In far western Arizona, the dusty beige expanse of desert stretches as far as the eye can see. Under the baking summer sun, which regularly pushes temperatures above 110 degrees in the summer, even scrubby desert bushes can struggle to survive.
But in the middle of that desert, the Colorado River creates a striking strip of green.
The river winds through the valleys and deserts of the Southwest, carrying Rocky Mountain snowmelt hundreds of miles away, giving life to places like Parker, Arizona. It's home to the Colorado River Indian Tribes – one of 30 federally recognized tribes in the Colorado River Basin, but one of the few whose land includes a stretch of the river itself.
"It's our lifeblood," said Dillon Esquerra, a member of the tribe who serves as its water resources director. "It's who we are. It's part of our identity."
People in this community have deep cultural ties to the river that go back millennia. Many of those people, Esquerra said, have a close personal relationship with its life-giving water.
"We look at it as something that nurtures us," he said, "So we have to protect it."
![Dillon Esquerra, water resources director for the Colorado River Indian Tribes, poses in the 'Ahakhav Tribal Preserve near Parker, Arizona on August 6, 2025. "[The Colorado River] is our lifeblood," he said. "It's who we are. It's part of our identity."](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/3d066ee/2147483647/strip/true/crop/6000x4000+0+0/resize/840x560!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F35%2F9d%2Fe989795c4e94b3bfc143717f6ed5%2Fimg-0512.JPG)
Now, the Colorado River Indian Tribes, often referred to as CRIT, is trying to take those long-held cultural ideas and put them into law. They are planning to establish legal personhood status for the Colorado River, giving it some of the same rights and protections a human could hold in court. No government, tribal or otherwise, has given these kinds of rights to the Colorado River before.
The effort comes at a critical juncture in the river's future. Climate change means there's less water in the river each year, and steady demand from cities and farms is stretching that supply thin. The region's indigenous people have largely been shut out from decisions about its management, despite a long history of using — and living alongside — the river long before it was divided and allocated according to the laws of white settlers.
CRIT, in essence, is trying to work within those laws to get some representation for a river that it sees as a living, beleaguered individual.
People along the river
The people of CRIT are river people. It's in their name. The traditional name of the Mohave, Hamakhav, means "people along the river."
CRIT itself is a relatively modern construct, a reservation established by the U.S. government that puts four different ethnic groups under the umbrella of one tribal government. The tribe's current reservation lands were originally occupied by the Mohave people, then the Chemehuevi. In the 1940s and 1950s, Hopi and Navajo people were relocated to the reservation from further north.
What many of those people share, especially those who grew up on CRIT's riverside reservation, is a deep reverence for the Colorado River.
"In our culture, the river is precious," said Anisa Patch, a member of the CRIT tribal council who is among those pushing for legal personhood status. "We're supposed to be the stewards of these gifts from our creator. That's what was taught to us by my grandmother, our aunts, our other relatives. It's in the stories."
Patch explained that personhood is a way to take those deeply-held cultural and spiritual values and put them into a lasting, enforceable code — one that will stay in writing across generations and changes in political leadership.
"We want to have a stake in the ground to stand firm on," she said. "To say that you have to recognize this is something not just personal to us, but something of cultural significance, something of significance to life itself for a lot of people."
A river at a crossroads
CRIT's decision to declare personhood status for the Colorado River is a timely one.
The river is used by nearly 40 million people and a massive agriculture industry across seven states. That includes major cities like Denver and Los Angeles, as well as farms that send produce to grocery shelves across the nation. It has been cut and divided and redirected in ways that exemplify humanity's attempts to defy the design of nature. The Colorado River is stored in reservoirs that represent historic feats of engineering. Its water is pumped hundreds of miles through tunnels and canals that carve through deserts and mountains.
With the river portioned out by a complicated web of physical and legal infrastructure, CRIT's leadership worries that there isn't much water left for the river itself, nor the plants and animals that rely on it.
"We've taken, we've taken, we've taken, we've taken from this river," said Amelia Flores, CRIT's chairwoman. "We're not giving back. We're not being reciprocal and giving back."
Right now, the Colorado River is at a crossroads. Policymakers are negotiating a new plan to share its water after the current rules expire in 2026, and they are facing calls to implement painful, permanent cuts to some areas' water supplies.
A Supreme Court decree, Arizona v. California, recognized CRIT as having the most senior water rights on the lower Colorado River, and among the most senior in the entire basin. That means CRIT has some of the most legally untouchable water rights along the lower half of the Colorado River, making the tribe the last to face cutbacks in times of shortage.
Longstanding legal precedent means the fast-growing Phoenix area would likely be the first to face cutbacks. As that possibility settles in, cities and municipalities in the nation's 10th-largest metro area are knocking on CRIT's door, looking to lease some of the tribe's water. The tribe's land is about 130 miles west of Phoenix, straddling the Arizona-California border.
Tribal leaders said the new legal protections would serve two purposes: a symbolic one and a practical one. The first is about sending a message.
As those Phoenix-area cities come to do business with CRIT, those legal protections would force outside governments and water agencies to sign deals acknowledging the nuanced importance of the river.
"It's not just going to be an economic transaction," said John Bezdek, a water attorney employed by the tribe. "It's going to be one that talks about the river, the needs of the community and how those are intertwined."
The second purpose, Bezdek said, is more practical.
Tribal council members are considering setting up a fund for the river, and anybody leasing water from the tribe would have to pay into it in order to do business. That money could be used for habitat restoration along the river, like improving wetlands, setting up ponds for migrating birds or expanding a nature preserve on the reservation. It could also boost tribal members' access to the river by funding new parks or designated swimming areas.
