(This post will contain spoilers.)
The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi contains a bit of foreshadowing early on that I was afraid to be right about. The MacGuffin in this thriller is a set of water rights that are so senior that they could be worth billions of dollars and decisively shift the balance of power in the region from California to Arizona. Please tell me the author isn’t going to do the dumb thing that I think he is, I thought. About two-thirds of the way through, the book confirmed it. The senior rights originally came from the Pima Indian (Akimel O’odham) community and promised four million acre-feet of (wet) water. I Laughed My Ass Off. I wanted to throw the book through the window.
I’ll pick this apart, but first, let me acknowledge that I am aware The Water Knife is a work of fiction. However, this is a book that is definitely set in what is supposed to be a realistic version of the US Southwest in the near future. (The chronology is squishy, which is fine; I kept trying in vain to guess how many decades into the future the book takes place.) The places and dams and organizations are all real. The book, for the most part, draws from real Western water law. The author even name checks a few real water writers. Bacigalupi made a creative decision to graft his world onto the world that we are living in, to heighten the stakes and probably to also deliver a warning to us readers. Therefore I think it’s fair to point out the areas where the book’s reality diverges from our own.
This post is not a review of the book, but for the curious I’ll offer my compliment sandwich about it as a creative work. I thought it was a compelling thriller about the possibility of climate-driven collapse and the violence that governs borderlands as people become refugees. The book turned me off early on, though, and had to make myself finish it. I’m generally a tough customer when it comes to fiction, and I am very keen on details when it comes to this topic in particular. Some of the worldbuilding consisted of proper nouns copy-pasted from the author’s research notes into snippets of dialogue. And while I’m pretty amenable to a lack of exposition in a cyberpunk dystopia–I’m a big fan of William Gibson–this book arrived at an uncomfortable middle ground for me. I wanted to know when this was taking place, what jobs people were still working in Phoenix, and why the hell China(?) built an arcology in the Sonora Desert. The realism was terrible, to paraphrase an old joke, and came in such small portions. Most readers may not mind, but the weird details took me out of the story. More importantly, the author perpetuates a flawed view of water problems in the very real West: people are greedy and short-sighted, and we will collectively experience a comeuppance when the whole edifice collapses.
For the narrator and the characters, the Jeremiah of this collapse narrative is none other than Marc Reisner, author of Cadillac Desert. Near the end, the titular “water knife” (a thug who works for the Southern Nevada Water Authority) says, “That guy Reisner, now. That man saw things… They call him one of their prophets now. But they weren’t listening back then. Back then no one gave a shit about what that man said.” (I’m rolling my eyes.) This type of moralizing is not present throughout the book, thankfully, but it feels very direct in the context of the story. A first edition copy of Cadillac Desert, which one character calls “the bible when it comes to water,” hides the original document granting water rights to the Pimas. (The most powerful entities in the region kill people wantonly and raze neighborhoods trying to get their hands on the paper document, presumably because water rights can transfer to whoever possesses it? Sorry but we’re in National Treasure territory here.)
I’ve written at length about my problems with Cadillac Desert, but there are two things I want to take Bacigalupi to task for. The first is that he seems unconcerned with the fundamental tension of water consumption in the West. Water itself is publicly owned, but water rights are private property. In order to tell a story about wealthy, powerful interests resorting to violence in their scramble for control over resources, I need to see whether that fundamental structure has changed. Instead, the author seems totally uninterested in that tension. People are resorting to murder over a fraction of a gallon of drinking water, yet there are still farms in the Colorado River’s Upper Basin? That doesn’t make any sense. Not to mention, surface reservoirs and canals–both Lake Powell and Lake Mead still exist in the book–with all their evaporative and seepage losses, presumably exist in the same form? Reisner grapples with this seeming paradox throughout Cadillac Desert–water is both extremely precious and consumed with extreme recklessness. The Water Knife, by contrast, depicts the residents of the Southwest almost as if they live on the planet Arrakis. Marc Reisner’s conclusions are ultimately inaccurate, but they are coherent. The federal government played a vital role, through pork barrel spending, in seeing infrastructure money dedicated to wasteful agricultural consumption. But the federal government hardly exists in The Water Knife, even though all the dam infrastructure on the Colorado River at the center of the story is federal. The implication is that the federal government has disintegrated and states are the only powers left, but then who is maintaining and managing those dams?
