One-third of homes on the Navajo Nation lack running water in 2025, and it took 25 years to connect a single small community in southeastern Utah

Approximately one-third of homes on the Navajo Nation — the largest Native American reservation in the US, spanning 27,000 square miles across Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah — have no running water. Families drive for miles over unpaved roads to haul barrels of water from communal spigots, then carefully ration that water for drinking, cooking, cleaning, and bathing. In March 2025, the community of Westwater in southeastern Utah finally received running water for the first time — after a 25-year effort to figure out the engineering, funding, and jurisdictional logistics of connecting a small Navajo community to piped water. Twenty-five years to connect one small cluster of homes. Without running water, every aspect of daily life is harder and more dangerous. Hauled water stored in tanks is prone to bacterial contamination. Families cannot wash hands reliably, cannot maintain basic hygiene, cannot flush toilets consistently. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Navajo Nation had one of the highest per-capita infection rates in the United States, and public health officials directly linked the inability to wash hands and sanitize surfaces to the lack of running water. Children in these communities have higher rates of gastrointestinal illness. The lack of water access is not an abstract infrastructure metric — it is a daily, physical hardship that shortens lives and limits every possibility for the people who endure it. This problem persists because of a tangle of jurisdictional complexity, chronic federal underfunding, and unresolved water rights. The Navajo Nation's water rights were not formally settled until 2024, when the Northeastern Arizona Indian Water Rights Settlement Agreement authorized $5.1 billion for water infrastructure — including a pipeline to bring Colorado River water to the reservation. But authorization is not appropriation: Congress must actually fund the projects, and the history of federal Indian water settlements is one of decades-long delays between authorization and construction. The Navajo Nation's land is vast, remote, and sparsely populated, making per-connection infrastructure costs extremely high. County and state governments have historically treated reservation infrastructure as a federal responsibility, while the federal government moves at geological speed. The result is that in 2025, tens of thousands of American families live without the running water that the rest of the country takes for granted.