Follow up to the story ‘A century of federal indifference left generations of Navajo homes without running water’
For a while, Chee Smith Jr. thought he was going to have to send his father to die among strangers. His family lives at Whitehorse Lake, a Navajo chapter where, until a few years ago, roughly 550 of 700 residents had no running water in their homes, including Smith’s. As Smith’s father aged and his health worsened, it became harder and harder for him to live at home.
“We had to haul water from the chapterhouse or the watering points every day for just basic things — for cooking, for laundry, for stuff like that, and also for our livestock,” Smith said. “It takes a big toll. … It gets worse in the winter when it gets muddy.”
The drive to the chapterhouse, the headquarters for local tribal governance, took 20 or 30 miles roundtrip.
If the well there ran low, as they sometimes do, the next closest source required 100 miles round trip, sometimes on ice, or in blowing snow, or on dirt roads that stay slick enough days after a storm to send a vehicle skidding. Some people avoid the slick mud by leaving home before dawn to drive on the roads while the mud is still frozen, then wait until after dark, when the ruts re-freeze, to drive home again.
“We get to the watering point, and then let’s hope that the pipes are not frozen,” Smith, former chapter president for Whitehorse Lake, said.
If the water ran, they filled 50-gallon barrels, which weighed more than 400 pounds, and drove them home, where water came inside in buckets and jugs. No running water also means no bathrooms in the house, and bundling up against the cold to visit an outhouse in winter.
“He didn’t want to go to a rest home. … He thought he’d be lonely, because he didn’t know anybody,” Smith said.
An estimated 30 to 40 percent of homes on the Navajo Nation lack running water, a share second only to the rate found in remote Alaskan villages. The size of the reservation and complexity of its terrain are often blamed, but the failures start with a federal system that promised to provide a home for Navajo people, who call themselves Diné, when establishing the reservation, but has yet to deliver a fully functioning one.
Indian Health Service reports first linked devastating rates of infectious diseases among Native Americans to the absence of basic sanitary facilities in residences a century ago. Since then, infectious diseases have been an ongoing crisis, which the world took note of last year as COVID-19 spread through and ravaged the Navajo Nation. Following guidelines around washing hands and staying home were all but impossible for people who must leave home to replenish their reserves of water and who can’t even turn on a tap to wash their hands.
Addressing lack of water in homes runs into a catch in where to start: begin plumbing communities and houses when there is no water, or build the trunkline that brings water nearby when there are no local waterlines to connect it to the people who live alongside it. The Navajo Gallup Water Supply Project, under construction in New Mexico’s Navajo communities, is testing these approaches.
The project has two main trunk lines, one that runs from the San Juan River to Gallup along Highway 491, called the San Juan Lateral, and another much smaller one that follows Highway 550’s route through a string of Navajo chapters — Huerfano, Nageezi, Counselor, Pueblo Pintado, Ojo Encino, Torreon, and Whitehorse Lake — from east of Bloomfield into Jicarilla Apache communities north of Cuba, called the Cutter Lateral.
On the San Juan Lateral, federal funds are paying to construct a trunkline that communities will then need to find money and develop projects to tap into.
But the Cutter Lateral connects to local chapters that linked water systems in anticipation of its arrival. That grassroots organizing, cooperation, and determined fundraising by a group of Navajo communities aided the Cutter Lateral’s progress toward completion and compelled the federal agencies managing the project into faster action. It also brought water to almost every home in Whitehorse Lake, piped from a well in a nearby community, years before the trunkline was finished in 2020.
“We were basically tying into parts of a system that was started before our project was authorized,” Pat Page, manager of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Four Corners office, which is overseeing the Navajo-Gallup Water Project, said. “It really is a great example of collaboration on many different levels.”
Since the water turned on, five families moved back to the community, Smith said: “A couple of them came back to me, they said ‘Thank you for helping me, that’s what we needed, the running water and electric. That’s the main reason we moved back.’ They’re happy about it.”
For Smith’s father, the water came just in time.
“My dad was very emotional when he turned on the faucet. He couldn’t believe water was coming out,” Smith said. Water meant caretakers could come to him. He was able to spend his last year at home and die among family.”
Smith had begun thinking he might have to send his father to spend his last months in an assisted living facility in Farmington.
Andrew Robertson, a civil engineer with Souder, Miller and Associates, was at a Torreon chapterhouse meeting discussing how to reach a few families without water when an Indian Health Service engineer first mentioned the idea of a project to pipe San Juan River water to these communities.
“At first it was, ‘Yeah, right. … Sure, bring water down from the San Juan River,’” Robertson said.
For those families in Torreon, a water line to their homes wouldn’t help, because there wasn’t any water to fill it. Groundwater wells tap into unregulated water supplies that come with health concerns and are running low in several parts of New Mexico. A pipeline to bring in reliable, high-quality drinking water offered a real solution.
Next Week: PART TWO: Chapters push for the Navajo Gallup Water Supply Project
By Elizabeth Miller
New Mexico In Depth
April 12, 2021
