Indian Water Rights Settlements: A rase Study in the Rhetoric of Implementation

Floyd Flores, an aide to the San Xavier Reservation District Council, spoke to a mute panel from the United States Bureau of Reclamation at a public hearing early in 1989. His concern, which he reiterated in the Tohono O'odham language for the elders, was with the proper disposition of human remains found on lands to be disturbed-subjugated-for the "San Xavier Development Project," a ten-thousand-acre farm. Juliann Ramon, a member of the district council, framed the issue at hand quite pointedly: If the remains of her ancestors were disturbed, her people would be "cursed with pain and disease until the seventh generation." Other Tohono O'odham addressed the same worry at the hearing on San Xavier Reservation and at a sparsely attended hearing the previous day in Sells, seat of government for the Tohono O'odham Nation. At the Sells meeting, tribal officials spoke by their absence. Members of the tribe's Water Resources Committee attended neither hearing, again making a statement of sorts. The Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) representatives, following a protocol they had constructed through scores of meetings with Indian and non-Indian beneficiaries of the Central Arizona Project (CAP) over the last decade, deferred their response until the preparation of the final environmental impact statement on the proposed farm (see fig. 1)