No AI for the Colorado River

The Colorado River is a living ecosystem of self-sustaining waterways stretching from tens of thousands of feet high in the Rocky Mountains traveling through the Sonoran and Mojave deserts and flowing into Mexico. These beautiful and unruly waters comprise rivers, tributaries, confluences, and bends flowing in from snow melt, groundwater, and aquifers. Over the past century, the US empire has violently undermined Indigenous lifeways and water sovereignty on the Colorado River through calculated legal manipulations and environmental degradation. The prevailing “Law of the River,” which mandates that Native American tribes collectively own 30% of the Colorado River’s waters, has amounted to a form of colonial datafication predicated on overallocated and depleted waterways and the repudiation and disavowal of Indigenous governing structures...