MISHONGNOVI - As a member of the Hopi tribal council, Marilyn Tewa supported a plan two years ago that would have delivered water from the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers to her people and to Navajos on their northern Arizona reservations, where tens of thousands of people live without running water.

The plan would have secured the rights to billions of gallons from the two rivers and authorized a federally funded distribution system of pipelines and reservoirs, satisfying claims that the tribes were put on the arid reservations without adequate resources. With the water, the tribes could supply homes and businesses and rebuild ties to rivers with deep cultural import.

Native American water controversy

On a recent April morning in her home atop Second Mesa on the Hopi Reservation, Tewa flipped through the remnants of that deal with disgust. She no longer sits on the council, but if she did, she said, she would vote against what, in her view, has become a very different settlement, one introduced by U.S. Sen. Jon Kyl in February.

"They want us to sign away our rights to the river and negotiate for our own groundwater," said Tewa, who now works with advocacy groups that oppose the measure. "They look at us like we don't know what we're doing. But we do know. We do know what we have. We're fighting for our children so they'll have something left."

The revised agreement represents the new realities of Washington, where money no longer flows like water downhill. The deal still allots the tribes all the unclaimed water in the Little Colorado River, but it includes no money to deliver it beyond farms and homes along the river. It postpones a long-sought settlement of claims to the Colorado, which would require long, expensive pipelines. And the promised infrastructure has been pared down to three groundwater systems, providing a delivery system for the same pool of water already available.

Kyl describes the settlement as the "best opportunity to achieve the best result." In remarks on the Senate floor in February, he said it "shocks the conscience that in this day and age, many on the Navajo and Hopi reservations only have access to the amount of water they can haul." Without the deal, the tribes' claims could languish in the courts for years, even decades.

Yet in the three months since he introduced the measure, opposition to it has swelled. When Kyl and Sen. John McCain, both R-Ariz., met with Navajo and Hopi leaders in Tuba City last month, nearly 300 protesters waved signs denouncing the agreement. Opponents have filled meeting rooms at a series of seven forums around the reservations, peppering leaders with questions. Several former tribal chairmen and presidents have railed against the deal publicly.

Current tribal leaders believe much of the opposition is based in a misunderstanding of the agreement itself, which was not released at the same time Kyl's enabling legislation was filed. A common complaint is that the deal cuts the tribes' ties to the Little Colorado, whereas the text of the settlement actually preserves those ties.

"We're not giving up any rights, and we're not giving up any water," said Leo Manheimer, a member of the Navajo Nation Water Rights Commission. "We're trying to settle our rights and bring dependable water to our communities."

There is also a ticking clock. Kyl, who has shepherded all of the state's major Indian water settlements, retires in January and without him, many wonder if any agreement or enacting legislation could make it through Congress and the Arizona Legislature.

The opponents say they won't accept an agreement they believe is unjust. They don't believe the tribes should have to negotiate for groundwater that has been theirs all along. They say a future Congress could refuse to set aside money for projects to deliver the water. And they are seething about a provision in the deal that offers an extra share of water if the tribes renew land and coal leases for a power plant near Page that draws on the same aquifer promised to the tribes.

"What we are giving up is our potential," said Jihan Gearon, a Navajo and executive director of the Black Mesa Water Coalition, one of several groups trying to defeat the Kyl settlement. "We need water to do anything. Without water, we can't come back to the reservation. We need to empower our own people."

Deal took years

For years, Navajo and Hopi leaders believed they would reach a settlement with the federal government for a share of renewable surface water from the Colorado and Little Colorado rivers, along with funding to build the infrastructure needed to distribute the water.

Such a plan emerged in 2010, allotting water from the two rivers and laying out plans for pipelines, including a long-awaited delivery system from Lake Powell. The deal grew out of a 2004 water-rights settlement with the Gila River Indian Community and other tribes that set aside additional water for future claims.

The water was there. It was the money that dried up. The estimated cost of the pipelines topped $800million, an appropriation that Kyl knew would never make it out of a Congress suddenly focused on deficits and spending.

"It was way too expensive," Kyl said. "I told everyone in this tough budget period, we have to get the costs to the bare minimum. Even with what we did, it may be too rich."

The settlement presented to the tribes in 2010 would have diverted 31,000 acre-feet a year from the lower Colorado River and all of the unallocated flow of the Little Colorado River, which could have amounted to 160,000 acre-feet a year depending on the year's snowpack, the river's largest source of water.

An acre-foot is 325,851 gallons. That's enough to serve two average households for a year, but on the Navajo Reservation, where water scarcity forces people to do with less, it could serve many more homes.

That agreement also quantified the tribes' rights to the two big aquifers underneath the reservations, the Navajo and the Coconino aquifers, and included delivery infrastructure.

Kyl returned to the negotiating table with tribal leaders and representatives from cities, agricultural water users, water providers and power utilities. What emerged was a less-expensive settlement of claims to the Little Colorado River and two huge aquifers beneath the two reservations.

The deal still includes all the unallocated water from the Little Colorado that flowed far enough downstream to reach the reservations. The tribes could use as much groundwater as they needed from the aquifers beneath their reservations, and there would be buffer areas just outside the reservation boundaries where pumping by non-Indian users would be limited.

