Well, I wanna thank you all for joining us here today.

Can you share with us where things stand with water rights here with the tribe?

- We have 550 acre feet of water here in the reservation.

A lot of our water flows downstream to the Green River and into the Colorado River.

Basically, we don't have the infrastructure to store our water, so we have a huge quantity of water where it goes downstream, and we have reserve water rights.

That's a little bit different than the state water rights, and was established because when the reservation was established in 1861, by decoration of Abraham Lincoln, they put water aside for reservations.

- Driving by, people can see the reservoir and say it looks like they have plenty of water, but is that case?

- No, it's not the case.

A lot of that water storage was built for irrigation purposes, which we have no control over it, pretty much.

It's state.

- About how much of it are you able to utilize?

- It's a small portion.

- Small portion?

- Yeah.

- Why is now the time to push for this change?

- We've been raised to believe that water is life, and without it, you've got no life.

You don't have nothing.

So the water is very, very important to us as Native people.

If the water's gonna go downstream, we wanna be compensated for it, and we'd like to have infrastructure, too.

- How did we get to this place today where we're still trying to get this infrastructure put in place?

- In the 60s basically the tribe was promised two reservoirs within the Basin here, and they were never fulfilled.

They were never built.

- Going through the system and believing that the system would come through, and help with the infrastructure, and they haven't, how do you believe again in the infrastructure, and in the system that they're gonna build this infrastructure?

- We have legislation that was passed in 1992, which gave us vast water rights in the Green River, 500,000 acre feet that just flows past.

It's impacted everybody.

We can technically settle a lot of the water issues in the Uinta Basin if we all just come to agreement.

- What do you think is the underlying issue that's preventing an agreement?

- Probably personalities.

(chuckles) You know, we're always gonna look after the Ute Indian Tribe, right?

So we gotta make sure that any agreement benefits not only us, but our water.

We depend on that four ceremonies, and how the Utes believe that everything has a spirit.

- How do you go into that when you're thinking from that perspective, and other people are thinking from a financial perspective?

- It's hard, right?

'Cause that's what they depend on for the tribe, right?

Is our environmental naturalistic philosophy when it comes to water.

- I think just the history of everything is really, it's just a reminder of how the United States has treated the Native Americans that were here.

And it's really disheartening to see that what was promised to us through our reserved water rights has never really been recognized by anybody.

It continues to flow downstream to where others received the benefits from it, and the tribe, it's always left just holding the bag.

I think that water is so precious that you can't help but fight for it.

- How do you keep hope alive that one day maybe this could happen when for so many years it hasn't happened?

- The longer these fights go on, the more and more people are getting educated on the histories of these things, and it's opening a lot of eyes, right?

- Us as Indian people and being here on this Uintah and Ouray reservation, we know that water goes with the land, so this land is ours, so the water should stay here.

A lot of things that we plan for or that we fight for is for our future, for our kids.

I feel like that we just gotta keep this fight going, and hopefully that we see the light at the end of the tunnel.

We all wanna see this come to an end.

We all wanna make peace, and be together as one.

'Cause we all have to live here together.

- Well thank you all for being here and taking time out of your day to talk with us on "Utah Insight".

I appreciate you guys using your voice.