Climate Change
Giving a Dam: Wyoming Tribes Push to Control Reservation Water as the State Proposes Sending it to Outside Irrigators
The Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho have long fought for water sovereignty on the Wind River Indian Reservation, but their effort is being challenged by federal legislation and a changing water landscape.
FT. WASHAKIE, Wyo.—Indigenous Peoples’ Day in October was thick with smoke on the Wind River Indian Reservation, with glimmers of fall foliage along its southwestern rivers shrouded in haze beneath a fuzzy horizon. Reservoirs were shriveled by drought, wildfires raged to the northwest, snow was conspicuously absent from mountain peaks and rivers dried to trickles. It wasn’t hard to imagine a future with much less water here.