Corrections & Clarifications: A previous version of this article misspelled the name of Emma Robbins, director of the Navajo Nation Water Project for the nonprofit DigDeep.

Three winters ago, Sen. Jamescita Peshlakai experienced firsthand the impact of the lack of running water or other basic infrastructure for many homes in the Navajo Nation.

“My niece’s trailer caught fire,” said Peshlakai, D-Cameron. “She and her husband burned to death. They pushed their baby out the window.” The child survived and is now in the care of her grandparents.

With the nearest fire station nearly 30 miles away, and no fire hydrants nearby to supply water to fight fires, Peshlakai says living in Cameron is like “living in the wild, wild West.”

Now a new tragedy plagues the Navajo Nation: A shortage of running water is contributing to sickness and death.

As the coronavirus pandemic swept across the United States, few places were harder hit than Navajo land. Its 24,700 square miles are sparsely populated, with only 175,000 Navajo citizens living in an area the size of West Virginia.

Yet as of late last week it had confirmed more than 1,000 cases of COVID-19. As a percentage of the population, the nation's infection rate is nearly 10 times that of Arizona's.

Jason John, director of the Navajo Nation Department of Water Resources, attributes the spread to two things. The tribe faces a chronic housing shortage, with an estimated half of all homes housing multiple generations.

Just as importantly, many of those residents lack running water. While the virus has attuned the whole country to the idea of "wash your hands for 20 seconds," at least 15% of Navajo Nation homes have no running water at all, according to the official tribal tally.

“When one gets it," John said, "it goes through the whole household pretty rapidly."

The real number may be 40% to 50%, Peshlakai said. “You see a lot of NHA (Navajo Housing Authority-built) homes with little hogans or even sheds where children or grandchildren live in their relatives' yard, and then they just get water from their relative,” she said.

The lack of water access has roots in the history of tribal reservations and federal land use, the byzantine nature of western water law, and the broader lack of infrastructure funding for the Navajo Nation, tribal members and experts said.

John said that not having adequate water in the home also makes it nearly impossible to follow one of the most important recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control on how to avoid infection. "It's really hard for families who don't have access to water or wastewater facilities," he said. "They tell you to wash your hands for 20 seconds, but people can't even do that."

The shortages are not only of water. John said a lack of sewer service, electricity and internet all deteriorate public health.

John said the current tally of homes without water is a drop from the 30% listed on the water department’s website or other sources. John attributes that to updated Indian Health Service tallies and to slowly completing a backlog of nearly 400 water and sanitation projects.

In a 2018 report to Congress, the Indian Health Service, which is one of the U.S. government’s primary funders of tribal water and sanitation systems, said that the Navajo Nation has a backlog of more than $450 million in unfunded requests.

Elsewhere the situation is not much better. According to a Johns Hopkins Center for American Indian Health report, 12% of homes throughout Indian Country lack water, compared with 0.6% of all American homes.

Peshlakai sees a remarkable disparity, given that tribal lands supplied the coal for the power plant that drove water through the Central Arizona Project, as well as the construction of Lake Powell and other big federal projects.

“Our natural resources were the seeds and the building blocks of what people think of as ‘high society’ in Phoenix,” she said. “Phoenix is one of the most beautiful cities in the country." All, she said, built from the natural resources found on tribal lands.

Unsettled water claims

On or off tribal land, water supplies in the West are complex.

“I think people, particularly out east, don't understand the difference," said Katosha Nakai of Tribal Policy People, a consulting firm. Nakai, an attorney, is the former manager of tribal relations and policy development at the Central Arizona Project. “East of the Mississippi, if you live in a narrow waterway, you can use that water. Out West, it’s all based on prior appropriations, which means whoever got there first and built it first gets to use it.”

Nakai, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, said that though the U.S. Supreme Court established water rights for tribes in 1903, settlers and other interests constructed water infrastructure much earlier in the West. “That complicates tribes’ ability to quantify how much water they are entitled to,” she said.

Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at the Morrison Institute, pointed to ongoing legal claims over water in the Little Colorado River watershed, which crosses Navajo land. With more than 9,000 claims on the water from 4,200 parties, the settlement is still not a done deal after 42 years. In fact, the case is now being heard in Maricopa County Superior Court.

The last attempt to settle the nation’s water rights was in 2012, when former Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl and the late Sen. John McCain developed a settlement that included funding to build water infrastructure. However, Porter said, despite tribal leaders believing their constituents would approve of the settlement, a last-minute grassroots pushback killed the deal.

Even if rights are settled, Nakai said, that doesn't mean water starts running. Next comes the enormous cost of planning and building infrastructure: pumps, pipelines and distribution systems that have never existed in many places.

Nakai said that constituents often don’t understand how long that takes.

“The population who wants these things to occur gets frustrated about the time it's taking," she said. Changes in administrations also can complicate the process. “Every time your political structure shifts, you start over, you know, new president, new priorities.”

“The cost per household is high in comparison with an urban subdivision,” Porter said. “I look at it and I just think this is just a really tragic situation that people would be living with this kind of water uncertainty.”

Without basic necessities

In many households, the only source of water is to haul it in, bottle by bottle or barrel by barrel, from a communal supply point.

The scarcity has built a culture of water ingenuity, a thrifty attitude toward water that is echoed in homes across tribal land – but one that may now run counter to the idea of constant washing to tamp down the virus.

