Burton dissects the irreconcilable conflict of interest within the Interior Department (between the Bureau of Reclamation and the Bureau of Indian Affairs). He also examines the methods of managing disputes in contemporary cases and offers original policy recommendations that include establishing an Indian Water Rights Commission to help with the paradoxical task now facing the federal government--restoring to tribes the water resources it earlier helped give away.

On January 6, 1908, the Supreme Court ruled that when land is set aside for the use of Indian tribes, that reservation of land includes reserved water rights. The Winters Doctrine, as it has come to be known, is now a fundamental principle of both federal Indian law and water law and has expanded beyond Indian reservations to include all federal reservations of land. Ordinarily, there would not be much to say about a one hundred-year-old Supreme Court case. But while its central conclusion that a claim to water was reserved when the land was reserved for Indians represents a commitment to justice, the exact nature of that commitment-its legal basis, scope, implications for non-Indian water rights holders, the purposes for and quantities of water reserved, the geographic nexus between the land and the water reserved, and many other details of practical consequence-has been, and continues to be, litigated and negotiated. In this detailed collection of essays, lawyers, historians, and tribal leaders explore the nuances of these issues and legacies.

In its 1908 decision for Winters v. United States, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower-court ruling that the United States and the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine Indians had reserved rights to water in the Milk River through an 1888 treaty which created the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Montana. Since 1908 the Winters decision, or Indian reserved water rights doctrine, has played an important and controversial role in the West. Indian Reserved Water Rights is the first book-length historical study of the Winters case and the early use of the reserved water doctrine. In the book, John Shurts explains how the litigation and its outcome fit well within the existing legal context and into ongoing efforts at water development in the Milk River Valley. He also examines the life of the Winters Doctrine during its earliest years, primarily through a study of water-rights litigation on the Uintah Reservation in Utah.