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.

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. 

Such a hereafter was at the forefront of Big Wind Carpenter’s mind as they sat on a soft gray beach beside Bull Lake Dam, the first of a triumvirate of federally-built and privately-managed dams on the reservation that feed a non-Indian irrigation district, and a place Big Wind’s family used to recreate when they were younger. Big Wind, a member of the Northern Arapaho, uses “they/them/their” pronouns, and asked to be identified by their nickname, after the Big Wind River running through the heart of the reservation, instead of their Anglo surname.  

“I grew up here. We’d come here during the summer. We’d ice fish in the winter, and we’d set up a campfire over here,” Big Wind said, pointing to a shaded area surrounded by cottonwoods and junipers. The family could usually count on hauling in ling and trout, but today the climate activist isn’t so sure future generations will be able to enjoy this place in the same way. “I think of this resource not being here in the future,” Big Wind said.

As humanity continues to burn fossil fuels that heat the climate, glaciers in the mountains around the reservation are receding. Without the moisture that trickles down from them, Bull Lake and other reservoirs on the reservation could soon yield much less water, making agriculture, aquatic life and even human survival on the Wind River reservation—already rife with tension—even more difficult. 

“It’s not looking good,” Big Wind said.

That vision of a desiccated future for the reservation turned even more grim in 2023 when U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman, a Republican and Wyoming’s only House member, proposed a bill that would have directed the federal Bureau of Reclamation to give the Pilot Butte power plant, a defunct hydroelectric facility and its reservoir on the reservation, to a nearby agricultural community. The legislation giving Midvale the hydropower plant that once provided electricity to parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska and Wyoming would provide that community with renewable energy each spring and summer. But it would have also further solidified non-native farmers’ control over a river within the reservation. For the tribes, this move was an affront to their sovereignty, and there’s concern that with a Republican trifecta in Washington, it may happen again. 

They believe the water in question is theirs, and any law that transfers land or infrastructure from the federal government to private management within the boundary of their reservation is a continuation of centuries of mistreatment from both.

For the entirety of the reservation’s history, its water has poured down from the snow and ice in the Wind River mountains, known to locals as “the Winds”—towering peaks home to some of the country’s most stunning and climate-vulnerable glaciers. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, by 2015, snowpack in the Winds had diminished by as much as 80 percent, and researchers from Central Wyoming College studying glaciers in the range estimated in 2018 that some may disappear altogether in five or six decades.

More recent reports have found that average temperatures in the ecosystems around the Wind River reservation have risen 2.3 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1950s, and peak streamflow is occurring more than a week earlier, leaving less water to go around later in the summer when it is hottest and driest.

Bull Lake Dam is the manmade extension of a prehistoric impression on the land created to augment the flow of the Big Wind River, which runs through the heart of the Eastern Shoshone’s and Northern Arapaho’s reservation. 

Cover photo:  Diversion Dam is where Midvale irrigators divert water from the Big Wind River, which regional tribes want to flow at higher volumes past this point. Credit: Jake Bolster/Inside Climate News