The Once and Future River

From Buckets and Barrels to Tanks, the Work of Preserving Traditional Indigenous Farms and Recovering Sacred Rivers in a Drier New Mexico

By Sarah Mock

For James and Joyce Skeet, farmers at Spirit Farm near Vanderwagen, when water doesn’t come from the sky, it comes from a truck.

“We’ve collected seven or eight thousand gallons of water since last year,” James explains, “from the Little Sisters of the Poor.” This organization, which runs a Gallup-based assisted living facility, is not supplying water from the tap but from their roof. A three-thousand-gallon tank (about twelve feet high, six or eight feet across) set up outside the Little Sisters’ Villa Guadalupe collects water from the roof and gutters when it rains, and stores it until the Skeets can haul the water from Gallup to their farm miles away.

Eight thousand gallons may sound like a lot, but on Spirit Farm, where chickens, pigs, cattle, Navajo-Churro sheep, and many gardens grow year-round, it will last about a month, and more water is always needed. Surface water from rivers is not an option, given that in a good year, only four small rivers flow in the entirety of the nearly six-thousand-square-mile county where the farm is located. A well isn’t an option either, because the Skeets’ farm is on Chichiltah Chapter lands of the Navajo Nation and securing permission from the multiple bodies required to drill a water well on tribal lands involves a long, bureaucratic, and very costly process that can take years to complete.

Spirit Farm is not alone in this challenge. Across the Navajo Nation, a third of all households and families don’t have access to running water, due to lack of municipal infrastructure and difficulties with drilling wells. Families without running water to their homes or farms must haul water for drinking, cleaning, and all other uses, usually from nearby municipalities.

“Hauling water is incredibly expensive,” reported Buu Nygren, president of the Navajo Nation, in his 2024 congressional testimony. “Families that haul water on the Navajo reservation spend the equivalent of $43,000 per acre-foot, compared to about $600 per acre-foot for a typical suburban water user.” This cost is both direct and indirect, including everything from the gas spent to haul thousands of pounds of water to the time spent in what can be hours-long lines at municipal distribution points. When that water is used for farming and gardening, the need, and the cost, multiply exponentially. In the face of these barriers, the Skeets had to get creative, which is what brought them to raise money and install a rain catchment tank in Gallup in the spring of 2024.

Right now, one of the main limitations on the rain harvesting project is the irregularity of precipitation. While the tank filled up in a single day once in 2024 during a particularly intense rain event, it can otherwise take weeks, even months, for the tank to get near capacity. And conditions are only getting more difficult, given that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Integrated Drought Information System has identified Gallup and surrounding McKinley County as current areas of “severe drought,” and forecasts for the 2025 summer indicate the trend will continue.

A few dozen miles south of Spirit Farm, the people of  Zuni Pueblo are also farming through the drought. Despite millenia of living and farming along the banks of the Zuni River, current conditions and alterations to the river have transformed Zuni farming practices in ways that make adaptation to the new normal difficult.

“Our storied irrigation techniques and careful stewardship of our water and lands allowed us to irrigate over 15,000 acres,” said Arden Kucate, governor of Zuni Pueblo, reflecting on the historical relationship between the Zuni people and their river in his 2024 congressional testimony. Extensive Zuni farms were planted along the banks of tributaries and the Zuni itself to ease irrigation and take advantage of river-borne nutrients, but today the Zuni River is barely a trickle for much of the year. Just as with the stream itself, the flow of Zuni life has been interrupted by diversions, overgrazing, and historic clear-cutting by farming settlers upstream, as well as by the enduring impacts of the largely ineffective Black Rock dam, constructed by the federal government in 1908.

But much like the Skeets, farmers in Zuni are finding creative ways to continue traditional farming practices. One group, the Zuni Youth Enrichment Project (ZYEP), makes both community gardening and supporting at-home gardens a central part of their youth nutrition and education work, especially since the start of the pandemic.

“We got [the youth program participants] tools, soil, non-GMO seeds, and all this information, packed into this little bucket,” says Zachary James, a food sovereignty and water conservation specialist for the program. “The bucket was for conserving water.” ZYEP’s water-saving programs have only grown since that earliest iteration. Over the last five years, they’ve distributed more than a hundred 50-gallon rain barrels to families to harvest and store rain from rooftops to water their backyard gardens. Today, Zachary reports, you can see the barrels all over the village, and families have been able to grow and expand home gardens as well as gardens in public spaces.

