WATER DO-OVERS

The Blackfeet Reservation is a roughly fifty-mile square (fifty miles on a side, not fifty square miles) on the east slope of the Rocky Mountains, defined on the north by the Canadian border. There are five major streams of water which (I nearly said “who” because in my mind they are so much like five moving persons.) cross this space from left (up in the mountains where they form from snowbanks) to right (out on the flats where they water grass and crops). Along the way they carve the coulees and valleys that making living here possible and even pleasant.

I’ve collected so many news articles about this water-on-the-move, that now and then I need to stop and re-consolidate my thinking, as do many others. The reservation is bounded on the north by Milk River and on the south by Birch Creek -- more or less. Milk River has had by far the most human intervention, its course changed by canals and pipelines so that what begins on the rez curves up into Canada and then east, down into Montana where it supplies many small towns.

Among my clippings somewhere is an account of a small break in the pipeline that went unrepaired for years. Like a natural spring, the steady supply of water became the basis for a small ecology of plants and animals that depended upon it. Growing naturally, not like human crops, it was organic and beautiful, a complex of intermeshed entities, deer standing in tall flower-studded grass. Then the break was repaired and the little ecology died.

The Rocky Mountains normally accumulate snowpack, on which we have become so dependent for our water -- some of it traveling in streams and some of it replenishing the underground aquifers for wells. Nowadays there is less snowpack because more of the moisture that comes to the mountains is in the form of rain, which runs off right away rather than accumulating. Snowpack becomes glaciers and the glaciers are shrinking. Some take this as proof of global warming, but one cranky conservative geologist said to me, “Get a clue! We’ve been in warming times all along! This is the natural trend that started ten thousand years ago, prompting the beginning of agriculture.”

Whatever the cause, the trend is clear. The consequences to water supply is near-catastrophic and global. In Tibet and Bhutan cities will be impossible because their only water source is mountain run-off. This is not different from the hole in the pipeline being sealed -- just on a vastly larger scale.

In the early days of settlement the pre-inhabiting indigenous people were used to certain kinds of plenty -- clean air, water, supplies on the hoof in the form of bison. If there was drought, smoke, unfortunate migration patterns, they just adapted by going to a different place because there was plenty of space. Today’s small ag towns can’t do that. The government of the state must support these ranchers and farmers or be voted out of office, so they are invested in finding new ways for them to have water.

The legal underpinnings of water access on reservations are European, based on the premise of “first come, first serve” and “use it or lose it.” Blackfeet had had no reason to form either principle so chiefs assumed there would always be enough. The newcomers looked away from “first come, first serve,” assuming that pre-existence didn’t count. Anyway, they didn’t think that Indians would last much longer, naturally wanting to become white and modern. So much for assumptions.

Now the water problem is like an emptying bathtub, a drained duck pond, revealing all sorts of dilemmas on the bottom. The Blackfeet tribe had been included in the agreement for who got what water from Milk River, but didn’t take their part of the bounty. At the south side of the rez, Birch Creek had been “developed” by the Conrad Brothers, ham-fisted moguls with politicians in their pockets, without much consideration of anything except their determination to wrap an irrigation project around the little town of Valier, growing alongside Lake Francis which is really an artificial irrigation impoundment that feeds a web of canals that feed the fields that feed the nation. On their side of Birch Creek the Blackfeet and its BIA agents couldn’t seem to get their irrigation ditches to work. (Often dug by hand by tribal members -- men and women -- who worked hard in return for commodities to which they were already entitled.) One administration would declare they had the perfect engineering plan -- the next would declare it hopeless and let it sit, deteriorating. Plenty of injustice to go around.

Ecologies are always changing -- this is the basis of Darwin’s theory of evolution: that the constant changes require constant adaptation, which creates new beings, just as the water from that pipeline created a new ecology. Left long enough and isolated from the original plant and animal stocks, eventually there would be new species. Because the secret of survival is NOT being the fittest in the sense of the biggest, most powerful being. (My UU minister used to have a poster in his “secret” working office. It said, “Yea, though I walk through the Valley of Death, I shall fear no Evil, for I am the meanest sunnavabitch in the Valley!” It was meant ironically.) The true secret is being the “fittingest”, the most molded to the ecology.

I often say “a lot of little things is a big thing,” which also shows up on posters. What are the little things that will help us all survive? Here’s a prototype: beavers. If one cause of the problem is lack of snowpack moisture impoundment, rather than building (at great cost) huge reservoirs behind dams where a breach is catastrophic (like Swift Dam in 1964), why don’t we encourage beavers? They could refill the mountains with a zillion small ponds -- if one went out, the beavers would immediately start repairs. For those who would miss ripping across a big reservoir in a speedboat, I suggest the gentler skill-based pleasure of fishing for trout in a beaver pond.

That’s just one small idea. Larry Mires, executive director of the St. Mary Rehabilitation Working Group, is a human beaver, working year-after-year to accumulate knowledge and ideas about this specific stream. If the humanly engineered diversion is not repaired soon, it will fail, turning the pipeline into an erosive firehose, much like the gold-mining dredges that ended up leaving mountains of gravel just outside Helena. The fail-save spillway has been unusable for years. Those living along northernmost Montana, town or ranch, will be trucking water -- long distances. At least those who stay. Most will do as the old-time Blackfeet did: move away.