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40 NARF Legal Rev. 1 (2015)

handle is hein.journals/narf40 and id is 1 raw text is: 













Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians

     rights to groundwater recognized


Introduction
  As California enters yet another year of an his-
toric drought, the all-encompassing importance
of the water resource is increasingly evident. The
need for more responsible management of the
resource has finally started to sink in - federal,
state, and local policymakers are finally taking
action to conserve water and to enact measures
that protect the availability of the resource in an
uncertain water future.

  Groundwater is perhaps the most critical water
resource for California's water future. In an arid
climate, surface waters are often available only
seasonally and can be unreliable. Because of this,
many big water users have opted to simply pump
groundwater and have been doing so with little or
no oversight for decades. This practice is being
called into question throughout the state with the
California State legislature passing new legisla-
tion last year that initiates a groundwater regula-
tory system, but it is incremental in execution
and many fear that it's too little too late.

  For years, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla
Indians has expressed growing concern about the
viability of the groundwater basin underlying its
Reservation. Indeed, the Cahuilla people have
long been the stewards of this resource. The
Coachella Valley was populated by ancestral
Cahuilla people prior to the arrival of Spanish and
then other people. The Cahuilla people under-
stood the groundwater resource and managed its
use with knowledge gained through millennia of
experience surviving in the arid desert. Today,
the Agua Caliente continue working to protect
the viability of the groundwater resource and
ensure that it is managed responsibly. Indeed,


VOLUME ~O, NO. 1 WINTERISPRING 2015


VOLUME 40, 111- 1

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