By Cathlena Plummer
It is the 21st century, in the year 2024, water has become the fight between Natives and the dominant mineral extraction industry.
Last year alone, the artesian water well at St. Christopher’s Mission in Bluff, Utah, served over 80,000 people from around the Navajo reservation, and this well is still going strong.
The late Rev. Harold Baxter Liebler, the founder of St. Christopher’s Mission, intended the well to be used by the Diné, and it was his ministry to maintain the well for that very purpose, but now it is being threatened.
We are now in danger of our artesian water being seized by SITLA, a mineral extraction company, for fracking and mining, as our aquifer is one of the last freshwater sources in the San Juan County region of Utah.
The industry has a long history of continuing to neglect the Indigenous communities that it takes from. The water extraction project from Denver to Las Vegas travels through lands that belong to the Diné, Apache, Hopi, Paiute, and others, yet they have no buy-in to having access to these water lines.
As recently as June 2023, the court case “Arizona V. Navajo Nation” posed the question, “Does the treaty between the Navajo Nation and the United States obligate the federal government to ‘assess’ the water needs of the Navajo and ‘make a plan’ for securing water to meet those needs?” On June 22, 2023, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the answer was no.
Meanwhile, the Navajo suffer. Lack of access to clean water contributed to high death rates on the reservation during the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 150 years after their reservation was created, the Navajo quest for water rights continues.
For more information about the Artesian Water Well in Bluff, Utah, see this Salt Lake Tribune article.
For additional information about the water rights issue with the Navajo Nation, click here.
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The Rev. Cathlena Plummer is the vicar of the Good Shepherd Mission in Fort Defiance, Arizona, and will be a deputy to General Convention. Originally from Bluff, Utah, Plummer cares deeply about preserving our environment for future generations.