07 March 22
I'm Going to Challenge All of You
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06 March 22
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A lot of people think this was very bad idea.
Yes, on Thursday evening the senator from South Carolina logged on and asked:
He added: “The only people who can fix this are the Russian people. Easy to say, hard to do. Unless you want to live in darkness for the rest of your life, be isolated from the rest of the world in abject poverty, and live in darkness you need to step up to the plate.”
Perhaps trying to ward off any questions about his phone being hacked, or having gone temporarily insane, Graham also called for Russians to assassinate Putin during an interview on Fox News, saying anyone willing to do it would be doing “their country a great service” and “the world a great service.”
Is Putin a megalomaniac whose designs on Europe it would be nice to not have to worry about for five consecutive seconds? Sure! Is this helping the situation? Not so much!
To give you an idea of just how insane it is for a sitting U.S. senator to publicly call for the murder of a world leader—and one in possession of nuclear weapons at that—Graham’s declaration was met with widespread condemnation by liberals and conservatives alike. Ted Cruz tweeted, “This is an exceptionally bad idea. Use massive economic sanctions; BOYCOTT Russian oil & gas; and provide military aid so the Ukrainians can defend themselves. But we should not be calling for the assassination of heads of state.” (You know things have gone off the rails when Ted Cruz is making a relatively good point.) Laura Ingraham called the idea “dangerous and stupid.” Representative Ilhan Omar tweeted: “I really wish our members of Congress would cool it and regulate their remarks as the administration works to avoid WWlll.” Former diplomat Norman Eisen asked: “Are you TRYING to cause escalation? Now Putin can say ‘one of the most senior U.S. Senators has called for my assassination.’ Why would you want to help him?”
In a statement, Graham’s spokesman told The Washington Post that people are overlooking the fact that, along with trying to crowdsource an assassination on Twitter, the senator “also expressed he was okay with a coup to remove Putin.” He added: “Basic point, Putin has to go. He also noted it will be—has to be—the Russian people who do it.”
Anyway, this is probably good advice for anyone working for an elected official, now or in the future:
Tucker Carlson says it’s not his fault he was calling for Putin to be named President of the Year as of a week ago
Laura Ingraham: Stop this yacht-seizing madness! It’s not what the Ukrainian people would want!
And now for the tiniest glimmer of hope in humanity
Everything is thoroughly f---ed at the moment, but if you need a reason not to fling yourself into the sea, there’s this:
Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, people around the globe have been looking for ways to help citizens of the embattled country. Several organizations have set up charities and donation centers to help people in Ukraine, but some worry about where their money is going and how much Ukrainians will actually receive.... Instead of donating to charities or nonprofits, some people have been booking stays on Airbnb in Ukrainian cities like Kyiv and Kherson with no intention of visiting—just to send money directly to Ukrainian hosts.
“I did it to show support,” Tiffany Marie, who booked a two-week stay in Kharkiv, told Insider. “I had been wanting to donate but hadn’t found anything that really stuck out to me because I’m not always sure where my money goes, so I wanted to pick a specific person.” Jeanie McDonald, who lives in Ireland and found out about the idea on Instagram, told USA Today she spent “a couple of hundred euros” on bookings on Thursday, spread across 10 to 15 hosts. “[It’s] just a message of support from Ireland…and if we can help them in any way, we’d love to,” she said. “Ireland has a history of a lot of Eastern European people moving here over the last 20, 30 years. So it’s quite dear to us that if we can help them again, we’d love to.” While experts have warned there could be fraudulent accounts created to capitalize on the crisis, Notre Dame law professor Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer told reporter Bailey Schulz that the risk is low: “These are established rentals created well before the current crisis. It does appear to get money to individual Ukrainians very quickly.” Airbnb has said it is waiving all fees for bookings in Ukraine, while on Thursday, its CEO said the company is suspending operations in Russia and Belarus.
Ukrainian servicemen walk at fragments of a downed aircraft seen in Kyiv, Ukraine. (photo: Oleksandr Ratushniak/AP)
Top US diplomat says US working on deal after Kyiv asks allies to send warplanes to fight Russia.
“We are looking actively now at the question of airplanes that Poland may provide to Ukraine and looking at how we might be able to backfill should Poland decide to supply those planes,” he told reporters on Sunday during a visit to Moldova. “I can’t speak to a timeline but I can just say we’re looking at it very, very actively.”
His comments came after Democrat Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a statement that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in a call on Saturday with US Congress members, asked Washington to facilitate the transfer of used Russian planes from Eastern European allies.
