Interview with Grady Gammage - Central Arizona Project

Indians ought to get a lot of water. It’s really different than that in the sense that,
what the settlements were about were these reserved water claims, or Winter’s
Rights claims. When the Federal Government created the Indian reservations,
the U.S. Supreme Court case called Winters held that they impliedly reserved
enough water for the Indian nations to irrigate the reservations that were created.
Those claims were claims in central Arizona. Claims against the Gila River
which is the Salt and Verde, make up the Gila and the Gila itself as it flows
through Phoenix. Well we dammed up and stopped the Gila from flowing
generations ago. That’s what the Salt River Project was about so there wasn’t
any water in the Gila to satisfy those claims. Exactly how big those claims are at
the end of day, how they would have been quantified and how much would have
been awarded to the Indian Tribes is hard to tell. But most people who were
engaged in that litigation felt it would be very significant, that these were
legitimate claims. The only way to settle them was to find other water because
you can’t take back from the SRP water that now flows to all of our houses. Well
that meant CAP water. So when we began negotiating with the federal
government over the lawsuit, over how much we owed for the canal, what they
really wanted was not money, it was water to settle these claims which were
primarily claims against the federal government. I thought it made sense to use
the CAP water to settle those claims because we had enough water to do it;
because by doing that the water would stay in central Arizona anyway. We made
very clear that we were not settling so a central Arizona Indian tribe could sell it
to Las Vegas or something like that. By doing it we provide the Indian tribes with
Interview with Grady Gammage
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