By: Daniel Cordalis
June 16, 2025
Published as part of The Headwaters Report
I had the privilege of talking with John Echohawk, Native American Rights Fund (NARF) Executive Director and Co-Founder, about NARF’s role in water and water-related work over the decades. In this interview, John discusses why water rights and water issues have been a mainstay of NARF’s work since 1970, and how the first NARF directors saw the importance of water rights for the growth of Tribal Nations.
John and I also talk about his own experiences working in water, including his first trip to Capitol Hill, his work on the Pyramid Lake case, and how NARF collaborated with western states and other organizations to increase the visibility and importance of settling Tribal water rights claims through multi-party negotiated settlements.
Finally, John and I talk about current and future stressors on water issues and how public and elected leadership education on Tribal water issues must continue to ensure Tribal water needs are met. I hope you enjoy watching and listening to John speak as much as I do.
Interview Excerpts:
Cordalis: While the Tribal Water Institute is new, NARF’s work on water issues is not. It’s been one of the pillars of the organization’s work since day one. So can you get us started today and discuss how NARF first got involved in doing tribal water work?
Echohawk: It was the result of deliberations by our first advisory council that then turned into our board of directors. We all knew that there was no way we could work on everything. We had to prioritize the most important issues and work on those.
You know, the way our Native people do things: we sit around in a circle and we talked about all the issues. We knew we had to talk about them as long as it took until we had consensus about what those issues were. And we came up with a set of five priorities.
One of those priorities was protection of our natural resources. An important part of that was the protection of our water rights as without water on our homelands, you know, Native peoples are not going to be able to survive. So protecting our water rights was one of the priorities that the advisory council set.
It was something that we were familiar with as lawyers, knowing about water rights and federal Indian law, and the fact that as a result of a US Supreme Court decision in 1908, Tribes have reserved water rights under federal law that give them precedent over most of the state water rights water holders. So in time of shortage, the Tribes get their water first.
That’s just a very important legal principle. So that’s what we started working on, helping Tribes to assert those Tribal reserved water rights because there was a lot of competition for water out West. And everybody knew unless we established our water rights early, then you know, people are going to be taking our water. So, away we went.
Cordalis: What are you most proud of achieving during your time here at NARF?
Echohawk: Well, really the development of our self-determination and sovereignty. You know, that change in federal policy the year NARF started in 1970, and to see Tribes gradually grow, all the Tribes benefit, and become more economically self-sufficient and able to manage their own affairs, and see that they’re major players in this country.
We’re an important part of what makes this country tick. And of course, that wasn’t the way it was when we first started. We were just left behind. Now we’re a very important part of America. To see that over the years is just super, and hopefully that [will] continue.
