To develop meaningful solutions, you must meaningfully define the problem.
The Tribal Drinking Water Access Gap
A 2016 report by the House Natural Resources Committee found that “nearly 48 percent of U.S. homes on Native American land–in contrast to less than 1 percent of U.S. homes overall–do not have access to reliable water sources, clean drinking water or basic sanitation.” A 2018 report, drawing from EPA’s ECHO database, showed that public water systems serving Indian country had monitoring and reporting violations at almost twice the rate of those not serving Indian country.
In exchange for millions of acres of Tribal homelands–through treaties, federal law, and executive orders–the United States agreed to respect Tribal Nations’ inherent right to self-govern and to protect Tribal interests. This created a legal obligation known as the “trust responsibility,” which requires the federal government to ensure the welfare and survival of Tribal Nations.
Welfare and survival cannot be had without water. The trust responsibility requires the federal government to ensure Tribes are provided access to safe, affordable drinking water. But the United States has historically failed to uphold its end of the deal: In 2020, Congress appropriated $192 million to address drinking water and sanitation deficiencies in Tribal homes– a mere 6 percent of the $3 billion needed.
The United States primarily its responsibility to provide for Tribal drinking water and sanitation needs through the Indian Health Service Sanitation Facilities Construction (SFC) program. The program was fully funded for the first time in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), when $3.5 billion was appropriated for 2022–2026. Time will tell how this funding has changed the landscape of Tribal drinking water access.
For more on the access gap, the Universal Access to Clean Water for Tribal Communities initiative has published extensive work outlining barriers and critical opportunities to achieving universal access to clean, safe drinking water for all Native communities across the United States.
Why Does Drinking Water Data Matter?
Tribal drinking water systems are often managed by under-resourced Tribal staff who are tasked with keeping systems operational, navigating complex legal and jurisdictional issues and fractured land bases, securing much-needed funding, managing funding requirements, and ensuring systems adhere to any relevant Tribal, federal, and local requirements.
Tribal staff and leaders use drinking water data internally to monitor the delivery of drinking water services, access to those services, the quality of those services and resources, to develop Tribal policy, and to plan for future needs. Tribal governments deploy data externally to shape federal and local policy and to apply for funding from any of the 7 federal agencies that administer Tribal drinking water programs, as well as state and local governments, and private entities.
Within this landscape, Tribal staff are collecting, managing, and reporting large amounts of data, but “the information collected, analysis methods, and data use reflect federal government priorities,” not Tribal priorities.
What Publicly-Available Data Exists?
Two federal agencies collect, manage, and maintain Tribal drinking water data–the Indian Health Service and the Environmental Protection Agency. There are 574 federally recognized Tribes in the United States, and many more that are not federally recognized, each with unique governance structures, relationships to federal agencies, and drinking water access priorities. Individual Tribes often maintain their own data systems, which may be more comprehensive and more accurate, but are not publicly-available. For the purposes of this evaluation, we were seeking to understand the accuracy of national-scale, publicly-available data, which is accessible to and used by Tribal staff, Tribal and non-Tribal policymakers, researchers, and drinking water access advocates.
In our evaluation of federal data sets, we illuminate how federal agency objectives create a data universe that can’t be reflective of Tribal data priorities.
EPA SABs and SDWIS
The EPA’s Service Area Boundaries (SABs) dataset is the first that shows who is served by which community water systems (CWSs)–allowing data users to link community demographics to specific CWSs to get a picture of drinking water access and quality using data reported in the Safe Drinking Water Information System (SDWIS). Before SABs, users had to estimate who was served by a water system based on its location and nearby demographic data—an approach that could not truly capture access by community demographics. SDWIS data on its own can only tell us about the system owner, who has primacy authority, where the system is located, and, of course, the system’s monitoring and compliance history. Without SABs, EPA has no way to aggregate or filter SDWIS data to understand the demographics of who is served by a water system.
IHS STARS
Indian Health Service, for its part, maintains the Sanitation Tracking and Reporting System (STARS) for the purposes of implementing the Sanitation Facilities Construction (SFC) program. The system includes several linked datasets, including one (HITS) that houses sanitation infrastructure access data at a household level for Native communities, and is aggregated to create a picture of sanitation access at a community level. HITS links to IHS’s project planning database, SDS. The data is confidential–accessible to Tribes, IHS staff, and some other federal agency staff with limited access. However, it is only accessible as a database, not as a data analytics tool, and data is not shared out for that purpose, other than in an annual, high-level report to Congress that IHS produces.
Tribal Data Sovereignty in the Context of Drinking Water Data
Researchers have described the perils of federally-owned and controlled Tribal population data in the United States. They found that these “data are often inconsistent, irrelevant, and of poor quality,” and that the data are “produced and used within an environment of mistrust, and controlled by those external to the Native nations.” Despite these limitations, “tribal leaders and communities depend on these data to inform decision making.” The researchers argue that reliance on data that is not reflective of Tribal priorities is a threat to Tribal self-determination.
To address this data challenge, a growing Indigenous data sovereignty movement calls for “Indigenous Peoples’ rights to govern the collection, ownership, and application of their data,” grounded in Tribes’ inherent right to self-govern.
