Most American Indian rights to water trace their origins to 19th century treaty negotiations with the United States. The 1908 Supreme Court case Winters v. United States established that the federal statutes and treaties setting aside land for Indian reservations also impliedly reserved sufficient water to fulfill the purpose of those reservations. In the century since Winters, the development of a legal doctrine around reserved water rights has centered largely on defining and quantifying the amount of water to which tribes are entitled. With an increasing number of tribes holding quantified water rights, a more recent project (and the broad focus of this Note) seeks to integrate tribal water use within the dominant system of western water law: state prior appropriation doctrine.

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