About this index
A reference index of Indian water rights settlements and reserved-rights case law, compiled from U.S. public records with a citation on every figure.
Who publishes this
Kinetic Gain LLC, an independent data and software company. We are not a law firm, employ no attorneys, offer no legal services, and take no position in any water dispute. This site does not speak for any tribal nation, agency, or party.
Methodology
- Sources: the Department of the Interior's Secretary's Indian Water Rights Office settlement list, Congressional Research Service reports (chiefly R44148), the New Mexico Office of the State Engineer's adjudication records, CourtListener / Free Law Project, congress.gov, and issuing courts' own sites. 52 source fetches are logged in the ingestion ledger.
- No invented values: a figure appears only if a cited source states it. "Not stated in sources reviewed" means exactly that: never zero, never an estimate.
- Provenance: every record carries its source URLs and retrieval dates. The dataset is downloadable (JSON, CSV) and each ingestion run is logged.
- Update cadence: the settlement registry is reviewed against DOI and CRS periodically; the pending tracker is a dated snapshot. Every page states the compile date.
- What we deliberately exclude: live litigation status tracking (it stales dangerously), editorial characterization of sacred or ceremonial sites beyond what public decrees themselves state, hydrological figures we have not ingested from the primary gauge records, and any form of legal analysis.
On the data itself
The underlying facts (statutes, case citations, court records, agency lists) are U.S. public records. Our compilation of them is released under CC0: use the dataset freely, though we'd appreciate a link. Case summaries are our own plain-English descriptions of public records; verify against the primary record before relying on them.
A note on whose water this is
This index describes the legal records of water rights held by sovereign tribal nations. We index public adjudication records; we do not interpret, advocate, or speak for any nation. Where settlement decrees protect named cultural sites, we use the decree's own language and go no further. If you represent a tribal water office and want something corrected, contextualized, or removed, use the corrections contact below; that request gets priority.
Corrections
Found an error? Email corrections@kineticgain.com with the page URL and, ideally, a primary source. Corrections ship with the next compile and are noted in the repository history.
Privacy
This site sets no cookies, runs no analytics, serves no ads, and collects no personal data. By default it loads no third-party resources. The one exception is deliberate: some articles carry a video that loads from YouTube (privacy-enhanced mode) only if you press play; until you do, no request leaves the page.