“Gardening ties into our culture,” says Kenzi Bowekaty, ZYEP’s food sovereignty leader. “We used to have the Zuni River running through here, which was our main resource for agriculture. Now with backyard gardens, we are still able to do those practices, but we have to be resilient and conserve water as best as we can.”

One much-celebrated Zuni strategy for resilient agriculture in a dry landscape is waffle gardening, which many families still practice today. Historically built alongside the river, waffle gardens involve the shaping of sunken beds in clay soil, surrounded by short earthen walls. These adobe-like structures trap water for slow release, protect plants from driving wind, and moderate temperature, keeping plants warm on cold nights and cooler on hot days. Although they can no longer rely on river water, the ZYEP team is integrating waffle gardening into their youth education and food sovereignty work, exploring its broader effectiveness in a drying climate and renewing their cultural connections to the land.

While ZYEP and the kids and families they empower continue to advance the goals of Zuni food sovereignty, growing everything from corn and chiles to cilantro and other sacred plants, the wider Zuni community continues caring for and protecting the Zuni River, both on and off the Pueblo.

On the national stage, Zuni leaders and New Mexican legislators are fighting to pass the Zuni Indian Tribe Water Rights Settlement Act, which would, in addition to providing funds to improve drinking water and wastewater infrastructure, provide funding to improve the Zuni River and one of its tributaries, the Rio Nutria. Improvements would include work like channel restoration, which will benefit riparian ecosystems, and setting aside tens of thousands of acres in the basin as a wildlife sanctuary. The settlement would also protect the tribe’s rights to water for irrigation and livestock, funding upgrades that honor traditional irrigation practices.

“If the water rights settlement goes through, it could be a reimagining of how we can bring [the river] back to life,” says Curtis Quam, a Zuni community leader and museum technician and cultural educator at the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center in Zuni. “Is it traditional? It’s debatable, but I think it’s important to have these conversations about what’s really important.”

Back on Navajo lands, the Skeets are continuing to advance their rain catchment work as well. Though they’re planning to partner with more farmers and add more tanks throughout the town of Gallup, they’re growing the program slowly in order to iron out the kinks.

When catchment water runs out at Spirit Farm, which it usually does in midsummer, the Skeets head to Gallup to fetch city water like so many of their neighbors. But they’ve had additional problems with the fact that this water is treated with chlorine, which means it must be amended before it can be used on crops. On top of that, as the Gallup city wells become depleted, they’re also becoming increasingly mineralized, which is hard on plants. In the Skeets’ experience, using this water contributes to declining soil health. One solution James and Joyce have found is dosing treated water with a compost extract, which they’ve found helps neutralize the salts.

Looking to the future, heat and drought conditions are not expected to improve. According to a 2022 study, average temperatures across the state are likely to increase between five and seven degrees in the next twenty-five years, and average precipitation is expected to decrease. When James considers this trend toward increased heat and dryness in the region, he sees good reason for the people of northwestern New Mexico to stop looking to deeper wells or imported water, and to start looking back at the ways Indigenous people have historically survived and thrived on this landscape.

“It floods here every year,” James explains, “but we’re not managing the water. It just runs off. We need to capture it, slow it down, spread it out, and let it soak in.” The Skeets are pursuing a number of strategies to do this work on their farm, everything from planting cover crops and amending soil with organic biochar to increase its water-holding capacity to supporting native plant species and utilizing locally adapted landraces of plants and animals, like the Navajo-Churro sheep, rather than more common but less resilient European types.

But James and Joyce are doing more than just adapting to the current (and likely future) conditions in the region. They’re also actively working to change the narrative around water. “We like to hold water celebrations,” Joyce explains of their local events, which they’re calling Bringing Back the Rain. Like much of the work on their farm, these events are part educational, part conversational, and part traditional. “How do we get back to considering water as sacred?” is one of the critical questions of these water celebrations, Joyce reports. “We have to reattach ourselves to how precious water is.”

Curtis Quam sees a similar path to revitalization through the maintenance of deep, cultural connections to the river itself, whether the water is visible there or not. “Even though the river is physically dry most of the year,” Curtis says, “it is still very much part of our spiritual lifeline and our connection to our ancestry, and it is visited every day by people within the community.” The memory of the river, and its vital importance to the Zuni people, lives on.