The more important point is how the book treats the fate of the Akimel O’odham. First, let’s look at how the book jumps straight into the world of fantasy with these coveted rights. There are Native American Tribes with very old water rights, but the courts, to a considerable degree, straight up ignored those rights for the better of the twentieth century. (Chances are, if you ask a historian, they will say that the courts totally disregarded Indian water rights until about the 1980s. For a more nuanced view of how Indian reserved rights shaped water law in the early twentieth century, see Indian Reserved Water Rights by John Shurts.) The basis for Western Indian water rights goes back to a very important Supreme Court case from 1908: Winters v. United States. The court’s opinion held that, because the goal of reservations was to assimilate their Native residents through agriculture, and because agriculture in the West requires irrigation, reservations carried an implicit right to water. The priority date for the community is set to the establishment of the reservation, which means that many Native communities have very old rights, since the reservation era dates from about the 1870s to 1910 or so.
At the risk of nitpicking, I have to share some snippets from the book that made me laugh. The rights at the center of the plot are “senior to God. Might be the most senior rights ever existed.” When specifically was the priority date? “Late eighteen hundreds.” (Wow, way back then, really?) One of the characters whistles. “Some of the most senior rights on record.” No one knew about them because, get this, “The Bureau of Indian Affairs deliberately buried it. It was an inconvenient agreement that the bureau regretted.” Just a bunch of silliness. There are plenty of settler water rights that predate the reservation period, and the idea that the BIA buried one Tribe’s agreement is just made up out of whole cloth. The BIA did not make explicit agreements about water, hence the significance of the Supreme Court ruling in Winters v. United States.
In the real world, some of the difficulty with these federal “reserved” rights hinged on their inability to square with the Western states’ prior appropriation doctrine, which is based on historic use. What this means is that “Winters” rights are open-ended, reserving in theory however much water is necessary for the reservation’s members to establish profitable agriculture. Winters rights, once they gained more attention after two court cases between Arizona and California in the late twentieth century, first needed to be quantified to turn into anything more than “paper” water. As of this writing, plenty of the thirty Tribes within the Colorado River Basin do not have quantified water rights. Those that do have typically bargained some of their rights away for infrastructure that is dreadfully slow to materialize, if it does at all. In other words, Winters rights have not been worth all that much in the hands of Native Americans, and the idea that one Tribe could have rights that would contain an ironclad guarantee of four million acre-feet(!!!!!) of Colorado River water, worth billions of dollars, is completely fictional.
Okay, sure, the author of a novel took some creative liberties. That’s not a crime. But here’s the problem. The Water Knife, like many Western observers, looks past the very real injustices and violence committed against Indigenous peoples to imagine a fantasy of collapse that centers the non-Indigenous. The Akimel O’odham are mute in this narrative, consigned to history even as their rights get bandied about. One of the novel’s protagonists, Lucy, wants to give these rights to the city of Phoenix: “The rights are theirs. They own them.” The book wants us to recognize the folly in Lucy’s way of thinking: that the city or region can survive indefinitely as water supplies dry up. But the transfer of the Akimel O’odham’s rights occurs, as if inevitable, with hardly any commentary.
Remember the narrator’s moralizing. Why do so many people insist that the problem with water in the West is what might happen to settlers rather than what settlers did to the Indigenous? I think it’s significant that the book is least faithful to reality when it needs to distract the reader from the unacknowledged fact of dispossession at its core to conjure a scenario in which dispossession affects refugees from Texas.
Cadillac Desert has been a very influential book and done much to promote the idea that the Western US will collapse in some spectacular fashion, as Bacigalupi imagines in The Water Knife. As I’ve written, Marc Reisner even seemed to look forward to it. Credit where it’s due though: Cadillac Desert contains a chapter about how the Pick-Sloan Project in the Dakotas ate away at valuable land on a number of Oceti Sakowin reservations. I am begging those who fantasize about people facing a cosmic correction for the hubris of living in the desert to direct their attention instead toward the actual historical record.