.

This question lingered in the back of my mind and resurfaced during the fall semester of 2023 in the “Political Geography” class. Tasked with choosing a project topic, I seized the opportunity to work through the issue of water management and allocation in Arizona. As I reflected on my experience in Arizona, I also realized that my U.S. history class in high school never covered the topic of Indigenous American tribes living in Arizona, such as the Hopi, Mohave, Apache, Zuni or Navajo Nation, to name a few. After a bit of research, it became clear to me that water management and allocation and indigenous water governance in Arizona are intricately entangled and continue to pose many challenges related to water inequalities among indigenous populations today.

The Navajo Nation, spanning parts of Northeast of Arizona and parts of New Mexico and Utah, is home to the largest Indigenous American tribe in the United States. The tribe faces numerous water-related challenges, including infrastructural, financial and environmental obstacles. As the reservation is rugged and only sparsely populated, many households lack plumbing access within their homes and are forced to haul water over long distances from wells and tanks. This burden is compounded by widespread disproportional poverty and the health hazards posed by unregulated water sources chemically contaminated by past mining activities. Indigenous scholars and activists argue that these inequalities are rooted deep in historical colonial dynamics that influenced water laws, resource allocation, and Indigenous sovereignty (see Andrew Curley, Mikayla Johnson, and Nicole Horseherder).

The historical trajectory of water inequalities is a complex tapestry of legislative acts, treaties, and legal cases. Key examples include the 1868 Treaty establishing the Navajo Nation reservation, followed by the Indian Appropriation Act of 1871, which ended the recognition of Indian nations as independent entities. The General Allotment Act of 1887 aimed at assimilating indigenous populations and dividing indigenous land, while the 1922 Colorado Compact allocated Colorado River water without sufficiently considering indigenous claims. The Central Arizona Project of the 1960s established a major water transport system, and the 2004 Arizona Settlement Act settled but also imposed permanent restraints on tribal water rights. Most recently, the 2023 legal case Arizona v. Navajo Nation denied state responsibility for Navajo water claims under the 1868 treaty. From the seminal 1868 Treaty to the recent Arizona v. Navajo Nation case, these legal instruments have consistently sidelined Navajo water rights in favor of broader state and federal interests, contributing to ongoing water scarcity and infrastructural deficits. This legacy of marginalization reflects a broader pattern of colonial exploitation, where water governance has been used to erode indigenous sovereignty and facilitate the assimilation and control of indigenous populations. Today, water governance in the Navajo Nation is severely constrained by the historical limitations that have been imposed upon it and litigation efforts are difficult, timely and costly.

Therefore, I wanted to creatively present this historical trajectory of water governance in Arizona and Navajo Nation through an ArcGIS Story Map. The platform offers a well-composed website layout facilitating active engagement of the viewer. After a couple of introductory paragraphs, the actual story map commences. By scrolling down, the viewer is taken on an explorative journey through space and time. The story itself follows the life events of a fictional member of the Navajo tribe, called Ahiga. To provide a comprehensive account of the most significant events in the history of indigenous and water governance in the Navajo Nation, the lifespan of Ahiga has been extended to cover 160 years. This allows Ahiga’s story to serve as a window into the intricacies of water governance, illuminating the more intimate effects of broader socio-political and economic dynamics.

While the story unfolds through text and image on the left side of the screen, a map view on the right dynamically changes and highlights different locations and spatial and topographic features. There are some interactive buttons implemented in the text to actively involve the viewer in map exploration. The map itself I created by integrating OpenStreetMap data, US Census data, and (historic) maps, which I digitally traced to extract spatial features. The map layers were initially processed in QGIS, and then uploaded to ArcGIS Online for the final layout. To add character to the story, I used a text-to-image model (DALL-E by OpenAI) to generate digital images from natural language descriptions. This allowed for contextual visual support and in-depth story telling. Finally, the narrative is concluded in a couple of paragraphs that integrate the story with the historical trajectory of water governance in the Navajo Nation.

While Ahiga’s story remains fictional, it does build on the lived realities of Navajo tribe members. However, it could never even remotely serve them justice. Thus, I am linking here further resources for you to check out.

Related to water governance

Related to general indigenous / native governance, life, and empowerment

Scientific resources

  • Biolsi, Thomas. 2005. “Imagined Geographies: Sovereignty, Indigenous Space, and American Indian Struggle.” American Ethnologist 32(2):239–59. doi: 10.1525/ae.2005.32.2.239.
  • Bray, Laura. 2021a. “Dividing the San Juan: Settler Colonialism, Water Inequality, and Rural Injustice in the US Southwest.” Dissertation, Graduate Faculty of North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina.
  • Bray, Laura. 2021b. “Settler Colonialism and Rural Environmental Injustice: Water Inequality on the Navajo Nation.” Rural Sociology 86(3):586–610. doi: 10.1111/ruso.12366.
  • Curley, Andrew. 2019a. “T’áá Hwó Ají t’éego and the Moral Economy of Navajo Coal Workers.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109(1):71–86. doi: 10.1080/24694452.2018.1488576.
  • Curley, Andrew. 2019b. “Unsettling Indian Water Settlements: The Little Colorado River, the San Juan River, and Colonial Enclosures.” Antipode 53(3):705–23. doi: 10.1111/anti.12535.
  • Curley, Andrew. 2021. “Infrastructures as Colonial Beachheads: The Central Arizona Project and the Taking of Navajo Resources.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 39(3):387–404. doi: 10.1177/0263775821991537.
  • Deitz, Shiloh, and Katie Meehan. 2019. “Plumbing Poverty: Mapping Hot Spots of Racial and Geographic Inequality in U.S. Household Water Insecurity.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109(4):1092–1109. doi: 10.1080/24694452.2018.1530587.
  • Hunt, Sarah Elizabeth. 2014. “Witnessing the Colonialscape: Lighting the Intimate Fires of Indigenous Legal Pluralism.” PhD Thesis, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada.
  • Washington, Elizabeth Yeager, and Stephanie van Hover. 2011. “Diné Bikéya: Teaching about Navajo Citizenship and Sovereignty.” The Social Studies 102(2):80–87. doi: 10.1080/00377996.2010.497177.

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