Multiple news outlets, meanwhile, reported that the US and Poland are working together to provide Polish Soviet-era warplanes to Ukraine.
Four US officials told Politico the two governments are working on a deal, with the question of how to transfer the planes being the biggest difficulty in a potential arrangement.
“We are working with the Poles on this issue and consulting with the rest of our NATO allies,” a White House spokesperson told Politico.
“We are also working on the capabilities we could provide to backfill Poland if it decided to transfer planes to Ukraine.”
‘We are not standing in the way’
A US defence official confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that Washington is working with allied nations to provide Ukraine with Russian-made aircraft, adding that the US military would backfill them with American warplanes.
Ukrainian military pilots are trained on Russian-made warplanes.
But The Associated Press news agency reported that there appeared to be a logistical problem in sending F-16s to Poland or other East European allies because of a production backlog.
“These countries would essentially have to give their MiGs to the Ukrainians and accept an IOU from the US for the F-16s. The situation is further complicated because the next shipment of F-16s is set for Taiwan, and Congress would be reluctant to delay those deliveries as it eyes China,” it said.
Zelenskyy also spoke by phone to US President Joe Biden on Saturday, but a White House readout said the two leaders discussed US, allies’ and private industry actions to deter Russia, without mentioning the issue of fighter jets.
On Saturday, Blinken met Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba at the Poland-Ukraine border, saying after the meeting: “We are talking about and working on everything.”
“The entire world stands with Ukraine, just as I am standing here in Ukraine with my friend,” Blinken said.
In his call with the Congress members, Zelenskyy also repeated his plea for a no-fly zone over Ukraine and for the US to stop buying Russian oil, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Ukrainian president previously said the absence of a no-fly zone allowed Russia to continue bombing Ukrainian cities and towns. He has also criticised NATO for refusing to impose the no-fly zone, warning that “all the people who die from this day forward will also die because of you”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned Western powers against the no-fly zone, saying it would be seen as a direct step into the military conflict between Russian and Ukrainian forces.
Russia unleashed a full-scale invasion of Ukraine late last month, sending shockwaves to the world.
Western countries have hit the Russian economy with crippling sanctions since then, including removing major Russian banking entities from the SWIFT global transfer system.
Many Western states have also helped Ukraine with military and humanitarian aid.
Mark Meadows and his wife Debbie Meadows walk on an airport tarmac with a jet in the background. (photo: Alex Edelman/Getty Images)
In September, 2020, Donald Trump’s then chief of staff claimed to live in a mobile home in North Carolina.
Meadows does not own this property and never has. It is not clear that he has ever spent a single night there. (He did not respond to a request for comment.) The previous owner, who asked that we not use her name, now lives in Florida. “That was just a summer home,” she told me, when I called her up the other day. She seemed surprised to learn that the residence was listed on the Meadowses’ forms. The property sits in the southern Appalachian mountains, at about four thousand feet, in the bend of a quiet road above a creek in Macon County. She and her husband bought it in 1985. “We’d come up there for three to four months when my husband was living,” she said. Her husband died several years ago, and the house sat mostly unused for some time afterward, she said, because she had “nobody to go up there with anymore.”
She only rented it out twice, she told me. The first renter, she said, was Debbie Meadows, who, according to the former owner, reserved the house for two months at some point within the past few years—she couldn’t remember exactly when—but only spent one or two nights there. The Meadowses’ kids had visited the place, too, she said. The former owner was in Florida at the time, but her neighbors, the Talleys, whom she described as friends of the Meadowses’, debriefed her later. As for Mark Meadows, she said, “He did not come. He’s never spent a night in there.”
The former owner had put the mobile home on the market in the summer of 2020, but the Meadowses never expressed an interest in buying it, she said. The one other time she rented the place out, it was to someone who had: a retail manager at Lowe’s named Ken Abele, who bought the mobile home in August of the following year. Abele said that he’d heard that the Meadows family stayed there in the fall of 2020, when they were in the area for a Trump rally, because nearby hotels were scarce. The realtor who facilitated his purchase, whom I was unable to reach before we went to press, told him this, he said, and the realtor had heard it from the Talleys. It struck him as odd. “I’ve made a lot of improvements,” Abele said, of the mobile home. “But when I got it, it was not the kind of place you’d think the chief of staff of the President would be staying.” I asked him what he made of Meadows listing the property as his place of residence on his voter-registration form. “That’s weird that he would do that,” he said. “Really weird.”
