An estimated 30 to 40% of homes on the Navajo Nation lack running water, a share second only to the rate found in remote Alaskan villages. The size of the reservation and complexity of its terrain are often blamed, but the failures start with a federal system that promised to provide a home for Navajo people, who call themselves Diné, when establishing the reservation, but has yet to deliver a fully functioning one.

Indian Health Service reports first linked devastating rates of infectious diseases among Native Americans to the absence of basic sanitary facilities in residences a century ago. Since then, infectious diseases have been an ongoing crisis, which the world took note of last year as COVID-19 spread through and ravaged the Navajo Nation. Following guidelines around washing hands and staying home were all but impossible for people who must leave home to replenish their reserves of water and who can’t even turn on a tap to wash their hands.

Addressing lack of water in homes runs into a catch in where to start: begin plumbing communities and houses when there is no water, or build the trunkline that brings water nearby when there are no local waterlines to connect it to the people who live alongside it. The Navajo Gallup Water Supply Project, under construction in New Mexico’s Navajo communities, is testing these approaches.

The project has two main trunk lines, one that runs from the San Juan River to Gallup along Highway 491, called the San Juan Lateral, and another much smaller one that follows Highway 550’s route through a string of Navajo chapters — Huerfano, Nageezi, Counselor, Pueblo Pintado, Ojo Encino, Torreon, and Whitehorse Lake — from east of Bloomfield into Jicarilla Apache communities north of Cuba, called the Cutter Lateral. On the San Juan Lateral, federal funds are paying to construct a trunkline that communities will then need to find money and develop projects to tap into.

Read the full article about getting water to Navajo communities by Elizabeth Miller at The 74.