date instead of the strict individual prior appropriation plan his predecessor had advocated. This reflected a shift to cooperation between non-Indian parties instead of trying to line up in priority order during legal procedures. It also reflects what Hispano irrigators had been doing for centuries—largely, ignoring individualistic prior appropriation and simply sharing water in their respective valleys. This strategy of legal aggregation for single dates was risky, given that the state water code called for individual water dates, but was a logical tactic for questioning whether prior appropriation could work in this cultural water context.
Sharing the water, then, returned as a near-term legal strategy and goal for water users in the Pojoaque Valley, reflected in the push for a single priority date on numerous ditches. In most respects, this is not surprising—the PVWUA’s leadership board had offered to meet with representatives of the four pueblos back in 1982, without attorneys, to see if some discussion could occur. Sharing was long the norm in this region.22 These advances by the acequias toward the Pueblo to negotiate or just have a dialogue were rebuffed at the time, although whether that was because of the respective tribal councils or their attorneys is unclear. Sharing may have been seen as a distraction tool since new attention was being paid to the hundreds of domestic wells that exist in the Pojoaque Valley.
ADJUDICATION EXPOSES SOVEREIGN WATER TENSIONS
The consequences of the suit were painfully clear on the ground. A reporter in the early 1980s recorded the fears of couples who had intermarried between Hispano and Pueblo families: “Please don’t use my name,” a man begged the reporter. “We just rent this land and it belongs to the [Pojoaque] pueblo, and I’m afraid they’ll evict us. But I think that all people should have water rights. It’s a God-given thing. People here have shared the water for hundreds of years.” His wife nodded in the background. “I just don’t understand it,” she said. “The Indians have always gotten along well with the Spanish here.” The numerous additional accounts of inter- and intrafamily difficulties caused by the Aamodt case in the 1980s make for fascinating, if difficult, reading. Many at the time hoped they could settle “by law instead of by guns or fists,” as one young man married to a Pueblo woman told the same reporter. The reporter summed up the situation as such: “One thing that nearly everyone in the Pojoaque Valley agrees on is that the divisiveness caused by the water-rights suit has been a shame.”23
Much of that early social disruption generated from the lawsuit remains as Murphy Inerque, a Pojoaque Pueblo resident and a “veteran of the case” (as he put it), shared with me one abnormally warm November day in 2010:
What it generated was a lot—I mean a lot—of resentment when the Pueblos tried to move on the entire basin to claim it was all their water. Sure, we live on areas of the valley where maybe they farmed in the past but to try and cheat all their current neighbors … Well, people took it badly. I lost a dozen or so friends because of that dispute, or the lawsuit … and people just don’t forget. Even if the thing [Aamodt] has been settled now, talk to anybody in the valley who is not an Indian and you’ll get some hard stares. That deal continues to cut in the valley, not in a good way.24
The friction sparked in the late 1960s smoldered for decades, even as the case went through active and passive periods of court litigation, most of it unseen in briefs, claims, and delayed court hearings. A long-time resident named Orlando, when I brought up the tensions in the valley, told me:
I mean, we know that the Indians were here first. But we’ve also been here now for some three hundred years, so it was disappointing that we couldn’t just use the same water-sharing principles that we had always used together. A lot of us who mobilized into the Pojoaque Valley Water Users Association were just concerned that they would get all the water, all of it. So we understood the priority rules in the end…. just that now [2011] it’s going to be hard for people to reduce their groundwater use from the well, especially those folks who came after the mid-1980s. That’s where the pinch is, so it’s still first here, you win; you move here late, tough, you’ll have less water on hand.25
The tension in the valley mounted with the inclusion of groundwater wells. This was no longer just a visible water conflict, based on surface streams. Changes to relationships in the valley were driven by the visible and the invisible waters being claimed. Given these challenges, it is understandable how and why Aamodt was the longest-standing adjudication suit. Its infamous reputation in New Mexico was well founded. The case was already forty years old when I started work on this project in 2006, older than I was at the time. How can a case last this long, I asked, still a few years into my research. “Ask the lawyers,” was the answer from Ernesto, a Pueblo irrigator from Ohkay Owingeh (ex-San Juan Pueblo). He lived outside the basin and had nothing at stake in Aamodt. He had approached me after a presentation at the University of New Mexico, where I had shared some of this work. He grinned. “You’ll never finish, man. It [adjudication] will chew you up and spit you out just like it does the rest of us.” He did get serious, losing his smile. “And they haven’t even bothered to talk to my pueblo yet—it’s going to take forever, I think.”26 He was still shaking his head after I thanked him for his questions and remarks.
Ernesto knew that Aamodt had dragged on for more pertinent reasons than just the lawyers and their squabbles. However, his joke provides insight. In addition to bringing old cultural conflicts back to the surface, adjudication also sparked antagonism between professionals. Many attorneys have made a living from this single case. No wonder, then, that even claimants had problems switching attorneys; legal counsels knew a good thing when they saw it. The correspondence between the PVWUA, Shoenfeld, and Sheridan make it clear how tense and interested parties were to retain a role in the suit. The valley residents were not the only ones pitted against each other. Even the professionals were at odds, and the court files and transcripts have elements of a soap opera, just with more technical language. Beyond the definitions of Indian and non-Indian water rights, Aamodt (dammit) left its mark on valley residents and relationships.
The reverberations from the Aamodt adjudication rippled into villages, upstream and downstream, for decades. Even among the valley’s acequias, the question of whether to push for individual water rights by specific dates heightened tensions along the ditches, between ditches, and between communities. It unsettled long-standing notions of water sharing throughout the Pojoaque Basin. Proving historical “priority” created skirmishes between communities that had in the past shared waters either informally or through convenios (accord or agreement) that established the splitting of water in dry basins.
To illustrate that these struggles were not just along or across perceived ethnic lines (Indian, non-Indian), I turn to an example of a prior convenio and a small stream system in the upper watershed of the Aamodt adjudication area, the Rio en Medio (refer back to map 4). Two tiny villages have shared the perennial Rio en Medio stream for over a century. Aamodt resurfaced the fights over prior appropriation dates at first, but the villages eventually reaffirmed the spirit and the letter of their old accord.
CHUPADERO: WATER SHARING, DATING MADNESS, AND DITCH ACCORDS
The two villages of Rio en Medio and Chupadero, located just north of Santa Fe, have long shared water from a splitter box, a simple concrete device that parts waters on the Rio en Medio stream and diverts a bit more than half to the village of the same name. The lesser amount of flow goes into a connecting canal leading to the upper acequias of the Chupadero basin. Chupadero gets its name from the ephemeral nature of the stream, which is sucked (chupar) into its bed and disappears to the naked eye along sections. Looking at this small village, nestled in a verdant strip and surrounded by the bone-dry foothills, gives additional perspective on how adjudication and prior appropriation raise concerns in areas without cleaved identity questions.
Chupadero was first settled in the 1860s. Like most places in northern New Mexico, it was sparsely settled until the late 1800s, when New Mexico was still a