The Talleys live in a white clapboard farmhouse that sits a few hundred yards from Abele’s mobile home. Last week, I dropped by to ask them about all this. Tammy Talley opened the door, and I identified myself.
“Mr. Journalist,” she said with a sigh. “God help us all.”
We spoke for about ten minutes, during which time Talley was never less than genial while seeming to suggest that I was a liar or at the very least had devious intentions. “I have a great distrust for media,” she explained. “I was a Trump supporter and—fake news to the hilt, communism in America, snakes in the grass, the whole nine yards. I am not charmed by the press at all.” I noted that I was a real person, not a fake one. “I see that you’re a real person, and that’s great,” she said. “But the fake news is full of real people with real communist agendas.”
She pointed to her cat, who was staring up at me from her porch steps. The cat, she said, was named Tricki Woo, after a Pekingese that appeared in a show called “All Creatures Great and Small,” which she urged me to watch.
We got to talking about conspiracy theories. “They said Noah was a conspiracy theorist until it started raining,” she said, attributing the quip to “that little Dr. Zelenko,” who helped popularize the antimalarial medication hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for the coronavirus.
I steered the conversation back to Meadows. Talley said that she was friends with Mark and Debbie and that, a few years ago, Debbie had stayed at the mobile home down the road, and their kids had visited, too. (The Meadowses have two adult children.) I said that I’d recently learned that Mark and Debbie linked their voter registration to the mobile home. Was Talley sure that Debbie and the kids had stayed there?
“I know they stayed there because I had them here to my house from time to time,” Talley said. “They were legitimately there. And, yes, they legitimately voted in the legitimate election.”
Slightly thrown by the pronoun, I said, “ ‘They’ being . . . ?”
“Debbie,” she said. “I don’t know what her children did.” She gave me her phone number before I drove off in case I wanted to follow up about a kitten.
After Trump lost the election, Meadows was one of the most influential Republicans claiming without factual evidence that widespread voter fraud had taken place. (He reiterated those claims in a recent memoir.) In late 2020 and early 2021, he e-mailed the Justice Department, urging it to investigate claims of voter fraud, including claims that courts had previously rejected.
Did Meadows potentially commit voter fraud by listing the Scaly Mountain address on his registration form? It’s a federal crime to provide false information to register to vote in a federal election. Under President Trump, the White House Web site posted a document, produced by the conservative Heritage Foundation, intended to present a “sampling” of the “long and unfortunate history of election fraud” in the U.S. Many of the cases sampled involve people who registered to vote at false addresses, including, for instance, second homes that did not serve as a person’s primary residence.
I called Melanie D. Thibault, the director of Macon County’s Board of Elections, and asked her what she made of the Meadowses’ registration forms. “I’m kind of dumbfounded, to be honest with you,” she said, after perusing them. “I looked up this Mcconnell Road, which is in Scaly Mountain, and I found out that it was a dive trailer in the middle of nowhere, which I do not see him or his wife staying in.” (It is not technically a trailer, but it is a modest dwelling.) She said that their registrations had arrived by mail and were entered into the system, and that a voter-registration card was sent to a P.O. Box they’d provided as their mailing address. “If that card makes it to the voter and it’s not sent back undeliverable, then the voter goes onto the system as a good voter,” she said. Meadows had voted absentee, by mail, in the 2020 general election, she added.
“The state board tells us we’re not the police,” she went on. “It’s up to the voter to give us the information.” A candidate or voter can challenge another voter’s address, she explained, but the burden of proof, at least at the outset, rests with the challenger. In this case, then, Meadows wouldn’t need, initially, to prove that he had listed a true place of residence—the challenger would need to prove that Meadows hadn’t. These challenges can be tough to win and are not frequently brought.
One of the authors of North Carolina’s voter-challenge statute is Gerry Cohen, who wrote it during his time as a staff attorney for the state’s General Assembly. He’s now on the Wake County Board of Elections; he teaches public policy at Duke. Cohen told me that, legally speaking, you can have more than one residence but only one domicile, and that your voter registration must be linked to the domicile. For something to qualify as such, he said, it must be a “place of abode” where you have spent at least one night and where you intend to remain indefinitely—“or at least without a present intent to establish a domicile at some other place.” (Elected officials who move—to D.C., for example—are allowed to remain registered in their home county or state as long as they don’t register to vote in the new location.)