In our evaluation of EPA and IHS Tribal drinking water data, we found that external data ownership similarly had consequences for the data and the resultant research and policy.
External control of Tribal drinking water access and quality data means that data gathered and administered by the federal government meets federal needs–not Tribal needs. Self-determination means that some Tribes may choose not to participate in IHS SFC data collection efforts, or to limit their collaboration with EPA regional offices.
Mistrust is reflected in the production of Tribal drinking water data by federal agencies in many ways. In some communities, it is a common occurrence for the federal government to claim drinking water is safe and to point to numbers and figures, while Tribal members are filling their glasses with water that is smelly, discolored, and undrinkable.
Accessible federal drinking water data that includes Tribes does not necessarily inform or reflect Tribal priorities, nor does it necessarily capture the most pertinent factors impacting access or quality on the ground. EPA has been making strides in recent years to better include Tribes in data analysis tools that make use of SDWIS data, which is an important aspect of Tribal data sovereignty–Tribal data should be reported back to Tribes in a useful form. Still, Tribal governments may have questions that can’t be answered by the data, simply because EPA only collects data that EPA needs. For example, Tribal governments have a responsibility to all of their citizens, not just those who live on the reservation, but no federally-produced tools or datasets would enable this level of analysis.
Because of this, the data also cannot always be aggregated “to levels useful for tribes, such as identifying the total population of tribal citizens or the number of tribal citizens and non-citizens in a particular geographic area.” To an unfamiliar audience, SDWIS’s Tribal-related identifiers (like whether a system serves Indian country) might appear to capture data about systems that serve Tribal citizens, but Tribal citizens, Native Americans who are citizens of different Tribes, and non-Native people live in Indian country. This indicator is only geographic–it cannot tell a data user who is served by a system, let alone how many Tribal citizens versus non-citizens are served by a system. Differences in federal agency priorities also result in varied identifiers for Tribal data across datasets (particularly in EPA datasets), where slight differences in definitions can make aggregation even more complicated and can be confusing to data users. Moreover, IHS’s data is widely regarded as the most accurate data on Tribal drinking water access, but privacy limitations and federal ownership mean that it is generally used to meet IHS’s policy objectives and to complete an annual report to Congress with high-level data–with Tribal collaboration there may be opportunities to expand the use of the dataset to respond to Tribal data priorities.
National-scale data that reflects some level of Tribal drinking water access or quality also does not account for the jurisdictional and governance complexities that Tribes are navigating. EPA drinking water quality data, for example, is best filtered using the “Indian country” indicator, which reflects only water systems defined as “Indian country” by EPA for the purposes of implementing SDWA drinking water regulations–it does not capture reservations that fall outside of that definition or even Tribal citizens who may live across the street from the reservation border. Moreover, EPA Service Area Boundaries data purports to include systems on Tribal lands, but the data was modeled using datasets that did not include Indian country–the result is that the dataset cannot account for the specific ways Tribal sovereignty and jurisdiction impact water system boundaries in Indian country.
These datasets capture pieces of the reality of Tribal drinking water access and quality, but they don’t capture the whole picture. They are framed by any given federal agency’s regulatory scope and statutory objectives. The data collected, analyzed, and applied, can respond only to federal priorities, not Tribal priorities. The result is that Tribal leaders must make decisions to improve drinking water conditions within a complex data landscape.
Perspectives on Tribal Drinking Water Data–What We Heard
Protecting drinking water quality includes a responsibility to protect the entire watershed.
Fractured lands result in the need for multiple water systems, and many rural Tribal communities have limited talent and capacity available, often resulting in one or two people keeping multiple, unconnected systems in compliance.
Tribal authorities may not have equitable access to certified laboratories and may need to drive hours away to submit samples required by SDWA.
The complexities of operating Tribal drinking water systems can be so burdensome as to incentivize federal management of Tribal water systems, precluding Tribes from exerting true self-governance, and limiting opportunities to improve drinking water access for Tribal citizens.
EPA’s inclusion of Tribes in the Drinking Water Dashboard is a step in the right direction.
IHS STARS is really useful, but it depends on how much data the Tribe is willing to share with IHS, which depends on individual Tribal privacy concerns and relationships with IHS.
Limited capacity at IHS limits the usefulness of SDS–lower priority projects don’t always get added to the system even though this is really helpful for Tribal planning and non-IHS grant applications.
Tribal Sovereignty in Drinking Water Data
Tribal self-determination is critical for improving access to safe, affordable drinking water for Tribal citizens, and data is a “strategic resource” for the exercise of Tribal self-determination. To solve Tribal drinking water access problems, Tribal Nations need data that reflect Tribal needs. The extension of Tribal sovereignty over Tribal drinking water data is imperative.
Our findings highlight significant gaps in national, publicly-available drinking water access and quality data for Tribal communities. But fixing gaps in federal datasets does not necessarily mean data will reflect Tribal data priorities. Tribal data sovereignty–whether exercised through individual Tribal initiatives, collaborative inter-Tribal efforts, or Tribal partnerships with federal agencies–is critical to meeting Tribal drinking water needs.