The money could also be used to teach tribal youth about the importance of the Colorado River.
"We want to keep that essence alive as much as we can," Flores said. "And if the essence is in this Western way of thinking, then so be it, because the next generation coming up may not have that cultural tie, that religious tie to the river."
Beyond the Colorado River
While legal personhood for the Colorado River would be new, the idea of giving rights to an element of nature has been around for a while.
CRIT's effort is part of the "rights of nature" movement, which has seen tribal and non-tribal governments around the world try to establish protections for the waters, lands and plants that are important to them.
Flores said the idea for Colorado River personhood came from a series of trips to New Zealand, where she canoed the Whanganui River with the indigenous Māori people. They achieved legal personhood for the river in 2017 after one of New Zealand's longest-running court cases.
Cases like the Whanganui, and a handful of similar legal efforts in the United States, can provide some insights on what might happen with this historic rights of nature declaration on the Colorado River.
Erin O'Donnell, a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne in Australia, researches water law with a focus on the global rights of nature movement. O'Donnell said those rights can be a "powerful transformative process to shift human relationships with rivers," but also a "sword that can cut both ways" by inciting legal backlash, especially in the U.S.
O'Donnell cited a 2019 case in which the city of Toledo, Ohio, established a "bill of rights" for Lake Erie, and was promptly sued by a farming corporation. Not long after, the bill of rights was struck down in court for being "unconstitutionally vague."
"We have seen significant backlash in the United States," O'Donnell said. "A real rejection of the idea that nature should have rights, and a kind of fear-based reaction that says, 'I'm going to sue to dismantle these rights and make them invalid before they can be weaponized against me.'"
O'Donnell said that tribal rights of nature declarations are often perceived differently, though, because they are focused on humans' relationship with nature, not just legal rights. In cases like CRIT's, she said, granting legal personhood to a river can start to change the way that people outside the river think about its water and health.
"The most successful examples of rights of nature around the world have been the ones that are indigenous led," O'Donnell said. "They tend to be the ones that get less backlash. Not necessarily no backlash, but certainly a lot less."
New Zealand's Whanganui River, which directly inspired CRIT's legal push, O'Donnell said, is "an outstanding example of almost no backlash."
The biggest questions about how CRIT's declaration will play out have to do with how the river's new rights will be deployed in court.
The Colorado River will only have legal personhood under CRIT tribal law, which only applies to the water that it has the legal right to use and lease.
So, if a faraway water user, outside of tribal land, does something to the river that impacts the stretch running through CRIT's land, can they be sued? O'Donnell said that it depends a lot on how the new law is written.
Bezdek said CRIT does not plan to use legal personhood status to go after a person or entity that is harming the river outside of tribal lands, which would fall outside of tribal law.
But, O'Donnell said, creating legal personhood for the Colorado River could leave the door open to lawsuits. Another case in the U.S. gives us clues about how that might play out.
In 2018, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota recognized the rights of manoomin, or wild rice. Courts have mostly interpreted those protections narrowly and haven't held faraway entities liable for harm to the water rice needs to grow. That example, O'Donnell said, shows it would be difficult for similar cases on the Colorado River to succeed.
New tools for an uncertain future
How CRIT's plans will shape the broader debate over the future of the Colorado River remains to be seen. Tribes have largely been excluded from negotiations about sharing its water. Many of them have directly called for greater inclusion in today's talks. For the most part, tribes still do not have a formal role in the state and federal discussions that will shape the river's next chapter.
A personhood declaration may not directly change that, but one tribal law expert says it's worth trying anyway.
"We have to recognize that what has happened to date hasn't really worked, but the river is still in decline," said Heather Tanana, a member of the Navajo Nation and a law professor at the University of Denver. "We're still over-allocating and over-using, so turning to new ideas, new tools, definitely should be explored, and rights of nature is one of those."
Tanana said rights of nature can change the way people think about the natural world at a time when the Colorado River faces complicated, unprecedented challenges.
Only one tribe in the U.S. has succeeded in giving rights of nature to a river. The Yurok tribe secured legal personhood for the Klamath River, which runs through Oregon and California. Amy Bowers Cordalis, a Yurok member and lawyer for the tribe, said it was a "100% good idea" for CRIT to pursue legal personhood.
"Tribal rights of nature is a really important step in bringing social, economic and environmental justice to tribes," Cordalis said. "Because it is a declaration of the tribe's relationships with the natural environment. It's a critical step into bringing those values and rights into modern U.S. law."
Cordalis said the Yurok Tribe's personhood declaration has had impacts outside of the courtroom. Putting tribal wisdom and ecosystem health at the forefront of decision making gave people "tremendous hope."
"However, CRIT decides to approach this," Cordalis said. "If it's consistent with their values, their sovereignty, the future they want to create, then it is a positive step in the right direction."
While rights of nature may be a modern legal tool, the values they represent go back generations.
Dillon Esquerra, CRIT's water resources director, stood amid the tall reeds and grasses of the 'Ahakhav Tribal Preserve, a backwater of the Colorado River, where native plants and animals thrive across more than 1,200 acres of protected habitat. In the background, birds chirped and cooed. Under the water's surface, fish flitted in and out of clustered aquatic plants.
"As far as I'm concerned we've always looked at the river as a person. It's an entity," said Esquerra. "It's what we rely on to survive, you know. It is a person to us. It's a living, breathing person."
This story is part of ongoing coverage of water in the West, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
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