I asked Cohen about the mobile home. “If Debra Meadows stayed there a single night, and Mark Meadows didn’t stay there, then he didn’t meet the abode test,” Cohen said. What if Meadows had stayed there, I asked? How would he establish that he intended to live there for an indefinite period of time? There isn’t a single determinative test, Cohen said, but a driver’s license, cable bill, W-2, or car registration listing the address would each suffice. “It’s a question of intent and evidence,” he added. I called the previous owner again, and asked her whether the Meadows family might have received any mail there. “It didn’t even have a mailbox,” she said. Abele has since installed one. He told me that he has never received any mail for the Meadows family at his home.
Why would Meadows risk committing voter fraud by listing as his domicile the address of a mobile home where he seems never to have slept? At the time, there was speculation that he might run for the Senate seat that the North Carolina Republican Richard Burr will vacate later this year; it may have struck him as important, politically, to keep voting in the state. Meadows owns two undeveloped parcels of land in Transylvania County, through an L.L.C., but neither could be described as a legal residence. Perhaps the Scaly Mountain mobile home, which was owned by someone who lived in another state and which sat just down the road from friends of the Meadows family, offered a last-minute fix. (Meadows ultimately decided not to run for Burr’s seat.)
Cohen pointed out to me another problem with the registration, also connected to the address: you can’t claim to live somewhere that you haven’t moved to yet, and Meadows listed his move-in date as the day after he signed and dated the form. In theory, this could invalidate the registration, Cohen said, but it happens fairly often, he added—many voters mix up their dates on registration forms or predate a planned relocation—and local officials usually look past it. Some mistakes seem to be taken more seriously than others: a Black woman in Wake County who voted while on probation in 2016 was arrested three years later and faced possible prison time if convicted.
This would not be the first time that Meadows seemed to mislead the public on the matters of his credentials or his real-estate holdings. For a long time, news outlets, apparently relying on his official House biography, reported that Meadows had earned a B.A. from the University of South Florida, though he actually received an associate’s degree. And Meadows appears to have violated congressional ethics guidelines by not disclosing his ownership of a hundred and thirty-four acres in Dinosaur, Colorado, which he ultimately sold to a nonprofit that aimed to use dinosaur bones in an effort to prove the literal truth of the creation story in the Book of Genesis.
In January, 2021, Meadows took a job with the Conservative Partnership Institute, a nonprofit founded by the former South Carolina senator—and former president of the Heritage Foundation—Jim DeMint. “No group has played a more critical role in helping conservatives stay true to their principles in the hostile Washington swamp,” Meadows said at the time. In July of that year, less than a month after the House voted to form a select committee to investigate the January 6th attack on the Capitol building, Donald Trump’s Save America PAC donated a million dollars to the institute. “The contribution to Meadows’s nonprofit stands out both for its size and for its timing,” NBC noted. A few months later, Mark and Debbie Meadows purchased a $1.6-million-dollar lakefront estate in Sunset, South Carolina. According to Thibault, the director of the Macon County Board of Elections, their voter registration remains linked to the Scaly Mountain mobile home.
Donald Trump. (photo: Politico)
I joined Truth Social. Why do I feel like the only one?
“Your wait is over! Tap here to start using Truth Social.”
Tap I did, and inside the new social media platform created by the former president, I found a nearly exact dupe of Donald Trump’s first love, Twitter, the site that kicked him out more than a year ago.
Jimmy Carter built houses with Habitat for Humanity. George W. Bush learned to paint. Barack Obama hung out with Bruce Springsteen. And Donald Trump, 45th president of the United States, created his own alternate online universe for the MAGA-loving, Big Tech-hating common man. After months of hype, the site was here — and it looked a lot like the thing it’s supposed to replace.
Inside Truth Social, everything once blue was now a bright, jewel-toned purple. Tweets, a.k.a. posts, were now “Truths.” Retweets were now “ReTruths,” capital T. And above my username, I saw the site’s default avatar: Twitter’s cream-colored egg icon, the image given to all new users, had apparently given birth to a proud purple eagle. The rest of the site appeared familiar: Replies were still replies. Likes were still likes. Direct messages, still in development, were still direct messages. And Donald Trump was still @realDonaldTrump — followed, as of this writing, by 140,000 people, a tiny fraction of his onetime total audience on Twitter. Only one Truth appeared on his page: “Get Ready! Your favorite President will see you soon!” he wrote two weeks ago, before the app’s launch. The Truth displayed 7,750 ReTruths, 30,500 likes and 4,700 replies. (Inexplicably, unlike replies on other user posts, none of the responses to Trump’s message were visible to me.)
In my inbox, an unsigned email welcomed me to “our Truth Seeking community.”
