Sovereignty, Data and Maps: How accurately represented are Tribes in water utility service area boundaries data?
An interview with Mariah Black Bird-Perry, Tribal Mitigation Fellow at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center.
As organizations across the country work to improve our understanding of water service area boundaries – from water supply, contamination and reliable access to safe drinking water - they need to be sure to accurately represent tribal water access. In May, EPIC, SimpleLab, and the Internet of Water Coalition released a provisional national map of drinking water service area boundaries to support the design and implementation of water and climate programs at the federal, state, and community levels. Since then, EPIC has published a series of blogs that explore why water service area boundaries are particularly important to individuals, communities, water system managers, state and federal agencies, and tribes. This blog post is the 6th of that series and focuses on how this data impacts tribes, it highlights important flags about tribal data sovereignty, and considerations for federal, state, and local organizations engagement with tribal partners when developing this data.
EPIC: Mariah, you’ve been working hard to help create opportunities for compensatory mitigation policies for ecological restoration on Tribal lands and for Tribal trust resources, and you’ve also been a tremendous resource to EPIC as we advance a more accurate map of water service area boundaries. What is drawing you to this work?
Mariah: I am committed to being an advocate for tribal communities and their development whether it be economically, ecologically or for basic infrastructure needs. The needs of tribal communities are often overlooked, treaty promises are broken and the people of tribal nations perpetually experience the lack of resources that are much needed for their prosperity. A good example of this is water. To many tribal nations, water is life because it equally holds the power to both provide and take life. In various tribal communities water issues can range from access, infrastructure, management, water right settlements, agriculture or drought and sanitation, to name a few. Particularly with safe drinking water, there are heightened challenges for tribes.
And yet despite the importance of water to tribes, we do not have a comprehensive, accurate map of who gets water from who. This picture looks different for every single tribal community, but in any scenario, it is immensely important to know where tribal water comes from, how it is used, and where it is going. It is dangerous to not know.
The challenge of trying to figure it out - and to help tribes prosper with their own data on service area boundaries - draws me to this work.
EPIC: In eight months, EPIC, SimpleLab and the Internet of Water Coalition built a high quality understanding of where 157 million people – i.e. more than half of the US population – gets their water from. But we are very aware that boundaries are more accurate in some places than others and the data need to be improved. This is especially true for tribal communities, who are too often misrepresented in the data sets available. Could you help contextualize this a bit more for tribes?
Mariah: During the last several months, EPIC conducted many interviews with tribal personnel to get a better understanding of service area boundaries in Indian Country. The tribal personnel included people from the Indian Health Service (IHS) who maintain the data on water resources across reservations (STARS), various tribal water resource departments, state water utility services (commissions and corporations), nonprofits focused on tribal access to clean drinking water, tribal college programs directors, and Tribal legal beagles. Despite the wide range of conversations, we were surprised to find a considerable lack of available tribal service area boundary data or insights for a wide variety of reasons. Moreover, even with data that was available on the state or local level, concerns arose with validity and consent of the data.
The interviews highlighted a variety of issues that are both complex in the nature of tribal sovereignty, but also on a general level. One of the biggest highlights is that it’s really unclear when a Tribal community manages or regulates their own water system or receives water from a neighboring non-tribal water system. Answering that question is hard enough, but then from there it can be further complicated by a few variations in data quality and completeness when it comes to tribal communities, and each has to be addressed differently:
Developing and maintaining tribal data: When a tribe does manage the water system, there remains a lack of data on who they serve. This overall lack of data often depends on the tribe's ability to create service area boundaries due to human capacity or financial capability to build and maintain this geospatial data.
Ensuring accuracy of nontribal data: Water systems not managed by tribes may publish data that is not accurate or is outdated that is to say, sometimes the data will show a certain water system serves a tribe, but when you speak to tribal personnel, they share that they don’t in fact receive water from that system. This has rippling effects wherein the inaccurate data at the local level is added to state-managed databases and then comprises analyses of states, policymakers, and researchers about access to safe drinking water.
Coordination between tribes and states: Not all state or local level coordinators share or confirm their data with neighboring tribes. Some do, which are great examples of data coordination across boundaries and jurisdictions, but many don't. This is problematic because it can lead to a variety of data sovereignty concerns for a tribe.
As elaborated, there are many differences and points of concern when it comes to service area boundaries in tribal communities. There are not only concerns of the actual data and what they might show on impacts to tribal communities (health, ecology and future generations, etc.); but there are inherent tribal sovereignty concerns, as well as, concerns on how this data will be obtained, managed and stored or used for the tribe.
EPIC: You’re starting to mention data sovereignty, but we haven’t really dived into exactly what that means to a tribe. What is data sovereignty and what does it mean for a tribe generally, and in the context of service area boundaries?
Mariah: Data sovereignty is the right of a nation to govern the collection, ownership and application of its own data. It derives from tribes’ inherent right to govern their peoples, lands and resources. Tribes have governance over their own peoples (tribal membership), lands (reservation and trust lands) and resources (natural, economic, and ecological resources). This inherent right to governance brings sovereignty to the table and concerns of sovereignty can include how tribes exercise it, why they exercise it, over what and how they regulate that exercise. In a general context, tribal sovereignty touches everything, including data. The data could pertain to health services, education, economic development or ecological data, to name a few. But if a tribe collects, has ownership and applies its own data to their own reservation, that is data sovereignty and the tribe has full control over it, or should.
One thing to understand is that data sovereignty is a concern, but not for all tribes. Some tribes are willing to share their data, but many are not for a variety of reasons. Sometimes the data is stolen or misrepresented when published. Above all, data sovereignty is very important for a tribe, whether it is a concern or not. We recommend folks to check out the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance to dive deeper into this topic as well.
EPIC: You also mentioned coordination. For nontribal local systems that want to create a water service area boundary file (or for that matter, state and federal agencies that want to help local systems create a boundary file), how should they engage with tribal communities?
Mariah: Tribal engagement is more than mere consultation. Consulting with or providing the option for tribes to be consulted on the creation of a boundary file is not enough. Tribes need to be involved in the process in the idea stage and considerations of tribal participation should be taken into account at every step. One way to do this is to focus on the working relationships between the jurisdictions to create consistent dialogue. Another is to identify the type of scenario that might be present pertaining to tribal water systems and data (discussed above). The scenarios could change the approach to interaction with a tribe because not all tribes are the same, even if similar in scenarios.
EPIC: Mariah, thank you so much. Is there anything else you want to share with our readers?
Mariah: Just to note that this work on water service boundaries is an important component of a bigger question - how do we develop a system to both protect the tribal sovereignty components and the need for data to better our water systems and ensure that clean water is provided to everyone? For all sovereigns, it is not always easy to bite the bullet and look beyond historical conflicts between jurisdictions or collectively identify the best interest of everyone to create a plan of action.
But we have to be able to answer the fundamental question: who is responsible for my water? As mentioned, that is a scary thought - to not know where your water comes from - not only in a historical sense but also in the sense of thinking about future generations for tribal nations and the state of our water systems as a whole. If we live here and we don’t know, who does?
EPIC: Absolutely - we have to get this data right. To help achieve that goal, EPIC is recruiting interns to assist in the refinement of the national map of drinking water system service area boundaries, with a focus on underserved communities and tribes in targeted regions. We encourage any of our readers to reach out to us if you are interested in participating in this work!
Support for this work was received from the Bezos Earth Fund.