The agreement also includes three groundwater-delivery projects, two for Navajo communities and one for Hopis, at a cost of about $350 million. Congress would have to agree to spend the money before any water could be delivered to homes, but tribal leaders say the systems would provide more reliable water than the Little Colorado, whose flows fluctuate.

Kyl's enabling legislation includes one other provision. If the Navajo tribe can ensure the renewal of land leases for the Navajo Generating Station, a coal-fired power plant outside Page, and the mine near Kaytena that supplies the plant's coal, the federal government will release an additional 6,411 acre-feet of water for communities in eastern Arizona.

Some supporters of the Little Colorado settlement say they're not comfortable with the inclusion of the power-plant leases in the deal, but tribal leaders say the provision would unlock water that would have been unreachable for decades and would preserve the economic benefits of the power plant and the coal mine.

Even with that addition and without the Colorado River settlement, tribal leaders say, the proposed agreement is better than anything that might come out of the courts, where river adjudications can languish for years.

"With those kinds of court-related settlements, you're not sure how long it's going to take," said Manheimer, the water commissioner. "It could be in and out of court indefinitely. In addition to getting a good deal, you've got certainty, something our people need."

Opposition forms

At a meeting in a school gym about 15 miles northeast of Tuba City, former Navajo Tribal Chairman Peter MacDonald told the crowd of 150 people, mostly Navajos, a story about negotiating with a livestock thief for the return of a stolen sheep.

The thief in his story was the federal government, the sheep the tribe's water. MacDonald worked the room like a preacher, switching seamlessly between English and Navajo as he explained his analogy using a water bottle as a prop, and noting its cost -- a dollar -- at a reservation Bashas' market.

"The negotiations have been kept under wraps," MacDonald said. "A great deal of our own people don't understand what is going on. The best thing we can do is stop it before it becomes law."

The appearance of a former tribal chairman at a local forum staged by opponents of the proposed water settlement underscored the tensions involved. The appearance of three former chairmen -- two former Hopi leaders listened to MacDonald's fiery oratory -- gave the opponents hope that their message could resonate.

"Our grandparents taught us that the water was there and we were put there to have it," said Anna Frazier, a Navajo from Dilkon and coordinator of the group Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment. "Now the only thing we can do about it is educate the people and give them a voice."

The people in the audience at the Rocky Ridge boarding school told their own stories of hauling water across dirt roads that wash out after storms, of finding another well dry or contaminated, of watching springs die. They had held out hope for a pipeline from the rivers.

Evelyn Simonson has moved around the Navajo Reservation most of her life, helping her mother take care of kids and livestock. When she was younger, springs would bubble out of the ground, providing water for people and sheep. By the 1980s, she said, the springs started to dry up.

"We used to grow corn, but now the crops die without water," she said. "Even the rain isn't enough. The last few years, there's no water, just wind."

Howard Dennis, a Hopi activist, said the damage from excessive groundwater pumping is clear at places like Toreva Spring, near Second Mesa, a source of water for ceremonies. At the spring earlier that day, he walked gingerly down the terraced wall of a deep basin. A murky pool sits at the bottom, leaves floating on the surface, the masonry walls of the basin exposed.

"The water used to be up to there," Dennis said, pointing to a line on the rocks several feet above the current level. "And higher, in the 1950s, a lot higher. Now we're praying for the springs to have a life."

Amid the controversy, a former Navajo president, state Rep. Albert Hale, D-St. Michaels, has appealed to opponents to accept the proposal, which he said would ensure a reliable water supply without years of fighting.

"If we do not approve and support the settlement, the alternative is more decades of fruitless litigation," Hale wrote in a letter. "We will spend more years sitting on the hilltop watching the Little Colorado River flow off the Navajo Nation and saying 'all that water belongs to the Navajo people.' To me that is not acceptable."

Some disappointment

Marie Gladue walked to the top of a ridge and stopped, listening for bells that would tell her if the sheep had wandered in her direction. Silence.

She stared across an arroyo wide enough to allow her to grow corn and squash, as her family has done for generations, wherever they have settled amid the wide mesas. "People see water in economic terms," she said slowly. "We are forgetting the cultural significance of it, the spiritual significance of it. That's what's missing."

Gladue bears the scars of other cultural wars. She and her family refused to leave their land more than a decade ago when the Navajo and Hopi were drawing lines across disputed portions of Big Mountain on the edge of Black Mesa, halfway between Tuba City and Kayenta.

Back at her family's compound, her mother, 95-year-old Katherine Smith, lives in a modern house with everything but running water. A tribal settlement that includes infrastructure seems written for them. Except this one. It seems like another disappointment, so limited that it will provide for too few of the people who need the water so much.

Years ago, the family had no vehicle to haul water across 30 miles of winding hardpack road, but it didn't matter, Smith said, because enough water flowed from springs and wells.

"There was water in the springs for the livestock," she said in Navajo, as her daughter translated. "And, most important, it rained. Now it doesn't rain."

Gladue said the proposed water settlement would change the reservation, perhaps in ways not immediately clear.

"It's not just losing land or water," she said. "It's losing the ability to build a better community, to build a healthy community."

People ask why she and others remain on the reservation when they have no electricity or running water, why any government should build a pipeline when water flows in nearby towns.

"It's easier for people to pick up and move to a city," Gladue said, taking her search for the sheep in another direction. "But somehow that has to be reversed. The water is a big part of being a part of the land. We have to find the cultural and the spiritual part of the water, rather than just the money part of it."