About
The American West is drying up and the crisis didn’t start with climate change. It started with a lie.
For 170 years, the Federal government diverted rivers, built dams, and constructed an elaborate system of canals all on water that was never theirs to take. That water was guaranteed by treaty to Indigenous nations, whose rivers were drained and blocked to fuel the growth of cities and industries across the West. The treaties were broken. The rivers were broken. Now, the artificial system built on that theft is beginning to break too.
But something remarkable is happening.
On the Klamath in California. On the Missouri in the Dakotas. On the Mississippi in Minnesota. Indigenous-led movements are rising up to reclaim what was never surrendered and in doing so, they show us a way through the crisis ahead.
WATER WARS tells the story: 170 years of history; the sabotage of Tribes’ ability to subsist; the mounting pressures of drought and climate change; and the Indigenous uprisings that are rewriting the future of water in America.
This is not a story you’ll see on the evening news. It’s a story that will change how you see our water, our landscape, and our country.