Most people are still awaiting entry to this purple-shaded landscape. Eleven days after its launch on Feb. 21, timed for the indistinct federal holiday that is President’s Day, I was welcomed to Donald Trump’s new online home after holding the 169,685th spot on the waitlist. (The line is hundreds of thousands of users long, according to other people waiting to get in.)
The site promises a safe space for “free expression,” encouraging of “all viewpoints,” according to the welcome email, “as we do not discriminate against political ideology.” But inside the app, digital tumbleweeds blew through my feed. The site is a bit slow, and a bit empty. Its stalled roll-out, led by Devin Nunes, the Trump supporter and former Republican congressman from California, has become a source of frustration and confusion in MAGA-world, according to my colleague Meridith McGraw. Republican lawmakers like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz and Kevin McCarthy already have accounts and appear to be posting similar or identical content to both Truth Social and Twitter, along with right-leaning platforms like Gettr and Parler. (Apparently, no one is quite ready to turn their backs on an actual audience yet.) But when they do finally get their welcome emails, the thousands of regular Trump fans still waiting in line, eager for their chance to search for truth, will find a Twitter knock-off with no immediately discernible improvement on the original — a vanity project that has yet to prove its utility.
Put simply, there isn’t much happening on the site.
After setting up my profile under my name, a list of suggested users appeared on the screen: Donald Trump held the number one spot, followed by pages for Truth Social, the NFL, USA Military News, the Daily Mail, Sean Hannity, Kyle Rittenhouse and an account for paranormal news and discussion.
Scrolling down, I saw ordinary users and trolls on the list: @CreepyJeffBezos, @HypocriteTrudeau, @FakeHunterBiden (bio: “Celebrating Hunter Biden’s love for art, prostitutes, and laptops”).
As I scrolled through the list, another notification popped up at the top of my phone. My first follow! “LET’S GO BRANDON TOKEN ($LGBT) is now following you,” the app informed me. Tapping on the page, I found an account promoting some kind of new crypto offering, the Let’s Go Brandon Token, also described by the anonymous user as “THE PEOPLE’S TOKEN.”
Minutes later, my second Truth Social follow came, hitting the full spectrum of Trump enemies, lest we forget 2016. “HilaryHater [sic] is now following you,” the notification read. The account’s avatar showed Hillary Clinton sitting on a witch’s broom, flying past a purple-shaded Earth. “Father of 4 grown men,” the bio explained. “Couldn’t be prouder of not having snowflakes for kids.” I followed both accounts back, hoping to strike up some engagement.
On Truth Social’s own account page, @truthsocial, site administrators advised users to please be patient as the platform continued to move through its waitlist and address tech bugs and inconsistencies. The site is the marquee offering of Trump’s tech venture, Trump Media & Technology Group, founded last year as part of a SPAC deal, with $1 billion from undisclosed investors, according to the company (which is now reportedly under investigation by federal regulators). Truth Social’s page is filled with memes: a car veering off the highway, away from a sign for “Big Tech” to an exit ramp for “Truth Social”; two doors, one for Twitter, showing a vacant room, another for “Truth Social,” with dozens of people trying to get in. But from the inside, Truth Social feels empty.
The most vigorous conversation on the site seems to be the entirely made-up one that appeared on the mock-ups before the launch. In the images available on the Apple app store, an account called @jack is seen corresponding with a man named Rick, making conversation like “What’s your favorite place to go in the world? You won’t believe how beautiful Jamaica is.” Another mock-up, demonstrating the yet to be unveiled direct message feature, shows @jack asking someone named @jane to ask Truth Social’s moderation team to take down an offensive account. “Are you sure you want to do that?” @jane replies. “I mean it’s a pretty big deal censoring that content. Kinda an overreach… right?” In the mock-up @jack (perhaps a reference to Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey) writes back, “JUST TAKE IT DOWN!” with a red-faced angry emoji. What the mock-up was meant to demonstrate — a user experience free of censorship, or safe moderation — is unclear. But on the site, there was little engagement between users. In response to a post from Nunes advising “another day with more people joining the platform,” 149 replies included messages of encouragement. “Making Social Media Great Again!” one user said. “It’s already better than Twitter if anyone can read this message!!” said another.
Dan Scavino, Trump’s former deputy chief of staff, appears to be one of the most active users on the site, with 74 Truths and counting. At the bottom of his feed, his first post on the site, published about two weeks ago, showed a picture of a blood-red wave crashing violently on the sea. Above a row of emojis — red heart, white heart, blue heart, American flag, flying eagle — Scavino wrote, “THERE ARE MORE OF US — THAN THERE ARE OF THEM!”
