How to read an Indian water rights settlement
Published 2026-09-01 · Kinetic Gain · figures computed from the site dataset at compile time (2026-09-01)
The master table compresses each settlement to one row. The documents behind a row run to hundreds of pages, and a few recurring concepts do most of the work in them. This is the reading order and the traps, written for researchers and journalists using this dataset.
1. The act is not the decree
A settlement usually exists in at least three legal layers: the negotiated settlement agreement among the parties, the act of Congress that ratifies and funds it (the public-law citation in the table), and the court decree that makes it binding in the underlying adjudication. The New Mexico examples on this site show the full stack: the Aamodt page carries both the 2010 act and the adjudication record from the state engineer, including the 2016 partial final decree and 2017 final judgment. If you cite one document, cite the layer that actually does the thing you are claiming.
2. The priority date is the power
Under the reserved-rights doctrine (explainer here), a tribal right's priority date is generally the reservation's creation date, and for some Pueblo claims it is earlier still. In prior-appropriation systems, seniority determines who gets water in a shortage. When you read a settlement, the priority date provisions are worth more attention than the headline acre-feet, because they control what the acre-feet are worth in a dry year.
3. Acre-feet do not compare across settlements
The table's water column is deliberately conservative and the site warns about this next to the table itself: settlements quantify water differently. Some state a diversion right (what may be taken from the stream), some a depletion right (what may be consumed and not returned), some split surface and groundwater, and some quantify only part of a tribe's claims. Two rows with the same number can describe very different rights. Before comparing, open both settlement acts and check which quantity is being counted.
4. "Authorized" money is a ceiling
The funding column transcribes CRS's "Authorized Federal Cost." Authorization is permission to spend, not spending: appropriations arrive separately, sometimes across many years and sometimes short of the ceiling. The companion analysis works through what the aggregate figure does and does not mean.
5. Absence of a number is information
Where this site prints "not stated in sources reviewed," that is a statement about the sources, not about the world. Four enacted settlements have no CRS funding figure; several New Mexico adjudication pages print no case number at all. A dataset that filled those cells with estimates would be more complete and less true. Treat every null as an invitation to the primary record, which each page links.
6. Where to go for the primary documents
- Acts: the public-law links on each settlement page go to govinfo or congress.gov.
- Decrees and adjudication filings: for the New Mexico cases, the state engineer's pages linked from each settlement page; for federal dockets, CourtListener.
- Doctrine cases: every case page links the primary opinion.
- Machine-readable summary: settlements.json with a sha256 sidecar, every record carrying its source URLs and retrieval dates.
The discipline this site holds itself to is the same one worth holding any secondary source to, this page included: if a claim matters, follow it down one layer.