“We’ve become kind of water experts,” Peshlakai said. “We have drinking water and household cleaning water. We have showering and bathing water. We have water for the plants and the animals, and then we have gray water for anything else that we need like agricultural use.” The family maintains their supply in different barrels.

Her own home lacks water, sewer, electrical or internet service. Peshlakai and her daughter Jamie Lynn Butler are now bathing and cooking at her mom’s house two miles away. “But if we want to get away from each other we go home,” she said.

Even when the Indian Health Service or the nation has funds to hook water up to more homes, there’s a unique barrier: bathrooms. IHS requires that before water can be run to a home, a bathroom must be constructed so they can run the lines directly to where the water will be used.

“So tribal members are being asked to construct bathrooms to justify Indian Health Service building out the lines,” said Nakai. She likens this situation to Martians landing. “Where are they going to get the money to do that?” she said. “But Indian Health Service won't build the line if they don’t have something to hook the lines up to.”

John said that residents are working with the Indian Health Service and the nation’s local governments to get bathrooms added to homes.

Nonprofit delivers a stopgap solution

Emma Robbins, director of the Navajo Water Project for the nonprofit DigDeep, is from Tuba City.

“Cities like L.A. or Phoenix, everyone has running water," Robbins said. "We should be having the same amenities and the same luxuries that everybody else who's living in current-day United States or whatever other part of the Americas has.”

DigDeep helps build community water supply projects in places like tribal land and Appalachia.

“Most of us cut our teeth in international water and sanitation work,” said DigDeep founder George McGraw. “We had really no idea that this problem existed in our own country.”

“We’re working to get families hot and cold running water in their homes through off-grid systems or through assisting with bill payments,” Robbins said. “We also install solar elements for families who don't have electricity."

DigDeep also helps ensure clean water flows through taps already in place. “We worked on installing new piping and filters in one of the only special needs schools on the reservation in St. Michaels,” Robbins said. “They had a safe water source, but the infrastructure in their schools contained lead and copper.”

Leaders frustrated with federal response

Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez said that his government has already expended about $4 million of its own resources to deal with the coronavirus outbreak to serve the 175,000 Navajo people who live on tribal lands.

Nez said that the nation is working with young people who want to help their relatives gain access to water, food and other necessities. “They haul water for them,” said Nez. “We can’t just tell them not to help.” So, he said, “We tell them, ‘Here's a mask, here's some gloves, here's a gown; when you're out there, wear it." The nation also provides training on how to use the protective equipment properly.

Of course, Nez said, Navajo is having to bid against others to get PPE equipment – even against other tribes.

With the training also comes caveats: “You’ve got an elder out there, living out in the rural part of the nation, who has no trace of the bug," said Nez, "and we don't want our volunteer that has a good heart end up taking that bug to our elders.”

Nez is also frustrated with the lack of progress from Congress in funding the large, expensive projects that are now needed to provide water to his nation.

“Congress had had an entire year to pass the Navajo Utah Water Rights Settlement Act," he said. That bill, sponsored by Rep. Rob Bishop, R-Utah, would provide water to at least parts of the nation by a successfully-negotiated agreement between Utah, the U.S. and Navajo.

"We've been asking for that approval for years," Nez said. He attributes the lack of movement on a key bill for his tribe's future needs to congressional gridlock.

Nez said that his frustration that all the work the nation does to prepare plans for congressional action, only to have them fall into a "black hole," is shared by other tribes. "They're all frustrated with Congress right now," he said. "Congress can't get anything passed unless it's an emergency."

Some of Arizona’s congressional delegation are aware of Navajo’s dilemma. “In a time where washing hands, disinfecting surfaces, and practicing good hygiene is more critical than ever before, it is unacceptable that some on Navajo struggle to access this resource so many of us take for granted,” said. U.S. Rep. Tom O’Halleran in an emailed statement. He’s a co-sponsor of the Utah water settlement bill.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and Sen. Martha McSally also pledged their help in resolving Navajo's water woes. “I will keep working with tribal leaders to ensure robust and meaningful government-to-government consultation and ensure the Navajo Nation has access to resources needed to combat this virus, including by strengthening critical infrastructure," Sinema said in a statement.

"Infrastructure needs are an ongoing challenge for the Navajo Nation and other rural tribes and the coronavirus has further highlighted the importance of investment in tribal communities," McSally emailed. "Addressing broader tribal infrastructure needs...has been a priority of mine as a member of the Indian Affairs and Energy and Natural Resources Committees and I will continue to advocate for Arizona’s tribal communities, including water and other infrastructure improvements.”

McSally’s challenger Mark Kelly said in a statement, "The Navajo Nation and other tribal communities cannot continue to be an afterthought in federal relief and infrastructure proposals, and we must make significant investments in roads, rural broadband and to ensure access to water throughout Indian Country."

Nez was glad to hear of the words of support for project studies that he said the Navajo Nation has completed. He's also hopeful that new stimulus bills will include infrastructure projects so the nation can be better prepared to deal with future pandemics.

"Those monies were intended for U.S. citizens," he said, "but they're neglecting the first citizens of this country."

Reach the reporter at debra.krol@AZCentral.com or at 602-444-8490. Follow her on Twitter at @debkrol.

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