Fort Belknap water compact gets Senate hearing

An agreement to settle water rights issues and provide water to Fort Belknap Indian Community — and to people all along the Milk River — decades in the making took a major step forward this week when the Fort Belknap Indian Community Water Rights Settlement Act was heard in the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs.

“What this water settlement is going to mean for the people in Fort Belknap and in surrounding communities is clean drinking water, water for the future, like we talked about for our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren” Fort Belkap Indian Community Council President Jeffrey Stiffarm testified in Wednesday’s hearing. “You know, that's what we're all here for.”

Stiffarm and Montana’s Lt. Gov. Kristen Juris were among the people who testified at Wednesday’s hearing.

The Fort Belknap Water Compact was ratified by the state in 2001, and has been in negotiation since then to get to ratification by Congress.

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont. — who was a state senator in 2001 when the compact was ratified by Montana — said the bill the committee was looking at was the results of years of of negotiations between the tribes, local elected officials, irrigators, state legislators, federal agencies, and other stakeholders.

"(The work was) to hammer out a fair compromise that honors our trust and treaty responsibilities while guaranteeing water certainty to all water users in north-central Montana through the rehabilitation of the Milk River Project,” Tester said.

The Milk River Project, one of the first projects the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation was authorized to work on when it was created at the start of the last century, includes a system of dams, dikes, and 29 miles of canals, siphons and drop structures that transports water from the St. Mary River, on the edge of Glacier National Park, across the Blackfeet Indian Reservation and into the North Fork of the Milk River.

The project typically provides half or more of the water in the Milk River, and, in drought years, as much as 90 percent of the water in the river. Before it was built, the Milk River dried up by fall in 6 out of 10 years.

More than 20 years ago, a push to rehabilitate the falling-apart system was started, leading to the creation of the St. Mary Working Group, which Juris co-chairs.

A first step in that project, the rehabilitation of the dam that diverts water from St. Mary River to the conveyance works, is underway. Funding for that was provided through the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed in 2021.

To ensure the Milk River supplies the water guaranteed to the Fort Belknap Indian Community, the water settlement bill also provides for rehabilitation of the diversion and conveyance works.

Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., said he has been working on this basically since he was elected to Congress.

“When I was first elected to the House 2012 over a decade ago, this is one of the first issues I heard about.” Daines said in the hearing. “I heard about it from the tribe. I heard about it from the county commissioners, Phillips County, Blaine County. Both sides wanted to set me straight on their strong opinions on this compact.

“Less than just a year ago, this settlement still had opposition from numerous groups, and here's the truth of the matter,” Daines added. “It was going nowhere. It was going nowhere. And as President Stiffarm so well-articulated I think we had to put aside the concerns for only ourselves and think about future generations. As he said it's been a century long battle.”

To go into effect, the bill now needs to be passed by Congress, signed into law, then approved by a simple majority of the members of the Fort Belknap Indian Community and then submitted to the Montana Water Court and be entered into the Montana Water Court as a final decree.

Watch for more on this story in Monday’s edition of Havre Daily News.