Around 10 a.m., I Truthed my first Truth.
“Anybody out there?” I wrote.
By the end of the day, no one had responded.
Disney. (photo: Getty Images)
”The biggest impact we can have in creating a more inclusive world is through the inspiring content we produce,“ company says
However, the media giant sidestepped the bill itself — which has drawn protests since the state House of Representatives passed it this week — and instead recommitted itself more broadly to LGBTQ+ rights. “We understand how important this issue is to our LGBTQ+ employees and many others,” the statement begins. “For nearly a century, Disney has been a unifying force that brings people together. We are determined that it remains a place where everyone is treated with dignity and respect.”
As the statement continues, Disney claims its “inspiring content” is action enough: “The biggest impact we can have in creating a more inclusive world is through the inspiring content we produce, the welcoming culture we create here and the diverse community organizations we support, including those representing the LGBTQ+ community.”
The statement comes one day after AIDS Healthcare Foundation staged protests of hundreds of demonstrators outside Disney locations in Florida and California calling on Disney to publicly denounce the bill.
The bill, which is officially called the Parental Rights in Education bill, not only outlaws teaching about sexual orientation and gender identity from kindergarten through Grade 3 “or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards,” but also allows parents to sue schools and individual teachers who engage in these topics.
The bill is currently on the agenda for the Florida Senate, and if it passes there it would land on Governor Ron DeSantis’ desk.
A person is detained during an anti-war protest, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in Yekaterinburg, Russia March 6, 2022. (photo: Reuters)
As of Sunday, the independent OVD-Info monitoring group reports over 2,500 were detained across 49 cities, with more than 800 in Moscow and more than 380 in St. Petersburg.
"The screws are being fully tightened -- essentially we are witnessing military censorship," Maria Kuznetsova, OVD-Info's spokesperson, told Reuters.
Since protests against Russia's invasion of Ukraine began on Feb. 24, nearly 11,000 people have been detained across Russia, according to the group.
Given the number of protests, there was a heavy presence of special police forces patrolling near the Kremlin on Sunday, with Red Square sealed off. A similar scene played out near Palace Square in St. Petersburg — which has seen repeated crowds protest the war.
The Colorado River. (photo: Herdiephoto/Flickr)
Indigenous nations have been an afterthought in U.S. water policy for over a century. That was all part of the plan.
In the Mohave language, Aha Makhav means “the Water People.” The Mohave, Chemehuevi, Hopi and Navajo — the four tribes that comprise the Colorado River Indian Tribes, a federally recognized tribe that is also known as CRIT — have relied on floodplain and irrigated agriculture along the Colorado for 4,000 years. The CRIT Reservation was established in 1865 for the “Indians of the Colorado River and its tributaries.” (That vague language made it easier for the tribe to welcome people from the Hopi and Navajo nations in the ’40s.) Today, the reservation’s green, lush farmland stands out against the dry desert that surrounds it.
“These valleys have always been traditional lands to us,” Amelia Flores, CRIT’s chairwoman, said in January. “It is evident in our clan songs that follow along the river.” The water from the Colorado helps the mesquite tree — a tree of life for the Mohave people — flourish. “The roots provide, for the babies, the cradle boards that they are cradled in, and when a person dies, we use the wood for the funeral, for the cremation,” Flores said. “It goes from birth to life.”
The Colorado River sustains the culture, economy and future of 30 Southwestern Indigenous nations. And in a just world, these nations — the river’s most senior users — would be central to its management in a postcolonial society. But for the past century, the United States has repeatedly ignored the river’s original managers, despite the fact that 10 tribes within the Colorado River Basin hold 20% of the river’s total water rights. With a drought stretching into its second decade and the impacts of climate change now undeniable, the tribes are working together to ensure a future of inclusion.
Modern water policy sits on a 200-year-old foundation of laws written and executed by non-Indigenous politicians. The modern reservation system, which is the foundation of Indigenous water rights, was formed in 1851 under the Indian Appropriation Act. Meanwhile, the Indian Intercourse Act, passed and updated throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, held that while Indigenous nations were guaranteed land and water rights when reservations were created, they lacked the right to sell that water. Instead, they had to save it for what the federal government considered a necessary use. (Unsurprisingly, the federal government also got to determine what qualified as necessary.) These policies simultaneously ensured and hindered the tribes’ sovereign authorities — giving them, in theory, legal rights to water without the means to access the water or even advocate for utilizing those rights, typically for farming, personal and cultural use.