There is an idiom in Indian country: “If you know one tribe you know one tribe.” There are 574 federally recognized Tribes in the United States, each with their own particular governance structure, unique relationship with IHS and EPA, and with particular drinking water needs and data priorities. Tribal data sovereignty over drinking water data is a key component of improving drinking water access through Tribal governance. Under data sovereignty frameworks, Tribes define how data is collected, managed, governed, and applied. But what does this really mean?
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The Passamaquoddy Tribe of Sipayik’s fight to address a decades-long drinking water crisis illustrates the necessity of Tribal self-determination in addressing drinking water needs, and demonstrates how asserting Tribal sovereignty over drinking water data can be one step on that path.
The people of the Passamaquoddy Tribe of Sipayik have lived in their ancestral homelands in what we now know as Maine since time immemorial. But residents of the Sipayik reservation have been turning on their taps to release brown, sludgy, and toxic water since the 1980s.
The Tribal government has been limited in its ability to address the crisis or to request federal help thanks to the Maine Indian Claims Settlement Act of 1980. In the 1970s, as the federal government shifted its approach to Tribes to one promoting Tribal self-determination, Tribes in Maine saw the opportunity to assert land claims and sovereignty that the state had been attempting to squash under a federal government that chose to look the other way. But the historical context, the state’s staunch anti-Tribal stance, and pressure on negotiators to reach a settlement led to an arrangement that has uniquely strangled the exercise of Tribal authority and Tribal self-determination for Maine Tribes.
Among other things, the law stipulated that federal laws concerning Native Americans passed after 1980 do not apply to Maine Tribes, Tribal lands held in trust are subject to state laws, and reservations are treated as municipalities. This meant that, unlike the rest of Indian country, the state of Maine had the authority to regulate drinking water standards on Tribal lands, rather than EPA. And, because state laws applied to Tribal lands, Tribes were unable to make use of natural resources located on Tribal lands without state and municipal approval, including alternate drinking water resources. This was a critical barrier when neighboring municipalities used their well construction approval processes to block the Tribe’s attempt to build a well to serve the Tribal school, where for years students had been disallowed from drinking piped water. Moreover, the utility that serves the reservation is excluded from the statewide tax exemption that applies to all other water utilities in Maine.
The law’s consequences extended as far as SDWIS, where the water system serving the reservation is classified as municipal and no Indian country flag is applied, because EPA has no regulatory authority over the system. Though the best way to proxy drinking water quality on Tribal lands and among Tribal communities nationally is by filtering SDWIS data using the Indian country flag, you wouldn’t find the emergency faced by the Sipayik community there. And you wouldn’t find it in any research, statistics, or policy proposals based on that data.
The resulting toxic water system in the poorest county in the northeastern-most state, where much-needed funds were being used to pay taxes to neighboring towns, the Tribal community was situated inside of the drinking water data gap, and the Tribal government had no ability to exert its sovereignty to address the situation.
Despite these conditions, regulators insisted the water was safe to drink. So, in 2019, the Tribe applied for and won EPA funding to test local drinking water themselves through a community monitoring initiative and to begin an engagement effort to create a community action plan to improve water quality. That community action plan and accompanying data (and decades of Tribal advocacy) resulted in a legislative fix, signed into law in 2022 by the Maine legislature. The legislation addressed barriers to Tribal governance over drinking water, allowed for EPA regulatory primacy over drinking water on Tribal lands, and enabled Tribes to be able to access groundwater resources on their own lands for drinking water. Now, after decades of fighting for the basic right to clean water, the Tribal government is finally on a path to address this crisis.
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Indigenous data sovereignty experts emphasize that strategic data sovereignty initiatives begin with a simple question–“what do we want to know?” To show what could be possible through Tribally-led drinking water data initiatives, we are lifting up some ideas that came up in our conversations with experts over the course of this evaluation:
Informing culturally responsive implementation of EPA’s newly announced PFAS regulations, where traditional practices may increase exposure to contaminated water and allowable contaminant levels may need to differ. The National Tribal Water Council PFAS Working Group is coordinating related efforts.
Ensuring equitable distribution of federal funds by accurately capturing Tribal drinking water access–which is particularly important after the massive influx of funds under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA).
Documenting the impacts of limited operations and maintenance funding, which, according to water operators and agency staff, often forces systems to fail before repairs can be made. Tribally driven data initiatives can help tell this story.
Linking drinking water data with public health data, including cancer clusters, other disease trends, and water source information, to support holistic health and infrastructure planning.
Identifying well locations and clusters of homes that are currently unserved, providing a foundation for designing small-scale water systems to improve quality and reliability (similar to this effort).
Supporting funding applications with data grounded in Tribal priorities and realities, particularly in cases where no relevant data was previously available (e.g., this paper and the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo HUD grant example here).
Understanding Tribal drinking water access and quality for citizens living on and off the reservation.
Highlighting projected infrastructure planning needs and gaps where IHS has not adequately accounted for community growth, which has resulted in new housing that may lack water or sanitation infrastructure to meet the needs of new residents (see p. 21).
