When Bidtah Becker, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, was growing up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, clean water flowed from the taps at her house. She and her siblings often visited her grandmother and other relatives on the Navajo reservation a few hours away. There, clean water was scarce — water had to be hauled by truck up to the reservation in large metal containers. “We always knew that every time we went we were going to get diarrhea,” Becker, now an associate attorney for the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority, told Grist. “We were just kids, we didn’t know why. But now that I’m an adult, I totally know why that is.”

In 2021, access to running water and clean drinking water is a given for most Americans. The Census Bureau has even considered dropping a question on plumbing access from the U.S. census questionnaire. But many of the nation’s tribes still lack running water, access to clean water, and even flushing toilets. Native American households are 19 times more likely than white households to lack indoor plumbing, according to the U.S. Water Alliance, and more likely to lack piped water services than any other racial group.

That problem is at an inflection point for the Navajo Nation and 29 other tribes in the Colorado River Basin, which stretches from the Rocky Mountains to Mexico. A new analysis shows that Native Americans in the region are severely impacted by lack of water infrastructure and water supplies contaminated by arsenic and other harmful chemicals, a problem that has been laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic. The report was published by the Water and Tribes Initiative, a consortium of tribes, nonprofits, and academics. It’s the first comprehensive analysis of water insecurity among all of the tribes in the Colorado River Basin, and it shows that, without federal intervention and billions of dollars of funding, water accessibility in the basin will continue to deteriorate.

Read the full article about drought in the Colorado River Basin by Zoya Teirstein at Grist.