U.S. water policy, like the reservation system, was crafted to eradicate Indigenous ways of life and people. As reservations confined tribes to one location, forcing them to transition to agrarian lifestyles, the federal government, as their trustee, failed to build or provide funds for up-to-date water infrastructure, allowing the U.S. to effectively control Indigenous water access. In 1867, two years after CRIT’s modern reservation was established, the Bureau of Indian Affairs authorized $50,000 for building the Colorado River Indian Irrigation Project. The project was ultimately never finished, a recurrent theme when it comes to Indigenous water infrastructure.
“We don’t have the full rights to our water,” Flores said. “That’s the bottom line.”
But by establishing tribes as the senior-most water right users in the basin, the U.S. tied itself into a legal knot. The Winters doctrine, which became law in 1908, confirmed the seniority of Indigenous water rights. Winters v. United States was a Supreme Court case that focused on Montana settlers who built a dam on the Milk River, which interfered with agriculture on the Fort Belknap Reservation. It established that the reservation’s creation reserved water rights, and that those rights were exempt from appropriation under state law. In effect, it meant that tribes were not subject to the “use or lose it” policy that defined state water law.
This landmark case established today’s legal footing for Indigenous water rights, while leaving many practical questions unanswered, and it was immediately ignored by American legislators. In 1922, seven states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — negotiated the Colorado River Compact without any input from Indigenous nations, even declaring, “Nothing in this compact shall be construed as affecting the obligations of the United States of America to Indian tribes.” State officials claimed that the Compact was designed for the “equitable division and apportionment of the use of waters of the Colorado River System.”
As the federal government slowly realized over the coming decades that it was bound by trust responsibilities to advocate on the tribes’ behalf, state and local governments, as well as private entities, repeatedly fought tribes over water rights. This led Indigenous nations, including the Colorado River Indian Tribes, to take them to court. One of those cases was Arizona v. California, in which the Supreme Court decreed water rights for the CRIT and five other nations in 1964. “If it wasn’t for the federal government stepping in, Arizona and California might have taken all the water,” Dwight Lomayesva Jr., the vice chair of the Colorado River Indian Tribes, said.
The Supreme Court’s action was a limited victory. Its usefulness lies in its permanence. Whereas water rights settlements — in which Indigenous governments willingly enter into legal negotiations with state and local shareholders to more quickly establish and access their claims — can be appealed and challenged even after they’re signed, the precedent in Arizona v. California is locked. But while the court’s decision defined the amount of acre-feet of water per year that each nation could use, it also saddled tribes with the subsequent management and infrastructure costs.
“There was no infrastructure attached to (Arizona v. California) so that the tribe could make beneficial use of that water — it was just a number,” Devin Rhinerson, a federal representative for the Colorado River Indian Tribes, said. “It is very secure, in that the Supreme Court has already acted. So it’s not really subject to a legal challenge in the same way that a settlement may be, but it’s also not flexible.”
Arizona v. California also did not require the state or federal governments to provide funding for maintenance, either — a problem, since many Western irrigation canals were built over a century ago. As a result, the CRIT has been unable to update any of its roughly 250 canals — this, in a nation that uses most of its water for agriculture and every year pulls nearly 640,000 acre-feet for farmland that is both leased to non-Natives and used by its own citizens.
“We have hundreds of miles of canals, and we’re losing a lot of water to the dirt canals and water going back into the river,” Vice Chair Lomayesva said. “Our whole infrastructure has been put together haphazardly.”
This story is echoed up and down the river. Water access and lack of infrastructure is a direct result of federal Indian water laws being written and then ignored ad nauseam. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 9,500 homes on the Navajo Nation lack access to running water. Indigenous leaders realized that no single state agency or federal department needed overhauling; instead, as Daryl Vigil, the water administrator for the Jicarilla Apache Nation, explained, the law of the river itself must change. The knot of principles and policies enacted by Congress and the Supreme Court were designed without input from the nations they were supposed to serve. But changing laws and guidelines requires time, money and political strength: Time, to navigate drawn-out court proceedings and settlement processes; money, to help tribes access, transport, sell and save their water; and the political strength to convince policymakers that Indigenous water rights are not optional.
In 1992, 10 nations — the Colorado River Indian Tribes, as well as the Ute Tribe, Southern Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, Jicarilla Apache, Navajo Nation, Fort Mojave, Chemehuevi, Quechan and Cocopah — created the Colorado River Basin Tribes Partnership, later renamed the Ten Tribes Partnership. Vigil said the Partnership idea gained steam as the nations realized that the time-consuming legal process was not the only way to leverage their power as senior water-rights holders.
