Unsettled Waters

Abstract

Water rights adjudications happen quietly every day across the western United States, sorting Indian water rights, claims by cities, and use by agriculture. This book argues that these state-driven court procedures change what they purport to merely measure and understand about water within state boundaries. Adjudications have unwittingly brought back to the surface old disputes over the meaning of water and access to it. Because of their adversarial court process and identity cleaving between Indian and non-Indian water rights, the state simultaneously faces resistance and friction over water use. Unsettled Waters uses insights from ethnography, geography, and critical legal perspectives to demonstrate the power of local negotiation in water settlements and to examine the side effects of these legal agreements and lawsuits in New Mexico, a state struggling with water scarcity. As the process unfolded in the twentieth century, new expert measures and cultures of expertise developed into an adjudication-industrial complex. These added layers of bureaucracy and technology complicated the state’s view of water. Water users have also pushed back against the state and have used the glacial pace of adjudication to adapt to changes in water law while making new demands. The process will also now have to account for climate-related water supply shifts and unquantified Indian water rights, as well as the demands endangered species and rivers themselves. Adjudication in the twenty-first century may serve a completely different purpose than what it was designed for over a century ago.