A promise made: The Navajo Indian Irrigation Project and water politics in the American West

According to the 1962 legislation by which the U.S. Congress authorized the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project (NIIP), a federal reclamation project on the Navajo Reservation in northwest New Mexico, it was to bring economic development to the Navajo Tribe in the form of 18,000 jobs on family farms and related enterprises, all in 14 years. The project is today just over half completed, it is a single corporate agribusiness that employs a few hundred Navajo during the peak harvest season, and there are pressures to reduce the size of the project.;This study of the project undertook to sort out from the historical record the causes of the disparity between the promised and delivered project. Relying for its evidence on federal legislative and administrative materials, Tribal documents, transcripts of meetings, files of the Bureaus of Reclamation and Indian Affairs, and interviews with federal, state, and Navajo officials, this study posed the following questions: is NIIP's history the result of poorly-informed decisions by managers and policymakers? Do the political and economic arrangements within which the project operated explain the project more powerfully? Or was some combination of both behaviors and structures responsible?;It was concluded that political and economic arrangements explain NIIP's history more powerfully than individual decisions and behaviors, though individual decisions and behaviors are far from irrelevant. Those arrangements include the power of the traditional reclamation lobby in the American West; the relative powerlessness of Indians and the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Congress; and the need for the project to meet standards of cost-effectiveness, for both political and economic reasons.;At the highest level of generality, the lesson of the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project is that when a society sets out to cope with the environment, specifically an arid climate, it brings its politics and economics to the task. Any effort, such as an irrigation project, to manage the climate or respond to its extremes will reflect political and economic arrangements, including the unequal treatment of groups such as Indians.