“My tribe started its settlement process in the ’70s,” Vigil said, referencing a bill passed by Congress in 1992 that secured 45,682 acre-feet per year for the Jicarilla, along with a small amount of funding. “It took almost 20 years to finalize.”
Despite the Partnership’s formation, the Colorado River Water Users Association (CRWUA), an organization representing the states along the river whose membership wields a huge political influence over basin water policy and management, sought to discourage settlement tribes from joining. In 1996, the Partnership applied for membership. The association offered each basin state three seats on its board of trustees, but gave tribes just a single one. According to Vigil, Indigenous leaders from the Partnership confronted the association in Las Vegas, where members gather for an annual meeting. The confrontation paid off in the short term, earning them membership and three board seats. “That was a really, really big deal back in that time,” Vigil said. (Crystal Thompson, the association’s public affairs committee chair, said she hadn’t heard about the confrontation and added that the group is working to better document its history.)
The tribes hoped that being a part of the association would encourage state and federal officials to include them in conversations around water rights. But, by the late 2000s, the Ten Tribes Partnership was mostly limited to sharing information internally between the tribes. Vigil ascribed this to the partnership’s ad hoc nature and the fact that Indigenous leaders were already stretched thin by their commitments as government officials. Then, in 2007, the Bureau of Reclamation issued its 56-page interim guidelines for Lower Basin water shortages, laying out an 18-year plan for how to manage reservoirs during sustained drought. Echoing the original 1922 agreement’s hollow promise of equity, the authors claimed they had “conducted government-to-
government activities” with the Indigenous nations along the river and that the tribes “were notified of the action.” According to Vigil, proper consultation sessions never happened. Two years later, Reclamation, the seven Upper and Lower Basin states and other stakeholders embarked on a basin-wide supply-and-demand study of the Colorado River Basin that would later guide water policy. Once again, Indigenous nations were left out.
“With a quarter ownership of the Colorado River, it was just unconscionable,” Vigil, a former chairman of the Partnership, said. He called the group’s exclusion a “turning point.” Indigenous leaders recognized that they needed a way to leverage their combined strength and support one another. So the Partnership undertook its own water study to ensure that the tribes’ perspective was heard. The 362-page report, published in 2018 with the assistance of the Bureau of Reclamation, details the specific needs and plans of Indigenous nations in the Colorado River Basin and how those plans have been affected, first by existing U.S. policy and now by climate change. “Even under the most favorable of circumstances for rapid tribal water development, the amount of water that will be used by the Tribes is dramatically overshadowed by the effect of climatic conditions on the overall supply of water in the Basin,” the Partnership wrote in the foreword.
Flores, CRIT’s chairwoman, called the Partnership “a plus” for the nation. Along with other leaders from the Ten Tribes Partnership, Flores attended the annual Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas last December, where, according to the Arizona Republic, the nations’ flags were flown alongside those of the other federal and state association members, and Indigenous officials were incorporated into the conference’s full schedule, rather than siloed as they had been before.
“As a collaboration, a partnership, our voice is stronger,” Flores said. “We all come from different reservations. Our needs, our water needs, or our water situations — we’re all different. But we can come together and support one another when it comes to our water rights.”
The path forward requires working with three federal governmental entities to secure water rights, while continuing to strengthen relationships between the state and local governments that will be crafting the new drought guidelines. The Colorado River Indian Tribes are currently working with Arizona Sens. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema to pass the Colorado River Indian Tribes Water Resiliency Act of 2021, which would allow the nation to tap into a potential source of revenue by leasing its water rights. At the same time, the Partnership is looking ahead to 2025, when the 2007 interim drought guidelines — the ones created without Indigenous input — expire, and, as Vigil said, “a new management framework will need to be created.” The tribes will have to work individually to ensure their specific needs are addressed, while continuing to employ the strength found in collaboration.
The future will, in many ways, resemble the past, with sovereign nations still forced to prove their senior rights every time they want to move closer to water independence. But both Flores and Vigil pointed out that their strength in the ongoing fight is grounded in seeing the Colorado River as more than a plumbing system. It is the giver of life, flowing from one generation to the next. Securing water rights is about the future — of both the tribes and the river.
“The river has taken care of us for many, many years,” Flores said. “We need to, in turn, do our part, so the water can continue to flow along (its) banks.”
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